She took the newspaper off her head and looked at it. The mayor of Philadelphia was black. The president of the United States was black. All around her there were black people doing things, but none of them were the black people she knew. Back in Morris Heights, there was a limited number of options. You could sell drugs. You could take drugs. You could run numbers. You could go on welfare if you had a baby or got very old. You could have the kind of job where you took the bus into Manhattan, and cleaned offices or worked in dry-cleaning places or did something else nobody could see you doing. You couldn’t even go to Manhattan to be a waitress, because in Manhattan all the waitresses were white college girls who wanted to go into acting.
Andra put the paper up over her head again. She was soaked through and shivering. She wished she could afford a cell phone. But then, there was no point in calling her mother. Her mother would have found a way to get high. She’d be lying on the living room floor because she’d just sold all the furniture again. Or she’d be five blocks away at somebody’s house. Or she’d be staggering along the street as if she were one of the living dead. She’d be somewhere.
Even so, Andra thought, it would be good to have a phone, so that she could check in, or ask somebody else to check. Assuming she knew anybody with a working phone.
Up at the head of the line, the doors began to open.
4
Mary-Louise Verdt had been the first person to stand in line this morning, at just after six o’clock, and she would have been earlier if she had been easy in her mind about staying out on the street here after dark. She’d heard the girls behind her talking. She’d even talked to some of them. By now, she knew she wasn’t even in the city of Philadelphia proper. It felt wrong to her for the producers of the show to be doing what they were doing. If the show was going to be called America’s Next Superstar—Philadelphia, then it ought to be in Philadelphia, and not someplace else, no matter how close.
When the doors opened, Mary-Louise was still first in line, in spite of the doubling up and the pushing and shoving and rain. There had been a lot of rain. Mary-Louise was glad to be out of it, stepping through the doors into a wide lobby with what looked like velour on the floor and the walls. It reminded her of the lobby in that movie theater in the Jim Carrey movie, The Majestic. She hadn’t much liked that movie. She liked movies where people went through a lot of funny troubles and then got married.
There was a long table right in the middle of everything. There were four women at the table, each holding a clipboard, with little signs in front of them that said A TO D, E TO H. Mary-Louise found the one at the very end, U TO Z, and went there. The woman at the clipboard looked a little hassled. The lobby was dark and damp and humid. Mary-Louise put on her brightest smile, but the woman with the clipboard didn’t notice it.
“Your name is . . . ,” the woman said.
“Verdt,” Mary-Louise said. “Mary-Louise Verdt.”
“And you’re from?”
“Holcomb, Kansas.”
The woman with the clipboard didn’t react. It made Mary-Louise a little annoyed. Almost everybody reacted to that “Holcomb, Kansas,” or at least everyone at home did. One of the most famous murders in the history of America had happened there. People still talked about it.
“Do you have your letter?” the woman with the clipboard said.
Mary-Louise reached into her oversized purse and got the letter, still in its envelope, from the little side compartment where she always kept her phone. She handed it over, and then she couldn’t help herself.
“This is the biggest thing, back home where I’m from,” she said. “I mean, it was even in the paper. Just my getting the chance to come in and interview. But I just knew I’d get the chance to come in and interview. I know I’m going to get to be on the show, too. You’ve got to really want things, do you know what I mean? You’ve got to really want them. That’s the only way anybody ever gets anywhere. And I really want this.”
She might as well have been talking to a statue. The woman with the clipboard was not paying attention. She read through the letter for, what felt like to Mary-Louise, the third time. Then she handed the letter back and pointed to the right.
“Through those doors,” she said, “you’ll find a corridor and a series of rooms. You go to the blue one. It’s painted blue. It won’t be hard to find.”
“Yes, of course,” Mary-Louise said. “I’m sure I won’t have any trouble.”
“Someone will come in and call you when it’s time for your interview. If you’re off in the bathroom or somewhere when they call you, they’ll come back in five minutes and call a second time. If you don’t answer then, either, then too bad. You go home.”