Wanting Sheila Dead(8)

“What is going on around here?” Shari said.

Then the surge hit again, and Coraline found herself thinking that it was like an invisible wave. It came up out of nowhere and crashed over her head, and then—

—she was lying flat on the ground, in the rain, with mud streaming up the back of her right hand.





6


Grace Alsop had no patience, really, for the sort of person she was running into. First there had been that girl on line, she couldn’t remember her name—Andra, she’d called herself, as if anybody had a name like that, and hair nobody had ever had—and now there were these people in here, one after another of them. There were so many frilly little dresses and tops, Grace wanted to run around pulling the flounces off. There were so many tattoos and piercings and hair frizzed out and dyed improbable colors. . . . Well, she supposed she should have expected it. She’d watched the show half a dozen times before doing her audition tape, and then she’d watched it three or four times more before coming for this interview. She did have a vague idea of what was going on in this place. She’d made sure, though, not to have more than a vague idea. That was part of the point.

The room she was sitting in was pink. The girls she was sharing it with were all nervous. Grace wasn’t nervous at all. She did feel a little sorry for one blond girl sitting in a corner chair, hunched down as if she were about to die. As for the rest of them, Grace didn’t know what to say. There was one standing there in the middle of the room looking like Andy Warhol with gangrene, a big neon lime green streak in her white blond hair—where did they come up with these things, really? Did they expect to get jobs someday, jobs that weren’t just clerking in a convenience store or tending bar in the kind of place where people had fights with bottles? Maybe they didn’t. Most of them weren’t in school. Grace had already figured that out.

The blond girl with the green streak was talking to the company at large, as if she’d been hired to deliver a lecture.

“They say they don’t like bitchiness, but it isn’t true,” she said. “They’re always looking for at least one bitch. They want a good season. They want people to watch. You need a good bitch for that.”

“They’ll take that awful girl who stepped on my ankle,” somebody in one of the seats said. “I wish they’d make this all faster. I’m so nervous, I’m going to pee myself.”

“They won’t take you if you spend all your time cussing,” another girl in another seat said. “They don’t want to have to bleep out every word you say. There was that girl from California and it was like all she could say was, um—”

“The ‘f’ word,” yet somebody else said.

“They can’t hurry too much,” the blond girl with the green streak said. “They want you to meet all the judges. And, you know, I don’t think it’s a good sign if you’re in and out of the interview in a minute and a half.”

“Oh, God,” the first of the girls in the chairs said.

The door to their room opened and a young woman with a clipboard stepped in. She wasn’t the important woman who’d come by at first to make sure none of them had been allowed to keep their cell phones. Grace had been sort of impressed with that woman. This was somebody unimportant. She looked frazzled.

She looked down at her clipboard and frowned. “Grace,” she said. “Grace Al . . .”

“Alsop,” Grace said.

“That’s it,” the young woman with the clipboard said. “Would you come with me?”

Grace couldn’t have been more relieved. She wasn’t sure what happened to girls when somebody with a clipboard came to fetch them, but she knew they didn’t come back to the room, at least not right away. Two of them had already disappeared from the pink room.

The young woman was holding the door to the hallway open. Grace went through it and looked around. The hallways and the lobby here reminded her of an old movie theater back in Connecticut. Years and years ago, it had been a vaudeville theater, and now it was barely hanging on with competition from the multiplexes at the Danbury Fair Mall.

“It’s just along here,” the young woman said. “You’ll have to wait for a minute at the door. They don’t like dead air, if you know what I mean, so we have to get it all set up in advance.”

They passed through a set of doors that led into the ballroom proper, but from the side, so that they didn’t have to pass through the lobby. Grace was curious. Was there a reason they weren’t supposed to see each other? There were canvas curtains hung all across the ballroom. She could hear the murmur of voices coming from one end. The young woman with the clipboard made her sit in a row of chairs all the way on the other side of the room.