Janice took a deep breath. This was yet another part of The Midwestern Thing. You started talking and you couldn’t stop.
The blond girl seemed to have shrunk into her raincoat. She didn’t look at all familiar anymore.
Janice started to feel a little worried. “Are you all right? You look sort of sick. Do you need to sit down? I could save your place in line if you needed to go somewhere and sit down.”
The blond girl shook her head and stood up a little straighter. “No,” she said. “No, I’m all right. Sorry. I’m a little tired. I’m Emily.”
“Oh, I like the name Emily,” Janice said. “It’s so old-fashioned. It reminds me of Little Women. Not that there was anybody in Little Women named Emily, because there wasn’t, but it’s that kind of name. Old-fashioned. And New England. You don’t happen to be from New England, do you?”
“I’m from Merion,” the blond girl said.
“Merion?”
“Merion, Pennsylvania,” the blond girl said. “You’re in Merion. We are. This is Merion, not Philadelphia proper.”
“Oh,” Janice said.
“It’s—the townships all sort of bleed together.”
The blond girl was making an effort. Janice understood that. She herself was making an effort, too. She was so nervous, she was ready to burst.
“Isn’t it awesome, the way people come from all over the country to take part in these things?” Janice said. “They’ve had girls from every state in the union be on America’s Next Superstar. And there have been girls from other countries. Well, you know, not right from other countries. I mean people from other countries who live here now. Look at all the girls here. I mean, just look at them. I didn’t know there would be so many trying out.”
Janice paused. People should talk, she thought. People should say things and not make other people uncomfortable.
“There are only thirty places,” Janice said. She had begun to feel desperate. Emily was standing right up against her shoulder. Janice could feel Emily’s breath in her hair. “And thirty is just the first round. If you get picked for the thirty there’s another round where they take it down to twenty, and then another where they take it down to fourteen, and it’s only fourteen that actually get to be on the show. Well, you know what I mean. They always show some of the losers for the thirty and the twenty to—I guess—make it dramatic, but it’s only the fourteen who get to live in the house. I’ll just die if I don’t make it into the house. I really mean it. I came all the way down here from South Dakota, and everybody I know back home knows I did it, too, and if I just get dumped back out with nothing they’ll all laugh at me. I won’t be able to show my face. And I can’t hardly show my face now, considering. It’s terrible.”
“Excuse me,” Emily said. She stepped out from under the umbrella and turned a little away. The rain came down on her hair again.
I’m talking too much, Janice thought. Easterners didn’t like it when you talked too much.
Emily turned her back to her and put her hands in her pockets.
That was when the crowd surged for the first time. The wave coming from behind pushed Janice almost off her feet and into the back of a girl in a pink vinyl motorcycle jacket.
3
Andra Gayle was not a fool, and she was not a hick from the sticks, either. She was from New York. She knew, as the girls around her didn’t—she could tell, because she was listening—that being on a reality show was not going to turn her into a superstar. Nothing was going to turn her into a superstar. She was not pretty, and she had none of the usual talents. Her great blooming Afro of red hair shot out from her skull like an animated cloud. Sometimes she looked in the mirror and imagined the cloud could talk.
The rain was coming down very steadily. The drops were so thick, they were less like drops than like the stream that comes from a faucet whose drip has been neglected for years. Some of the girls had taken off their coats and put them around their heads. Others were using those huge pocketbooks that everybody had thought were hot about two and a half years ago. Andra had neither. She had bought a copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer from a little mechanized kiosk instead. She had a picture of the latest mayor of Philadelphia on her head, along with a thick tall headline that made it sound as if the entire state of Pennsylvania was mad at him.
Andra hated the state of Pennsylvania. She hadn’t seen that much of it. She’d come in on Amtrak just the day before, and stayed at a Holiday Inn for an amount of money that made her stomach hurt. Still, she couldn’t imagine that the rest of the state would be any better, even if it was different. There was no point in a city that wasn’t New York. Even Los Angeles only existed because of the movies.