Wanting Sheila Dead(107)

“You know what Aristotle said?”

Olivia didn’t really believe Sheila had ever read Aristotle. She hung on to her clipboard and kept her mouth shut.

“Aristotle said,” Sheila went on, “that some people are born to be subservient. It’s their nature. I’ve always thought that that was a very insightful comment.”





2


The word went around that Sheila Dunham was going to be at the individual interviews in person, and Andra thought she was going to faint. This experience had not been what she expected it to be, and she hadn’t been here one whole week. It wasn’t as easy to pass for something you hadn’t ever had a chance to be. There were the things that she had expected to go wrong, like her voice. She knew she talked “ghetto,” as people said. Even black people said it. She talked “ghetto,” and she was supposed to talk like Tyra Banks, or Barack Obama. The speech thing was a dead giveaway. There were things she had not expected to go wrong, and that she didn’t know what to do with. There was the thing with the anger, for instance. If people criticized her, she got angry. She blew up. She told them off. She got in their face. It was what you did. You never let anyone disrespect you.

But people here did not do that. People here stayed polite, almost all the time, and they never, ever, ever got physical. They didn’t push each other. They really never had full-out fights. Andra had been in at least a dozen of those over the course of her life. One time, her forehead had been cracked by a bitch with a beer bottle. That had happened in a bar somewhere in the Bronx, and the police had been called, and she had been the only one arrested, because she had been the only one still there. She hadn’t been able to go anywhere because her head was bleeding. The blood was getting into her eyes and making her blind. They took her to the hospital and got her bandaged up, and in the end they didn’t arrest her. It wasn’t against the law to have blood flowing into your eyes. There was nobody around to say she’d hit them, too.

Olivia Dahl came out into the hallway and called her name. Andra adjusted her tank top and rubbed her right ankle into the top of her left foot. Her clothes were wrong. She knew that, too. The other girls wore things that didn’t fit too tightly on their bodies, and that weren’t very bright in color. Grace, who was the classiest girl Andra had ever known, always looked as if she didn’t have a real body under her clothes, and her clothes floated when she walked. The other girls walked differently, too. It had gotten to the point where Andra was afraid to stand up and go anywhere. She felt like she was a billboard screaming STREET HO! STREET HO!

But she had never been a street whore. That was the truth. It had always been number one on Andra’s list of things she would never do.

Olivia was standing at the door, holding it back. Andra went in. She saw the plain black and metal chair at the other end of the room right away. There were lights beaming down on it. That was obviously where she was supposed to go. She tried to walk very slowly past where Sheila Dunham and the man from the interviews at the ballroom were sitting. The man who had done the interviews at the ballroom was sitting in a chair just like the one that had been put out for Andra. Sheila was sitting in something fancy in green upholstery. Andra had no idea why she was noticing any of these things.

Andra sat down. She couldn’t see Sheila or the interview guy because the lights were right behind them, or something. When Andra looked in their direction, all she got was glare. She folded her hands in her lap.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Sheila said. “Your name isn’t Andra Gayle.”

Andra felt her stomach clench. If she ever ate anything, she would throw it up. She never ate anything. That wasn’t right. She never ate much. She didn’t like most food.

“Ms. Gayle,” Sheila said.

Andra made herself concentrate. “My birth name is Shanequa Johnson,” she said, “but it’s not right to say my name isn’t Andra Gayle. Lots of people change their names when they go into show business.”

“So Andra Gayle is your stage name.”

“I guess.” Andra didn’t know what a stage name was.

“Why did you want to change your name?”

For a split second, Andra thought about spilling the whole thing right here: her mother the crack addict; the years of “and then” when she was a child; the bar fights; the sleeping in abandoned buildings. Now that would be a personal interview that would definitely make it onto television.

“I want,” she said instead, “to be something else. To be someone else. To be something I wasn’t born to be.”