Excerpt: Something of Importance

"Smile for the camera!" said Mr. Fantastico. She smiled, a dull soulless thing, teeth scrubbed fanatically by her mother the day before and gleaming white in the stage lights. They'd practiced for hours. It would've been all right, but that man. And that smirk, that hellacious smirk, the way he tries to pretend like he's a good person and he just stares at Marigold, right through her, and she can feel herself dying inside, something she's more used to than she'd care to be. She'd practically sleepwalked straight through the stage auditions; it was so easy, the producer shouting encouragement i.e. “That's a good little tyke!” while her mother stared on with a plastic smile, the connotations of which were not lost for a moment on Merigold and the escape from which she succeeded at by vacating the immediate premises, mentally.
And but it's a live show. So around the second commercial break Merigold's escaping starts to come undone, a spiral unwinding from the base of her skull and winding downwards in what feels to her like a slow arch of ribbon, and she steps out of her skin.
“What do Merigolds need?” Mr. Fantastico asks joyfully.
“Sunlight.” Merigold says, not with the cheery upbeatness or panic normally reserved for F.A.M.E. Contestants, but with a dead glare. “They need sunlight.”
“And if you like your friends enough, and share ...”
“The sun will come out!” they say in unison. Merigold takes her costume as she is singing, with that dead, angelic voice, and takes off her costume. Normally, this would just be awkward, but there are visible marks on her body. Her eyes are large and pleading. She starts to cry.
It is estimated that around 65% of the viewing audience saw this act for a good 1.58 seconds before the censoring 8 lines of technicolor blocked the screen, a loud pitch emitting, until approximately thirty seconds later: a sweating Mr. Fantastico closing the show with something to the effect of “Merigold has gone to the sun”, a fake smile on his mouth, and then a cutaway to a static version of the closing credits [saved for emergencies].