Wanting Sheila Dead(80)

Mary-Louise’s dress had a ruffle thing around the neck and down the front, and then it sort of flounced. This was very common at home, but here, nobody wore dresses like that. Here, they wore dresses like the one Alida had put on, very sleek, and monocolored, and cut high on the leg. Of course, Mary-Louise’s dress was also cut high on the leg, but the skirt was so wide and swishy it looked as if it were going to fly up into the air with the first wind. It was a good thing she had no intention of going commando.

Mary-Louise leaned very close to the mirror, as close as she could get. She thought she was wearing too much eye shadow. She wondered if she had time to take it off and put on some that was less . . . obvious. She thought of the girls in her town in their prom dresses. The prom dresses were almost always made out of chiffon, and they always flounced, and the girls always wore their hair twisted up high on their heads and hairsprayed into sculpture.

Mary-Louise thought she was wearing too much lipstick, too. She ran her tongue over her lips. It didn’t help.

Alida had come up behind her, looking annoyed. “So,” she said, “I don’t see what any of you accomplished. You went crawling through the air ducts, or wherever it was—”

“It wasn’t anything like that,” Mary-Louise said. “It was just a little attic kind of place, except part of it had a really low ceiling.”

“I don’t care what it was,” Alida said. “You did it. You were up all night. And what was the point? You didn’t get any information that I could see. And you all could have been thrown out of here on your ears.”

“Ivy is right,” Mary-Louise said. “They wouldn’t throw that many of us out at once. They couldn’t do that and still film the whole show. It would cost them too much money.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alida said. “You listen to Ivy and you think she knows something. They could have slated you all for elimination right on the spot and taken a few weeks to do it. Why not? None of you get it. It’s really pathetic. You all think this is the Girl Scouts or something.”

Mary-Louise had, in fact, been a Girl Scout. She didn’t know whether this would be considered normal or stupid by the girls in the house. She hadn’t thought about mentioning it before now. She sat back on the vanity chair with its rickety wire backing and started to gather up her things.

“I can’t believe you’re going out like that,” Alida said.

“It’s the best dress I own.”

“And you didn’t think about getting anything special for the show? It’s a show. You’re trying to play a part. You’re not really being yourself, no matter what they say in the interviews.”

“There wasn’t any time to buy any clothes,” Mary-Louise said. “We got to casting, then we got put in the top thirty, then that got pared down to twenty, then that got pared down to fourteen, and then we came here. All in one day. I don’t even know if there were any stores where we were.”

“I don’t mean you should have bought a dress after casting,” Alida said. “I mean you should have bought some things before you ever came out here. You should have at least considered the possibility that you’d end up in the house and come prepared.”

“I think it’s a very bad thing to assume you’re going to win something like that,” Mary-Louise said. “There were hundreds of girls trying out. How could I know I was going to get into the house?”

“Honestly,” Alida said. She backed away from the mirror. Mary-Louise had to admit that Alida looked very nice, almost wonderful. She was all lines and angles anyway, and the short black dress that didn’t look like it was much of anything when it was on the hanger, just straight lines and arm and neck holes—Well, Mary-Louise thought, it did look wonderful on.

“Sheila Dunham’s prowling around in the hallways,” Alida said. “She’s going to pounce on us and try to make us lose our cool. She’s a joke, really. If she hadn’t done this, she wouldn’t have any career left at all.”

Mary-Louise did not think that Sheila Dunham was a joke. She thought about being eliminated from the last challenge and blushed.

“The spying wasn’t for nothing,” she said. “I mean, we did find out a few things. We found out that the show was going to go on filming in spite of everything. And we did hear that the police hadn’t found the gun. I wonder if the gun is still in the house somewhere. They searched practically the whole place. I wonder if somebody has the gun and, you know.”