“Did you shoot at me this afternoon?”
“What?”
“Did you shoot at me?” Sheila’s voice sounded very patient. Janice didn’t think that was a good sign.
“I don’t think anybody shot at you,” she said, thinking it over. “I’ve been trying to remember it all day. I think somebody shot something, but I don’t think they shot it at you.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you know, it missed, didn’t it?” Janice said. “And we were all so close. If somebody really wanted to shoot you, they would probably have hit you. I’ve been thinking that maybe they’ve been shooting at one of us. Maybe we have the whole thing wrong. But I could be crazy. I mean, I don’t really understand how people like you live, if you know what I mean. It has to be really odd never to be able to go anywhere without people knowing who you are. I don’t know if I’d really like that.”
“Then you don’t want to be America’s Next Superstar?”
“Oh. Yes. I would. I mean, I’d like to win the competition. That would be a good thing. That would be in the paper.”
“And that’s what you want, to be in the paper, in, where was it—”
“Marshall, South Dakota.”
“And you were the one who had a big tragedy, or something, before you came.” There was a rustling of papers. Janice wished she could see past the lights.
She didn’t like Sheila Dunham. She really didn’t. The woman was old, and she was nasty, too, with that way adults sometimes had of acting as if everybody under the age of thirty was a moron with a morals problem. Janice smoothed her skirt.
“I don’t think I had a tragedy,” she said.
There was a long pause on the other side of the lights. “I remember,” Sheila said. “You’re the loser. You’re the one whose boyfriend dumped her for her best friend.”
Janice rubbed her hands together. This was bad. A male voice from the other side of the lights told her to sit still. You weren’t supposed to move around a lot during interviews. It made it hard for the audience to hear what you were saying if they were concentrating instead on your jumping all over the place.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “They’re very good for each other. And I don’t begrudge her, you know. She had a hard life. She came from a very bad family. Well, it wasn’t a family, really. It was just her mother. But her mother drank. Drinks, I guess.”
“So you didn’t mind it? Your boyfriend dumps you for your best friend, and you don’t mind it?”
“I didn’t like it. But I didn’t think about it. And then I got this, and everybody in the whole place just thought I was wonderful for it. And you know, there was a sort of justice in it. She tried out, too. She didn’t get asked to the audition.”
There was more silence from the other side of the lights. Janice really couldn’t keep her body still. She’d never been able to keep herself still. She talked all the time, and she was always moving. They made fun of her about that at school, and that was one of the things her boyfriend hadn’t liked.
The papers rustled again. Sheila said. “Do you think it’s a good idea, you telling that story to everybody you meet? You have told that story to everybody here. You’ve told it to me before. You’ve told it to the other girls. You mentioned it in the first interview you did, back at the Ballroom, before you were chosen to come to the house. Don’t you think telling that story over and over again makes you look pathetic?”
“I don’t know,” Janice said.
“It makes you look pathetic,” Sheila said. “It is pathetic. If I had a story like that in my background, nobody would ever hear it from me. Perception is everything. People will think what you want them to think. You want them to think you’re a loser.”
You want them to think you’re a bitch, Janice thought, but she wasn’t that crazy. She didn’t say it. What she said instead was, “Yes, I can see that. I can see how that would be.”
“Who do you think took those shots at me?”
That was better. Janice could breathe again.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t really know. I don’t think anybody knows.”
“But they suspect,” Sheila said.
“They make guesses,” Janice said, “but I think it’s all just talk. I mean, everybody wants to believe they know what’s going on, so they pretend they do. But it’s just talk.”
“And who are they talking about?”
“I wouldn’t like to say.”