Charleigh Hawkins has been to a lot of interviews.

She'll tell you that herself — it was the first thing she said when she sat down, the day after her eighth birthday, still riding the buzz of turning a whole new age. A second grader at Vandalia with three years of pageant experience already behind her, Charleigh carries herself like someone who's been doing this for a while. Because she has.

Pageants are her thing. She competes in interview, fun fashion, and talent — sometimes singing, sometimes performing dances she choreographs on her own. Her old dance studio closed, so she improvised.

"I just make up my own dances," she said.

That self-starting instinct runs through most of what Charleigh does. She's in cheer and tumbling at Kayla Starr's in Effingham, and when the interviewer suggested that gymnastics and tumbling might be different things, she set the record straight.

"Gymnastics and cheerleading and tumbling are the exact same thing," she said.

Noted.

She's also learning Spanish, enjoys art and music, and has two karaoke machines at home — though the newer one, she reports, doesn't quite meet her standards. And she has a dog named Sophie, whose name she's not entirely sure how to spell but whose lack of a middle name she can confirm with certainty.

Does she love practicing? Not always.

"Sometimes I do not like practicing," she admitted.

But she keeps showing up. And the showing up has taken her places most second graders haven't been. Charleigh was featured on a billboard in New York through a pageant she won. In June, she'll travel to Colorado for another competition — her first time seeing mountains. And then there's the one she mentions almost casually, as though it were just another line on a very full calendar.

She's going to walk in New York Fashion Week.

"I've never been to New York," she said. "I've always wanted to go to New York."

An eight-year-old from Vandalia, walking a runway in Manhattan. It's the kind of sentence that sounds made up until you're sitting across from the kid who's about to do it.

Meanwhile, back at school, life is a little more grounded. Her teacher this year is Mrs. Holman. Last year it was Mrs. Peyton, in first grade. She enjoys both. And at home, she shares space with her five-year-old brother Kaiser — whom she describes, without hesitation, as "feral."

The evidence? He scratched her face at a hotel the night before a pageant crowning.

"Seriously, Kaiser," she said. "Great. Now I'm gonna have to have this on for crowning."

Band-Aid applied. Crowning attended. Life goes on.

That's Charleigh — pageant stages and sibling scratches, fashion weeks and karaoke machines, Colorado mountains and second-grade Spanish. When asked how to say "taco" in Spanish, she didn't miss a beat.

"Taco," she said.

Hard to argue with that.