“And you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that? You don’t think it’s better to be yourself?”
“It depends on who ‘yourself’ is.”
“According to our investigation,” Sheila said, “you’ve been arrested at least a dozen times, all for acts of violence.”
“They weren’t acts of violence,” Andra said quickly. “I didn’t jump people or anything like that. I didn’t go out and try to hurt people. It’s—where I come from, if somebody disrespects you, you gotta do something about it. You can’t just let it go. So I got into a few fights. I never hurt anybody bad enough to put them in the hospital, even. Not for overnight. I never killed someone.”
“Did you ever own a gun?”
“No,” Andra said. “That was my number two.”
“Your number two what?”
Andra looked down at her hands. There was a barking noise from the other side of the lights. She looked up again. She was supposed to look at the camera the whole time. She couldn’t see where the camera was.
“When I was growing up,” she said, “I made a list. I made a list of all the things I would never do. I would never own a gun or live anywhere there were guns in the house. That was my number two.”
“What was your number one?”
“I would never go out on the street and sell it,” Andra said. She was sweating. She could feel the thick wash of it around her neck. It confused her a little, because she did not feel especially stressed. She was just sweating.
Nobody was saying anything. Andra hated the silence so much, she wanted to shout.
“It was what my mother did,” she said finally. “My mother sold herself for as long as she could, and now she’s too old and she just stays wherever. Home, if she’s got one. She doesn’t care as long as she’s high.”
“And do you get high?”
“No. That’s number three.”
“Did you shoot at me at the Milky Way Ballroom?”
“No, I told you. I don’t touch guns.”
“Did you shoot at me here?”
“No.”
“Did you kill that girl who was found dead in the study?”
“No.”
“Do you know who she was?”
“No,” Andra said, and now she was just tired. “I didn’t even get a good look at her at the casting thing. Everything happened so fast and then it was over and the police were there, and I was sort of nervous. But it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. They didn’t, you know, search everybody, or arrest anybody, or whatever.”
“And you were afraid of being searched?”
“No,” Andra said, but she wasn’t thinking about that.
She was thinking that it must be a very odd thing to live a life where you didn’t just automatically expect the police to arrest you, if they were there and you happened to be around.
3
When Andra came out of the interview room, she almost looked like she was in tears. Mary-Louise was impressed. Andra always looked so tough that Mary-Louise didn’t think she ever cried. Olivia Dahl, on the other hand, always looked either disapproving or furious, and she was looking furious now. When she called Mary-Louise’s name, Mary-Louise came forward and did her best to smile.
“This shouldn’t be bad,” she said. “We don’t get judged on this.”
Mary-Louise wanted Olivia Dahl to say “of course not,” or something like it. Mary-Louise really wanted to be sure. It was a little off-putting, the idea of having Sheila Dunham here. Sheila Dunham did a lot of yelling, and she’d already yelled at Mary-Louise once.
Mary-Louise went across the room and sat down in the empty chair. She crossed her legs at her ankles and folded her hands in her lap. They had been instructed to fold their hands in their laps during interviews. You didn’t want to wave your hands about, because if you did it made a distraction and the tape wasn’t worth using. You wanted the show to use your tapes, because then you would get more time on the air, and the more time you got the more famous you would be. You had to let America get to know you. That had been in the lecture Olivia had given right before—well, before.
Mary-Louise smiled. She didn’t know why she was smiling. She always smiled. It was something people did.
“So,” Sheila Dunham said. “Your name is Mary-Louise Verdt, and you’re from Holcomb, Kansas.”
Sheila pronounced the name as “VerD.”
“Actually,” Mary-Louise said, “you say my last name as ‘VerT’. As if the ‘d’ wasn’t there.”
“Verdt,” Sheila Dunham said, pronouncing it wrong yet again. Mary-Louise let it go. She didn’t want to embarrass anybody. “Tell me,” Sheila said, “about Holcomb, Kansas.”