Wanting Sheila Dead(11)

“Well,” Ivy said, and suddenly it was no trouble at all to breathe. Everything was perfectly fine. “I do have an irrational revulsion against all Romulans. But I don’t think it’s likely to come up on America’s Next Superstar.”

“What the hell is a Romulan?” Sheila demanded.

Pete Waldheim was smirking. “It’s an alien race. From the Star Trek series. It’s—”

“Illegal aliens?” Sheila demanded.

“Aliens from space,” Pete said again.

“Christ,” Sheila said. “What do you think you’re doing? Are you wasting our time? Because, let me tell you, we’ve got a lot of people out there who’d like to be where you are now. They didn’t get invited to these interviews.”

Ivy wanted to point out that lots of people had been invited to these interviews, hundreds of them. She’d just spent several hours standing in line with them.

“I’m not going to put up with racists on my show, no matter what kind of racists they are,” Sheila said. “I’m not going to put up with fag haters, either. Are you a fag hater?”

Johnny Rell was wincing. Mark Borodine was staring at the ceiling.

Ivy said, “I’m not a fag hater, but I understand why it is everybody keeps expecting you to turn up dead.”





8


Alida Akido had been feeling confident all morning, even when she was standing out there in the rain at the back of that God-awful line. It was easy to see, just by looking around a little, that there were almost no other Asian girls trying out for this cycle. They dotted the crowd like separate little miracles. They were also completely impossible. One of them was Korean, so Korean that her face was as flat and ugly as a pancake with acne. One of the others was that Asian-indeterminate that spelled mixed ancestry with a white person, or maybe even worse. Alida had never understood the mania Americans had with pretending that race didn’t matter. Of course race mattered. Race said everything you needed to know about a person, at least as it applied to people in any of the other races. You saw that very clearly in Japan.

The panel at the front of the room was all trying to look encouraging, except for Sheila Dunham, who always looked sour. Alida stood very straight and waited, patiently. There was something about the girls she’d been seeing all day. None of them could be patient. None of them could be calm. They were all jumping and hopping all over the place.

“So,” the one called Deedee Plant said, “your grandparents were in a Japanese internment camp in World War II—”

“My great-grandparents,” Alida said.

“What?” Deedee said.

“My great-grandparents,” Alida said again. “I’m only nineteen. It was a long time ago.”

“Your great-grandparents,” Deedee said.

Pete Waldheim leaned in and tried to look aggressive. Alida nearly giggled.

“I think the point here,” he said, “is that we’d like to know if you knew these people. These great-grandparents. The ones who were in the internment camp.”

“I knew my great-grandmother a little,” Alida said. “She died when I was six. My great-grandfather died before I was born.”

“Your mother died, too, didn’t she?” Sheila Dunham said.

Alida would never in her life have done anything as stupid as take a deep breath, or shift on her feet. The important thing was not to let go of your emotions, only to look as if you had. There was something else the Americans had a mania about: showing your feelings. Only idiots and savages showed their feelings on their faces, as if it didn’t matter who could see what.

Alida was counting to thirty in her head. Finally, she said, “Yes. My mother is dead. She died when I was twelve.”

“And how did that feel?” Deedee said. “Could you tell us how that affected your life? You were just at the age when girls most need their mothers.”

“I want to know how she died,” Sheila said. “Did you kill her?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Pete said.

“It’s a perfectly legitimate question,” Sheila said. “Remember that girl they let into Harvard a few years ago? Then they found out that she’d been convicted of killing her mother, and they had to take it back. Have you been convicted of killing your mother?”

“I haven’t been convicted of anything,” Alida said. “And my mother died of breast cancer.”

“Is that an issue you feel strongly about?” Deedee said. She sounded as if she were rushing. “A lot of our contestants have causes they want to advance if they win the competition. Maybe breast cancer can be yours.”