Wanting Sheila Dead (10 page)

Grace was getting up, favoring one of her arms and wincing. “What do you think you're doing?” she said. She should have demanded it, but it didn't come out that way.

“Wellesley my ass,” Sheila said. “And don't you dare pretend there's anything wrong with you. You want a broken arm? I can give you a broken arm. I can give you a broken head—”

“For God's sake,” Olivia said.

Sheila advanced on the now-standing Grace, grabbed the top of her sleep shirt, and ripped. The front cloth came away from Grace Alsop's body in ragged tatters.

Olivia grabbed Sheila's arm. This time, Sheila did not resist.

“You can't do this,” Olivia said. “You have to realize you can't do this.”

“She's a spy,” Sheila said, perfectly calm.

“You don't know that,” Olivia said.

“Her father is the entertainment news director for Fox.” Sheila was still calm. Olivia thought Sheila was much worse when she was calm.
“Her name isn't Alsop. It's Harrigan. She doesn't go to Wellesley. She doesn't go to college at all. She's twenty-eight. I knew she looked old.”

“You hurt me,” Grace said.

Sheila leaned forward and grabbed Grace's wrist—Grace Harrigan, Olivia told herself. But she knew the girl was Grace Harrigan and not Grace Alsop. She'd discovered that information herself. That was the only reason Sheila knew it. Sheila would never do any of her research on her own.

Sheila jerked Grace toward the door to the hall and then out of it. By now, all the girls were there, or nearly all of them, standing as close to the walls as they could get and trying to figure out what was going on. Sheila pulled Grace out where they could all see her. The entire front of Grace's sleep-shirt was gone. She was standing there, to all intents and purposes, naked.

“Traitor,” Sheila said.

And now her voice was gone. Just gone. It had that tinge of crazy that was not anger and not calm and not hysteria—that was nothing Olivia understood, but that was recognizable.

“Traitor,” Sheila said again.

Some of the girls were crying. All of them had their arms wrapped around their bodies as if that would shield them from something.

“Traitor,” Sheila said again. “Bitch. Whore.
Cunt.
”

Grace whirled around. “Nobody calls me a cunt,” she screamed. “Don't you even try.”

Sheila grabbed Grace's wrist again and spun her around.

Then she lifted one Nike-trainered foot, flexed it back, and punched it directly into Grace Harrigan's backside.

Grace seemed to lift off the ground half a foot before she first stumbled onto the carpet and then went flying, face down, with a thud.

It was Janice Ledbedder who had not come out of her room when the fuss started. She had stayed, instead, lying very still in her bed, hoping
that Sheila Dunham would not come back to see if everybody had gotten up and gone into the hall. Janice didn't think that would happen. She watched the show every week, every season. She watched it when it was on Oxygen and A&E in those marathon all-day season-complete runs. She knew how it worked. There were always a couple of these explosions. They happened in the house, like this one that had happened to Grace. Or they happened on set and as an official part of the show. Or they happened away from the cameras, in a parking lot somewhere, so that the only way the world knew about them was that they turned up on the entertainment news Web sites, or because somebody had a camera phone.

Janice checked the Web sites just as much as she checked the television. There wasn't really a lot more to do in Marshall, South Dakota. She was not especially “cute,” as people said there—they never talked about pretty, or beautiful. The standard for being attractive in high school was definitely “cute.” It was nonthreatening, and it didn't sound as if whoever had it was trying to be something other than what they were. “Trying to be something you're not” was the biggest sin in Marshall, as far as Janice could tell. It had once made her wonder about all those people who
were
on television. All of them looked like who they were trying to be—but it was impossible to work out. It really was. Maybe it didn't matter if you were uppity if you were somebody who deserved to be uppity. Maybe it was just people from South Dakota who didn't deserve that, and that was why she had never seen anybody who “acted uppity” and still had friends. Janice definitely had friends.

