Wanting Sheila Dead(28)

She worked her way down the row to her own roommate, who was not hard to find. This was a girl named Ivy Demari, and she had white-blond hair with an electric green streak in it. Janice thought you could probably have found Ivy on the moon.

“What’s going on?” Janice whispered.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Grace said. Her face was still red. “Miss Dahl was just telling me not to go anywhere, and then she left herself, and now I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m supposed to do. I’m not giving that vile little bitch another chance to kick me.”

“Oh, Grace,” Coraline said.

“She’s a bitch and worse,” Grace said. “And I’m not going to watch my language about it, either.”

“This is what’s going on,” Ivy whispered.

Then she grabbed Janice’s hand and squeezed it. Janice had been a little worried about Ivy at first, but it had turned out that Ivy was actually Very Nice, even though she had tattoos.

“I meant it about not being allowed to touch you physically,” Linda said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that on this show, or on any reality show—”

“The contestants do it,” Shari said. “They get into fights sometimes.”

“The contestants, yes, well,” Linda said. “But Sheila Dunham isn’t a contestant. You could sue her.”

“You could if you aren’t really a spy,” Shari said. “I mean, if you’re really a spy, you could sue her, but you might not win. If you see what I mean.”

“Of course I’m not really a spy,” Grace said.

“Is your father really that guy she was talking about?” another girl said. Janice had to work at it a little, but she came up with a name: Mary-Louise Verdt.

Grace shifted a little on the floor. She was sitting down with her left leg stretched out across the hall carpet. Janice could see bruises starting to emerge on her thigh.

“Yes,” she said finally. “My father really is who she said he was. But I’m not a spy. I haven’t talked to the man for six years, for God’s sake. I barely talked to him when I was still living at home. And Wellesley, my foot. I did go to Wellesley. I even graduated.”

“They can throw you off the show for lying about things, I think,” Coraline said. “We all had to sign that form, do you remember, promising that everything we said was true and we promised it on pain of perjury and that kind of thing.”

“We did sign such a paper,” Alida Akido said. “I remember.”

“We signed a lot of papers, but I didn’t read them,” another girl said—that was Marcia Lee Baldwin.

“There are so many of us,” Janice whispered to Ivy. “I have trouble keeping them apart.”

“There are only fourteen of us now,” Ivy said. “There were thirty, four days ago. More.”

“I know. But I still get confused.”

“Half of them have changed their names, you watch,” Ivy said. “Or worse. It happens every season.”

“I didn’t change anything,” Janice said.

It was true, too. She hadn’t changed anything. She had just left some things out, like how she wasn’t . . . ever first. She was popular enough, but never first. She looked a little sideways at Ivy and wondered what Ivy had been back where she was from. Somehow, she just couldn’t imagine Ivy on a cheerleading team.

“You don’t understand the real problem here,” Grace said. She was now getting very carefully to her feet. “It isn’t being thrown off the show or not. Who gives a flying damn? It’s what’s going to happen next. I wonder which one of you is going to put this up on YouTube.”

“Why would any of us put this up on YouTube?” Coraline said. “And how would we manage it?”

“Cell phone video,” Shari said.

“And if one of you don’t do it,” Grace said, “then one of the crew here will. There are cameras everywhere, haven’t you noticed? They’re filming us all the time. One way or the other, this thing is going to be on the Internet by the end of the day, and it’s going to be everywhere, and I mean everywhere, by the end of the week. Courtesy of my father.”

“Your father is going to show a tape of this everywhere in the world?” Mary-Louise Verdt sounded confused.

“No, you rank idiot,” Grace said. “My father being who he is means other people are going to show this to the world. It doesn’t matter if I’m going to be sent home right this minute or not. I’m going to be made a complete and utter idiot. Which was the point.”