“I’ve thought about that,” Alida said.
And it was true. She had thought about it. Everybody had a cause in America. Everybody wanted to help the world. Everybody wanted the world to like her. That was the problem. The world never liked really successful people; it envied them. Alida wanted to be envied.
Sheila was staring at her. Alida did not smile. She was not surprised at the questions: They were the kind of questions Sheila was famous for asking. Sheila Dunham made a career out of being an uncivilized jerk.
“Well,” Sheila said.
The panel leaned in toward each other, whispering. Alida was not worried. Sheila took a clipboard and wrote something on it. She passed it around. The others also wrote something on it. Then they gave it back to Sheila. If you had perfect calm, perfect poise, perfect self-control, you could stand in a crowd of people and have them all believing you weren’t a savage.
Sheila looked at the clipboard and then handed it across the table to that Miss Dahl who had brought Alida in to the panel. Miss Dahl looked at the clipboard and nodded.
“Come with me,” Miss Dahl said.
Alida nodded to the panel—she’d seen the show a million times; she’d seen the clips from this part of it; she was supposed to look sincere and strained and to thank them for considering her and tell them how desperately she needed to do this with her life.
“Good luck,” Deedee said.
Alida smiled this time, and then followed Olivia Dahl out of the canvas-enclosed area. She was just passing through the flap to what appeared to be yet another corridor at the back when she heard Sheila Dunham say to the other judges:
“You’re going to regret that one. She’s got all the emotion of a dead fish.”
The corridor went through a long stretch of what looked like high school lockers, to a back staircase.
“This way,” Olivia Dahl said, climbing.
Alida followed her.
“I need you to stay in this room until you’re called again,” Olivia said. “That may take another hour or so. There are still a lot of girls who have to be interviewed, and of course there are always borderline cases that have to be reinterviewed and rediscussed. You’re in neither of those categories. You’ll be in the initial thirty, which means you’ll appear in at least the first episode of the new cycle.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s no point in thanking me. I had nothing to do with it. The other girls in the room up here will also be part of the first episode of the new cycle. But you’ve got to remember that none of you is on the show or in the house yet. Once we’ve made the determination of just which thirty of you there will be, we’ll film an episode where first ten of you will be eliminated, then another six, and the fourteen left standing will be cast for the show proper. Do you understand all that?”
“Yes,” Alida said.
“You’ve watched the show?”
“I watch it all the time.”
“Good,” Olivia said. “You wouldn’t believe how many people try out for this thing without ever bothering to watch the show. What’s the point, really? It’s not even good strategy. Well, never mind. Up here.”
They were in a dark upstairs corridor, carpeted and wallpapered just like the corridors downstairs, all dark and fuzzy-velour. Olivia opened a door and held it back. Alida looked in on a small crowd of girls, some of whom she recognized from the line and the waiting room, some of whom she didn’t. There was that girl with the thick green streak in her white-blond hair. There was that Southern girl who looked like she was dressed to go to a very formal PTA meeting.
“This is Alida Akido,” Olivia said in a very loud voice.
Alida stepped into the room proper, and behind her, Olivia pulled the door closed and disappeared behind it. Alida looked from girl to girl. Some girls were sitting. Some girls were standing. Some girls were all the way down on the floor.
She’d gone about halfway around the room when she finally noticed the black girl, and then it was all she could do not to make a face. It wasn’t just a black girl. It was a black girl with a bright red Afro that looked like a Brillo pad in the electric chair. It was a black girl with “ghetto” screaming out all over her.
And it didn’t help that Alida knew that both she and the black girl were in this room for the very same reason—because America’s Next Superstar didn’t want to look like it was prejudiced.
Alida shrugged slightly, and then turned away, looking for somebody to talk to who wouldn’t be an annoyance or a threat.
9
Olivia Dahl thought she had a headache, but she wasn’t sure. She would have a headache, when all this was over, because she always did. Right now it only mattered that she kept going without hurting anyone, and especially without hurting Sheila. Executive assistants were supposed to worship the ground their celebrity employers walked on, but Sheila wasn’t that much of a celebrity, and Olivia was from Brooklyn.