Wanting Sheila Dead (2 page)

“Excuse me,” Emily said. She stepped out from under the umbrella and turned a little away. The rain came down on her hair again.

I'm talking too much,
Janice thought. Easterners didn't like it when you talked too much.

Emily turned her back to her and put her hands in her pockets.

That was when the crowd surged for the first time. The wave coming
from behind pushed Janice almost off her feet and into the back of a girl in a pink vinyl motorcycle jacket.

Andra Gayle was not a fool, and she was not a hick from the sticks, either. She was from New York. She knew, as the girls around her didn't—she could tell, because she was listening—that being on a reality show was not going to turn her into a superstar. Nothing was going to turn her into a superstar. She was not pretty, and she had none of the usual talents. Her great blooming Afro of red hair shot out from her skull like an animated cloud. Sometimes she looked in the mirror and imagined the cloud could talk.

The rain was coming down very steadily. The drops were so thick, they were less like drops than like the stream that comes from a faucet whose drip has been neglected for years. Some of the girls had taken off their coats and put them around their heads. Others were using those huge pocketbooks that everybody had thought were hot about two and a half years ago. Andra had neither. She had bought a copy of
The Philadelphia Inquirer
from a little mechanized kiosk instead. She had a picture of the latest mayor of Philadelphia on her head, along with a thick tall headline that made it sound as if the entire state of Pennsylvania was mad at him.

Andra hated the state of Pennsylvania. She hadn't seen that much of it. She'd come in on Amtrak just the day before, and stayed at a Holiday Inn for an amount of money that made her stomach hurt. Still, she couldn't imagine that the rest of the state would be any better, even if it was different. There was no point in a city that wasn't New York. Even Los Angeles only existed because of the movies.

“And the government,” Andra said.

The girl next to her turned and stared, but there wasn't any time to do anything about it. A wave of energy seemed to ripple through the crowd around them and everybody was shoved suddenly forward. Andra wobbled on her ankles. Then she stumbled first forward and
then to the side. Somebody far in the back started screaming. It didn't sound frightening, or pitiful. It just sounded stupid.

“For God's sake,” the girl who had looked at Andra said. “What are they doing back there?”

“Screwing around,” Andra said.

“I don't think they should be screwing around,” the girl said. She was wearing a light windbreaker jacket and a very odd hat. It had a brim like a baseball cap, and a band that went around the head, but nothing that went over the top. What the hell use was that going to be? It was raining. The girl's hair was getting wet.

“They ought to open the doors,” the girl said. “It's ridiculous out here. Somebody's going to get sick and end up suing.”

“I think it's only a couple of minutes,” Andra said.

“I think they should let everybody into the building as soon as they open the doors. They won't, of course, because they enjoy the ritual of it. It's part of what sells the television program. It's still a damned stupid thing to do. I'm Grace Alsop, by the way. I'm from Connecticut.”

“I'm Andra Gayle.”

This was not true. Andra was no more “Andra Gayle” than she was a natural redhead. She took the hand that was not holding the newspaper on her head, and turned it over and over in the rain. The girl beside her made her very nervous. It was the way she talked, and the way she held her body, and the clothes she wore. It was an atmosphere. Andra looked down at the ground. Grace Alsop was wearing plain little ballet flat shoes that looked more expensive than Andra's mother's last phone bill.

Of course, Andra's mother hadn't paid the last phone bill. Andra's mother never paid bills, and never had paid bills, in all the time Andra had known her. Andra had started to pay the bills when she was old enough to quit school and go to work. This month, she hadn't paid them because she'd needed the money to come here. Her mother was back there in Morris Heights, living without electricity and shooting up heroin in the dark.

“You've got to wonder, don't you?” Grace said.

“Wonder what?” Andra said. She knew, now, what bothered her about Grace. Grace Alsop smelled like money.

“Why people come to audition for something like this,” Grace said. “Look at how many there are. I hadn't expected there to be this many. There has to be a couple of hundred girls just on this part of the block alone.”

“There were more than that,” Andra said. “There were tens of thousands of audition tapes. Didn't you send an audition tape?”

“Well, yes, of course I did,” Grace said. “But I thought that was just—”

“Just what?”

“Well, you know, just to weed out the people with mental health problems, or things like that,” Grace said. “They must get a lot of crazies, don't you think? I mean, on
American Idol
you have to be able to sing, or something. And on
America's Next Top Model
you at least have to look like a model. But with this. Well. You don't have to be anything, do you?”

“You have to be female,” Andra said.

“Yes, you do. Did you ever wonder why that was? My friends back at school say that they're just trying to pick the next Paris Hilton, or something like that, the next person who's just famous for being famous. Which is pretty funny, if you think about it.”

“Is it?”

“I think it is,” Grace said. “I mean, the Hilton sisters are famous because they have lots of money. I'll bet nobody here has lots of money. Do they really think they're going to make a career out of having people pay them to go to parties?”

“I don't know,” Andra said.

“Don't you?”

Grace stepped away a little. Andra was suddenly aware that this other girl was looking her up and down, really looking at her, and for the first time. There was a light in those pale blue eyes that was not very pleasant.

“I'm just here on a dare,” Grace said. “I'm going to law school next
year. Lawyers actually do make lots of money, if that's the kind of thing you're into.”

Grace turned her back to Andra and eased off a little into the crowd, and Andra wrapped her one free arm around her waist.

Grace was right, she thought. There were hundreds of girls here. There were too many girls. Andra had thought that the audition tapes would be the thing that weeded out most of the competition, so that when she showed up at the Milky Way Ballroom there might be fifty or sixty other girls, and then a fast whittling down to the thirty and the twenty and the fourteen. Instead, there were girls everywhere, and some of them were pretty, and some of them could probably do something other than just stand there and look cute.