The noise in the hall had stopped. No, the screaming had. There was a soft, dull murmur that was girls talking in low voices, but Janice was sure that Sheila Dunham had to be gone. Janice couldn't see what she could possibly do to cause Sheila to go into one of her patented fits, but the longer she was in this house the more she began to think that nothing had to cause it. Sheila Dunham just had fits. If you were handy, you were it.

The problem was, Janice wasn't particularly “smart,” either. She wasn't stupid. She didn't run around saying dumbo things about, well,
stuff, the way some people did. It was just that she wasn't much interested in books and reading, which meant she hadn't gotten a good score on the SAT tests. That was the big thing about getting into a college. Janice got very good grades, but other people also got very good grades, and those people got better scores on those tests. The SATs. The ACTs. Some people could get out of Marshall, South Dakota, just by going away to school. When they went away to school, they never came back again.

Of course, just wanting to get out of Marshall was “uppity.” There was that.

Janice got out of bed. Her robe was lying over the back of the chair next to the bed. Each of the beds in each of the rooms had its own chair next to it. Janice put her robe on. It was pastel blue and had a little clutch of kittens embroidered at the place where a breast pocket would be. She rubbed the embroidery a little and frowned. She'd heard a lot about diversity, and about how people thought differently and lived differently and liked different things depending on where they were from and what kinds of family they had, but she'd never entirely believed it before she came here.

She thought about putting on her slippers and decided against it. None of the other girls wore slippers except for Coraline Mays, and Coraline was obviously just as clueless as Janice was herself.

She stepped out into the hall. The girls were mostly sitting on the floor, except for the black one, that Andra Gayle. She was leaning against one of the walls and looking murderous.

“I don't think she can actually get away with touching you,” one of the seated girls was saying.

Janice wracked her brains and came up with a name: Linda Kowalski. Linda Kowalski was Catholic and had a rosary she kept on her bedside table. Her roommate was a girl named Shari Bernstein, who was Jewish and came from somewhere in New York that was not New York City. Janice felt rather proud of herself for remembering all of that.

She worked her way down the row to her own roommate, who was
not hard to find. This was a girl named Ivy Demari, and she had white-blond hair with an electric green streak in it. Janice thought you could probably have found Ivy on the moon.

“What's going on?” Janice whispered.

“I don't know what's going on,” Grace said. Her face was still red. “Miss Dahl was just telling me not to go anywhere, and then she left herself, and now I don't have the faintest idea what I'm supposed to do. I'm not giving that vile little bitch another chance to kick me.”

“Oh, Grace,” Coraline said.

“She's a bitch and worse,” Grace said. “And I'm not going to watch my language about it, either.”

“This is what's going on,” Ivy whispered.

Then she grabbed Janice's hand and squeezed it. Janice had been a little worried about Ivy at first, but it had turned out that Ivy was actually Very Nice, even though she had tattoos.

“I meant it about not being allowed to touch you physically,” Linda said. “I don't think I've ever seen that on this show, or on any reality show—”

“The contestants do it,” Shari said. “They get into fights sometimes.”

“The contestants, yes, well,” Linda said. “But Sheila Dunham isn't a contestant. You could sue her.”

“You could if you aren't really a spy,” Shari said. “I mean, if you're really a spy, you could sue her, but you might not win. If you see what I mean.”

“Of course I'm not really a spy,” Grace said.

“Is your father really that guy she was talking about?” another girl said. Janice had to work at it a little, but she came up with a name: Mary-Louise Verdt.

Grace shifted a little on the floor. She was sitting down with her left leg stretched out across the hall carpet. Janice could see bruises starting to emerge on her thigh.

“Yes,” she said finally. “My father really is who she said he was. But I'm not a spy. I haven't talked to the man for six years, for God's sake.
I barely talked to him when I was still living at home. And Wellesley, my foot. I did go to Wellesley. I even graduated.”

“They can throw you off the show for lying about things, I think,” Coraline said. “We all had to sign that form, do you remember, promising that everything we said was true and we promised it on pain of perjury and that kind of thing.”

