Wanting Sheila Dead(27)

Some of the girls were crying. All of them had their arms wrapped around their bodies as if that would shield them from something.

“Traitor,” Sheila said again. “Bitch. Whore. Cunt.”

Grace whirled around. “Nobody calls me a cunt,” she screamed. “Don’t you even try.”

Sheila grabbed Grace’s wrist again and spun her around.

Then she lifted one Nike-trainered foot, flexed it back, and punched it directly into Grace Harrigan’s backside.

Grace seemed to lift off the ground half a foot before she first stumbled onto the carpet and then went flying, face down, with a thud.





2


It was Janice Ledbedder who had not come out of her room when the fuss started. She had stayed, instead, lying very still in her bed, hoping that Sheila Dunham would not come back to see if everybody had gotten up and gone into the hall. Janice didn’t think that would happen. She watched the show every week, every season. She watched it when it was on Oxygen and A&E in those marathon all-day season-complete runs. She knew how it worked. There were always a couple of these explosions. They happened in the house, like this one that had happened to Grace. Or they happened on set and as an official part of the show. Or they happened away from the cameras, in a parking lot somewhere, so that the only way the world knew about them was that they turned up on the entertainment news Web sites, or because somebody had a camera phone.

Janice checked the Web sites just as much as she checked the television. There wasn’t really a lot more to do in Marshall, South Dakota. She was not especially “cute,” as people said there—they never talked about pretty, or beautiful. The standard for being attractive in high school was definitely “cute.” It was nonthreatening, and it didn’t sound as if whoever had it was trying to be something other than what they were. “Trying to be something you’re not” was the biggest sin in Marshall, as far as Janice could tell. It had once made her wonder about all those people who were on television. All of them looked like who they were trying to be—but it was impossible to work out. It really was. Maybe it didn’t matter if you were uppity if you were somebody who deserved to be uppity. Maybe it was just people from South Dakota who didn’t deserve that, and that was why she had never seen anybody who “acted uppity” and still had friends. Janice definitely had friends.

The noise in the hall had stopped. No, the screaming had. There was a soft, dull murmur that was girls talking in low voices, but Janice was sure that Sheila Dunham had to be gone. Janice couldn’t see what she could possibly do to cause Sheila to go into one of her patented fits, but the longer she was in this house the more she began to think that nothing had to cause it. Sheila Dunham just had fits. If you were handy, you were it.

The problem was, Janice wasn’t particularly “smart,” either. She wasn’t stupid. She didn’t run around saying dumbo things about, well, stuff, the way some people did. It was just that she wasn’t much interested in books and reading, which meant she hadn’t gotten a good score on the SAT tests. That was the big thing about getting into a college. Janice got very good grades, but other people also got very good grades, and those people got better scores on those tests. The SATs. The ACTs. Some people could get out of Marshall, South Dakota, just by going away to school. When they went away to school, they never came back again.

Of course, just wanting to get out of Marshall was “uppity.” There was that.

Janice got out of bed. Her robe was lying over the back of the chair next to the bed. Each of the beds in each of the rooms had its own chair next to it. Janice put her robe on. It was pastel blue and had a little clutch of kittens embroidered at the place where a breast pocket would be. She rubbed the embroidery a little and frowned. She’d heard a lot about diversity, and about how people thought differently and lived differently and liked different things depending on where they were from and what kinds of family they had, but she’d never entirely believed it before she came here.

She thought about putting on her slippers and decided against it. None of the other girls wore slippers except for Coraline Mays, and Coraline was obviously just as clueless as Janice was herself.

She stepped out into the hall. The girls were mostly sitting on the floor, except for the black one, that Andra Gayle. She was leaning against one of the walls and looking murderous.

“I don’t think she can actually get away with touching you,” one of the seated girls was saying.

Janice wracked her brains and came up with a name: Linda Kowalski. Linda Kowalski was Catholic and had a rosary she kept on her bedside table. Her roommate was a girl named Shari Bernstein, who was Jewish and came from somewhere in New York that was not New York City. Janice felt rather proud of herself for remembering all of that.