Wanting Sheila Dead(9)

“It’ll just be a minute,” the young woman with the clipboard said.

Grace looked around. The ballroom was empty. It was all very odd. A moment later, another young woman with a clipboard entered, leading a perky-looking sort of girl with her hair plastered almost entirely to her head.

“I had an umbrella,” she said, “but it didn’t seem to work after a while.”

“Too bad,” Grace said.

“I’m Mary-Louise,” the other girl said. “Mary-Louise Verdt.”

“It’s better if you don’t talk out here,” the new young woman with the clipboard said, in a whisper. “They don’t like the noise. And she gets, you know.”

The new young woman with the clipboard left, and Mary-Louise giggled.

“You hear all these stories,” Mary-Louise said, not so much whispering as speaking very loudly in a hiss. “About Sheila Dunham, I mean. That she’s crazy. That she screams at people and throws things. Do you think she’s going to do anything like that today? I’d give a lot to see it. I mean, if I didn’t get on the show, it would be something I could talk about when I got back home.”

Grace already had enough to talk about when she got back home, or back to school, which was more to the point. She looked down at her hands.

“I met a girl in line,” Mary-Louise said, “who said she’d murder somebody to get on this show. Wouldn’t that be amazing? If something like that happened? It would be on all the television stations and you’d be hearing about it forever.”

“You’d be living through it first,” Grace said.

Mary-Louise looked startled, but she didn’t have time to say anything else. The older woman with the clipboard—the one Grace thought of as important—had come out from behind the screen on the other end of the room and was advancing toward them. She had a name tag on that said MISS DAHL.

“It’s Miss Alsop I’m looking for,” she announced as she came up to them.

Way up at the other end of the room, a girl stumbled out from behind the canvas curtains. It was obvious she’d been crying.

“Never mind about that,” Miss Dahl said, because Mary-Louise was staring. “If you can’t handle the interview, you can’t handle the show. And if you can’t handle the show, you can’t handle being a celebrity. Believe me. I’ve seen it. Will you come with me, Miss Alsop? It’s right up front here.”

Grace could see where it was. She didn’t need to be told. And she wasn’t nervous, either. This was not the kind of thing she did. This was not the kind of thing anybody with any sense did. It was stupid people who went on shows like this. They had to go on shows like this. They couldn’t get the grades to get into a decent college, never mind graduate from one. They didn’t have a hope in hell of having a real career.

The space between the chairs on one end of the ballroom to the curtains on the other end was endless. It went on and on, and the longer Grace tried to make herself walk across it, the drier her mouth felt. Her head hurt. Her feet hurt worse. The shoes she was wearing seemed to have shrunk on her feet.

Miss Dahl stopped at the curtains and pulled them back. Grace could see a line of people sitting at a table with a tablecloth on it. She tried to remember who had been the judges on the shows she had watched, but her mind was blank.

“Don’t make a fuss,” Miss Dahl said. “They don’t give a damn. And she really doesn’t.”

Grace stepped through the curtains, took a deep breath, and looked around.

Sheila Dunham was the only face she recognized, and Sheila Dunham looked so triumphantly furious, Grace almost turned around and ran.





7


If there was one thing about this entire day that had made Ivy Demari really happy, it was definitely the part where that woman had come around and taken all their cell phones. Normally, Ivy liked her cell phone, as much as she liked her NDS, her PSP, and that little handheld arcade game thing her sister had given her for Christmas last year. She liked her computer and her subscription to World of Warcraft, too. Every tattoo on her body except for the butterfly on her neck had to do with World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings, and she was here to tell the world that geek girls were not necessarily fat misfits in Starfleet uniforms.

Of course, Ivy had no problem with Starfleet uniforms, either, but she did think it was a little excessive when people wore them to jury duty.

What Ivy didn’t like about her cell phone, today, was that Dennis wouldn’t stop calling her on it. He had called at least forty times while she’d been standing in line. She’d had the phone out of her pocket so often she’d begun to be afraid it would be ruined by the rain. There was a lot of rain, too. There was also wind. Ivy had never been in a hurricane, but she had begun to wonder if that was about to end. And then there was all that shoving.