She took the newspaper off her head and looked at it. The mayor of Philadelphia was black. The president of the United States was black. All around her there were black people doing things, but none of them were the black people she knew. Back in Morris Heights, there was a limited number of options. You could sell drugs. You could take drugs. You could run numbers. You could go on welfare if you had a baby or got very old. You could have the kind of job where you took the bus into Manhattan, and cleaned offices or worked in dry-cleaning places or did something else nobody could see you doing. You couldn't even go to Manhattan to be a waitress, because in Manhattan all the waitresses were white college girls who wanted to go into acting.

Andra put the paper up over her head again. She was soaked through and shivering. She wished she could afford a cell phone. But then, there was no point in calling her mother. Her mother would have found a way to get high. She'd be lying on the living room floor because she'd just sold all the furniture again. Or she'd be five blocks away at somebody's house. Or she'd be staggering along the street as if she were one of the living dead. She'd be somewhere.

Even so, Andra thought, it would be good to have a phone, so that she could check in, or ask somebody else to check. Assuming she knew anybody with a working phone.

Up at the head of the line, the doors began to open.

Mary-Louise Verdt had been the first person to stand in line this morning, at just after six o'clock, and she would have been earlier if she had been easy in her mind about staying out on the street here after dark. She'd heard the girls behind her talking. She'd even talked to some of them. By now, she knew she wasn't even in the city of Philadelphia proper. It felt wrong to her for the producers of the show to be doing what they were doing. If the show was going to be called
America's Next Superstar—Philadelphia,
then it ought to be in Philadelphia, and not someplace else, no matter how close.

When the doors opened, Mary-Louise was still first in line, in spite of the doubling up and the pushing and shoving and rain. There had been a lot of rain. Mary-Louise was glad to be out of it, stepping through the doors into a wide lobby with what looked like velour on the floor and the walls. It reminded her of the lobby in that movie theater in the Jim Carrey movie,
The Majestic.
She hadn't much liked that movie. She liked movies where people went through a lot of funny troubles and then got married.

There was a long table right in the middle of everything. There were four women at the table, each holding a clipboard, with little signs in front of them that said
A TO D, E TO H
. Mary-Louise found the one at the very end,
U TO Z
, and went there. The woman at the clipboard looked a little hassled. The lobby was dark and damp and humid. Mary-Louise put on her brightest smile, but the woman with the clipboard didn't notice it.

“Your name is . . . ,” the woman said.

“Verdt,” Mary-Louise said. “Mary-Louise Verdt.”

“And you're from?”

“Holcomb, Kansas.”

The woman with the clipboard didn't react. It made Mary-Louise a little annoyed. Almost everybody reacted to that “Holcomb, Kansas,” or at least everyone at home did. One of the most famous murders in the history of America had happened there. People still talked about it.

“Do you have your letter?” the woman with the clipboard said.

Mary-Louise reached into her oversized purse and got the letter, still in its envelope, from the little side compartment where she always kept her phone. She handed it over, and then she couldn't help herself.

“This is the biggest thing, back home where I'm from,” she said. “I mean, it was even in the paper. Just my getting the chance to come in and interview. But I just knew I'd get the chance to come in and interview. I know I'm going to get to be on the show, too. You've got to really want things, do you know what I mean? You've got to really want them. That's the only way anybody ever gets anywhere. And I really want this.”

She might as well have been talking to a statue. The woman with the clipboard was not paying attention. She read through the letter for, what felt like to Mary-Louise, the third time. Then she handed the letter back and pointed to the right.

“Through those doors,” she said, “you'll find a corridor and a series of rooms. You go to the blue one. It's painted blue. It won't be hard to find.”

“Yes, of course,” Mary-Louise said. “I'm sure I won't have any trouble.”

“Someone will come in and call you when it's time for your interview. If you're off in the bathroom or somewhere when they call you, they'll come back in five minutes and call a second time. If you don't answer then, either, then too bad. You go home.”

“Yes, of course,” Mary-Louise said. “I'm sure I won't have any trouble.”

“That way.” The woman with the clipboard pointed right again.

Mary-Louise stepped away from the table. Girls were crowding in, pushing each other, but they were stopping well back from the tables. There was something intimidating about the tables. Mary-Louise had to admit it: There was something intimidating about a lot of the girls, too. She was sure she was dressed all wrong, but she couldn't quite put a finger on why.

She went to the doors on the right. She looked across the lobby and
saw that there were also doors on the left. This place was called a ballroom. Maybe they held dances here. Maybe there were dressing rooms. She had no idea.

She went through into a narrow corridor and looked around again. It was a shabby place. The carpet here was worn. The paint on the walls was faded.

The first room she came to was painted a sickly color of pink. There were already two girls in there, looking at magazines. The second room she came to was beigy-brown. It was empty, and it smelled a little bad, as if somebody had left a sandwich in the wastebasket overnight. She went farther along the hall and found it, the blue room.

Mary-Louise went in, and looked around, and put down her purse. There were windows. She went to them and tried to look out, but the only view she got was of a blank wall. She got her purse again and sat down in a big chair in the middle of everything. Then she took out her phone.

She was in the middle of calling her mother when she heard a voice from the hall that said, “Oh, for God's sake.”

She looked up and saw a woman standing in the door, very thin and businesslike, running a hand through her hair.

“For God's sake,” the woman said again. “You can't have that here. Didn't they tell you you couldn't have that here? I don't know what I'm going to do if they haven't bothered to confiscate any of them.”

“Excuse me?” Mary-Louise said.

The thin woman came into the room and snatched the phone from Mary-Louise's hand. “The phone,” she said. “You're not allowed to have a phone. Well, a camera phone, actually, it's the pictures she cares about, but this is a camera phone, isn't it? Everything's a camera phone these days.”