Sister Marie, a nun, makes Soto stand in a waste basket for fighting while she talks about the hunger crisis in Biafra. She says that hunger is a terrible thing because “[i]t robs the body of its vitality and the mind of its glory, which is God’s” (37). She then says that heavier people last longer through a hunger crisis because they have more fat. She points to Gloria, a heavier girl in the class, and says that she would last the longest out of anyone. Then she points to Soto and says that he would be the first to die: “Students turned in their chairs to look at me with their mouths open, and I was mad, not for being pointed out but because of that unfair lie. I could outlive the whole class, food or no food. Wasn’t I one of the meanest kids in the entire school?” (40). 

Soto opens the story with an introduction of the playground’s beauty contest: “It had been a sticky and difficult week of two nose bleeds from bigger kids when Karen, the coach at Romain playground, announced that there was going to be a children’s beauty contest” (41).