“We did sign such a paper,” Alida Akido said. “I remember.”

“We signed a lot of papers, but I didn't read them,” another girl said—that was Marcia Lee Baldwin.

“There are so many of us,” Janice whispered to Ivy. “I have trouble keeping them apart.”

“There are only fourteen of us now,” Ivy said. “There were thirty, four days ago. More.”

“I know. But I still get confused.”

“Half of them have changed their names, you watch,” Ivy said. “Or worse. It happens every season.”

“I didn't change anything,” Janice said.

It was true, too. She hadn't changed anything. She had just left some things out, like how she wasn't . . . ever first. She was popular enough, but never first. She looked a little sideways at Ivy and wondered what Ivy had been back where she was from. Somehow, she just couldn't imagine Ivy on a cheerleading team.

“You don't understand the real problem here,” Grace said. She was now getting very carefully to her feet. “It isn't being thrown off the show or not. Who gives a flying damn? It's what's going to happen next. I wonder which one of you is going to put this up on YouTube.”

“Why would any of us put this up on YouTube?” Coraline said. “And how would we manage it?”

“Cell phone video,” Shari said.

“And if one of you don't do it,” Grace said, “then one of the crew here will. There are cameras everywhere, haven't you noticed? They're filming us all the time. One way or the other, this thing is going to
be on the Internet by the end of the day, and it's going to be everywhere, and I mean everywhere, by the end of the week. Courtesy of my father.”

“Your father is going to show a tape of this everywhere in the world?” Mary-Louise Verdt sounded confused.

“No, you rank idiot,” Grace said. “My father being who he is means other people are going to show this to the world. It doesn't matter if I'm going to be sent home right this minute or not. I'm going to be made a complete and utter idiot. Which was the point.”

“You know, I've thought that, too, sometimes,” Coraline said. “That it's all done on purpose. You know, to make more drama.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Grace said. “Of course it's all done on purpose. I mean, it's Sheila Dunham we're talking about here. It's not like she's Tyra Banks. The world doesn't worship the ground she walks on. She wouldn't have any career at all anymore if she didn't behave like a complete asshole in public and on unpredictable occasions. It's what she does. No wonder that silly little blond girl tried to murder her.”

“Oh, do we know that's what it was about?” Coraline asked. “Emily, I mean. Was Emily a contestant on the show? I thought I'd seen all the shows and I don't remember her.”

“But she looked familiar, didn't she?” Mary-Louise said. “I remember thinking that when I saw her. She looks very familiar.”

“Maybe she was on the show for just a little while and then she got booted off, and she was wearing makeup, you know, or clothes, different things,” Coraline said. “I'll admit I don't always remember the girls who go home first. I mean, they're not on very long and—”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Grace said again. She was standing all the way now, but still leaning against the wall for support. Janice thought that that bruise on her thigh was going to be nasty. “Would you people please wake up? This is a game she plays, and you're all getting suckered into it. All of you. I'll bet you anything that Emily didn't try to murder her at all. I'll bet you it's a setup. That's what they're saying on the news.”

“We're not supposed to watch the news,” Coraline said.

“Oh, for God's sake,” Grace said.

Then she stomped off toward her own bedroom, limping but obviously furious.

Janice watched her disappear through her bedroom door and then another girl, Suzanne Toretti, disappear after her. Suzanne looked scared to death.

Janice turned to Ivy. Ivy was looking at her fingernails.

“I didn't realize it would be so tense,” Janice said. “I guess I didn't really think about what it would be like at all. I just thought it would be something to do. Something that wasn't just staying in South Dakota. If you know what I mean.”

Ivy got up and held out a hand for her. “Of course I know what you mean,” she said, “but Grace has a point. Sheila Dunham probably does do these things on purpose. And it's a good way to get yourself killed. Don't you think so?”

“I don't think anybody would actually kill her,” Janice said.