Wanting Sheila Dead(6)

“Well,” Mary-Louise said.

“Do you know who that was?” the new girl asked. “That was Olivia Dahl.”

“Who’s Olivia Dahl? Is she famous?”

“She is if you follow the show,” the new girl said, “or if you read the supermarket newspapers. You know the ones. She’s Sheila Dunham’s personal assistant. She runs everything around here.”

“Runs how?”

“Oh, you know—does the scut work, and organizes everything, and makes sure things get done. Everybody says she should have been promoted to executive producer years ago, but Sheila Dunham won’t have it. She likes to pretend she does everything herself.”

“Oh,” Mary-Louise said.

The new girl sat down in one of the other chairs. Nobody else had come into their room. Mary-Louise wished they would.

“They’re shoving each other like maniacs out there,” the new girl said, “and it’s still raining. There’s going to be a riot. Wouldn’t that be something else?”

Mary-Louise didn’t know what it would be, but she did know that this girl was not going to make it through the interviews.

This girl didn’t care, and Mary-Louise did, and caring was the only thing that really mattered.





5


Coraline Mays had never intended to enter this competition. She had never even seen the television program, although she’d heard it talked about often enough. Practically everybody back in Southport talked about it, and then complained about the way Sheila Dunham behaved, and who got picked to stay and who was made to go. Even the people at Coraline’s church did that. To Coraline, it seemed somehow very wrong to be watching something that you knew was full of sin, just so that you could complain about the sin later.

This was the very back of the line. It had only been in the last minute and a half that they had moved far enough forward, and turned enough corners, so that Coraline could see the entrance doors to the building. The entire idea of a ballroom made her nervous. It wouldn’t be the kind of ballroom Cinderella had danced in. It would be the kind that Jane Fonda had danced in, in that movie Coraline had seen at her friend Miranda’s house one afternoon when Miranda had broken up with Keith again. Miranda broke up with Keith a lot. Coraline had been with her own boyfriend since their freshman year in high school, and she expected to get engaged to him as soon as they got off to college. Or, rather, as soon as Miranda got off to college, to Liberty University, to get her teaching degree. Michael was talking about joining up with the Marines.

Coraline had an umbrella. It wasn’t a very good one, and it had cost nearly twenty dollars, but she had needed to buy it off one of those street stands with the newspapers. She hadn’t expected the rain. She hadn’t expected the crowd of girls. She had almost been late, and she wondered if that was because she didn’t really want to be here at all.

“Oh, thank God,” the girl next to her said. The girl was very short and she had a lot of rings on. She also had tattoos. There was a big green and black snake down the side of her neck. Where Coraline came from, girls only got tattoos when they were . . . when they were . . . well—not right with the Lord. That might be the best way to put it.

The girl with the tattoos had an umbrella, too. If she hadn’t had one, Coraline would have offered to share her own. People she didn’t understand made Coraline very nervous, but she knew there was only one way to bring souls to Heaven, and that was to be as good a Christian as possible in your everyday life. Coraline didn’t think she was an especially good Christian—she could think the most awful things about people; she had to work like the dickens to make sure she didn’t say them out loud—but she could try, and trying was something she was good at.

“We are actually moving,” the girl with the tattoos said.

Coraline realized that the girl was actually talking to another girl, who was standing beside her. This other girl was also very short, and did not seem to have brought her own umbrella.

The girl with the tattoos turned to Coraline. “Hey,” she said. “I’m Linda Kowalski.”

“Hello,” Coraline said, and suddenly she could just hear her own accent, like a joke on a television show. “I’m Coraline Mays from Southport, Alabama.”

“Well, you sound like you’re from Alabama,” the other girl said, the one without the tattoo. “I’m Shari Bernstein. I’m from Scarsdale.”

“It’s a town in New York,” Linda Kowalski said. “You can’t just do that. You can’t just assume that everybody is going to know where Scarsdale it.”