Sheila leaned in, far enough so that Alida couldn’t help smelling her breath. It was very bad breath.
“Wrong,” Sheila said. “You’ve got to be a star on the level of Brad Pitt to want to avoid the paparazzi. That’s just something you say when reporters ask you, because you don’t want to sound like a jerk. When you’re a celebrity on the way up, or a celebrity who isn’t known for anything but being a celebrity—well, then you need the paparazzi as much as they need you. More. Do you know what people like Paris Hilton do? They make deals with these guys. They make a point of being easy to photograph at least some of the time, because not to be photographed is not to exist. Not to be photographed is not to be famous.”
Alida took a deep breath. There was nothing to say. There wasn’t even anything she wanted to say.
Sheila stood back. “So,” she said. “I watched all your performances. And we’ll have the pictures at judging, to back this up. But I know right away who has won this challenge. You need to be seen and photographed in a way that makes you look good. Some of you did all right. Some of you did not do so well. Some of you were hopeless, like what’s-her-name out in the car. But Johnny and Mark and I have talked it over, and the winner of the challenge is—”
Alida stood very still. She wouldn’t be the winner of the challenge, so she assumed that Grace would be. If Sheila hadn’t sent Grace home, then Grace could not be out of the competition.
Sheila made a flourish with her arms and announced, “Andra!”
The word bounced across the restaurant foyer like a Ping-Pong ball.
Andra Gayle squealed and jumped up and down, and did all those other things winning contestants loved to do in front of the cameras.
Alida nearly spat.
2
Ivy Demari was completely astounded that she hadn’t been the subject of one of Sheila Dunham’s patented on-camera rages—almost as astounded as she was that she’d managed to make it into the house at all. No matter what she had told Dennis at home, she hadn’t really thought that America’s Next Superstar was her thing, except perhaps in the sense that the casting always contained one or two freaks. She certainly looked like the freak in this particular group. She was the only one with visible tattoos. Grace had a small Chipmunk on her left buttock, but she didn’t have the buttock on display. She was the only one with hair that wasn’t a normal color for hair, too. Even her mother had warned her about that one before she came. Still, Ivy thought, you had to be yourself. She really hated all the normal colors for hair.
They had been ushered into the restaurant, which was very small and empty of all other patrons. That didn’t seem like the best way to do this. Ivy could see that regular, ordinary people probably could not be included in a day like today. You’d have to chase them around and get them to sign releases in case their faces showed during one of the shots you wanted to use for television. In real life, though, there would be lots of other people in the restaurant besides the celebrity of the moment, and the celebrity of the moment would have to find a way to deal with them. Ivy almost wished she had agreed to go to those clubs where a bouncer kept watch at the door and only let in the people he thought would “count.” Dennis always wanted to go to those clubs, even though he wasn’t sure of getting in. Dennis always wanted a lot of things.
They were being shown to a table near the back window wall that overlooked a little waterfall. They were all trooping along like girls in line at summer camp. Ivy let herself be seated in the chair that looked directly outside. Then she heard Janice fall into the chair to her right, as thick and breathy as if she were collapsing.
“Oh, whoosh,” Janice said. “Can you believe that happened to Mary-Louise? She’s one of the nicest girls here, too. Not catty, like so many of them. It’s like any of us could mess up at any time, and then what would happen? We’d go home, that’s what would happen.”
Then there was the thing where so many of these girls lived and breathed the show, and nothing but the show. Ivy looked up as Grace Alsop and her roommate Suzanne Toretti took the other two chairs at their table. Grace looked the way she had always looked, Sheila-attack or not: like one of those girls’ boarding-school girls who didn’t talk to anybody who wasn’t on her cotillion invitation list. And Ivy knew cotillions. They did cotillions in Dallas.
“You could have come out if you’d wanted to,” Ivy’s mother had said, at around the time Ivy was making the audition tape she’d sent to the show. “Do you know why you do things anymore? Do you care?”