by Jane Haddam
Andra put the paper up over her head again. She was soaked through and shivering. She wished she could afford a cell phone. But then, there was no point in calling her mother. Her mother would have found a way to get high. She’d be lying on the living room floor because she’d just sold all the furniture again. Or she’d be five blocks away at somebody’s house. Or she’d be staggering along the street as if she were one of the living dead. She’d be somewhere.
Even so, Andra thought, it would be good to have a phone, so that she could check in, or ask somebody else to check. Assuming she knew anybody with a working phone.
Up at the head of the line, the doors began to open.
4
Mary-Louise Verdt had been the first person to stand in line this morning, at just after six o’clock, and she would have been earlier if she had been easy in her mind about staying out on the street here after dark. She’d heard the girls behind her talking. She’d even talked to some of them. By now, she knew she wasn’t even in the city of Philadelphia proper. It felt wrong to her for the producers of the show to be doing what they were doing. If the show was going to be called America’s Next Superstar—Philadelphia, then it ought to be in Philadelphia, and not someplace else, no matter how close.
When the doors opened, Mary-Louise was still first in line, in spite of the doubling up and the pushing and shoving and rain. There had been a lot of rain. Mary-Louise was glad to be out of it, stepping through the doors into a wide lobby with what looked like velour on the floor and the walls. It reminded her of the lobby in that movie theater in the Jim Carrey movie, The Majestic. She hadn’t much liked that movie. She liked movies where people went through a lot of funny troubles and then got married.
There was a long table right in the middle of everything. There were four women at the table, each holding a clipboard, with little signs in front of them that said A TO D, E TO H. Mary-Louise found the one at the very end, U TO Z, and went there. The woman at the clipboard looked a little hassled. The lobby was dark and damp and humid. Mary-Louise put on her brightest smile, but the woman with the clipboard didn’t notice it.
“Your name is . . . ,” the woman said.
“Verdt,” Mary-Louise said. “Mary-Louise Verdt.”
“And you’re from?”
“Holcomb, Kansas.”
The woman with the clipboard didn’t react. It made Mary-Louise a little annoyed. Almost everybody reacted to that “Holcomb, Kansas,” or at least everyone at home did. One of the most famous murders in the history of America had happened there. People still talked about it.
“Do you have your letter?” the woman with the clipboard said.
Mary-Louise reached into her oversized purse and got the letter, still in its envelope, from the little side compartment where she always kept her phone. She handed it over, and then she couldn’t help herself.
“This is the biggest thing, back home where I’m from,” she said. “I mean, it was even in the paper. Just my getting the chance to come in and interview. But I just knew I’d get the chance to come in and interview. I know I’m going to get to be on the show, too. You’ve got to really want things, do you know what I mean? You’ve got to really want them. That’s the only way anybody ever gets anywhere. And I really want this.”
She might as well have been talking to a statue. The woman with the clipboard was not paying attention. She read through the letter for, what felt like to Mary-Louise, the third time. Then she handed the letter back and pointed to the right.
“Through those doors,” she said, “you’ll find a corridor and a series of rooms. You go to the blue one. It’s painted blue. It won’t be hard to find.”
“Yes, of course,” Mary-Louise said. “I’m sure I won’t have any trouble.”
“Someone will come in and call you when it’s time for your interview. If you’re off in the bathroom or somewhere when they call you, they’ll come back in five minutes and call a second time. If you don’t answer then, either, then too bad. You go home.”
“Yes, of course,” Mary-Louise said. “I’m sure I won’t have any trouble.”
“That way.” The woman with the clipboard pointed right again.
Mary-Louise stepped away from the table. Girls were crowding in, pushing each other, but they were stopping well back from the tables. There was something intimidating about the tables. Mary-Louise had to admit it: There was something intimidating about a lot of the girls, too. She was sure she was dressed all wrong, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on why.
She went to the doors on the right. She looked across the lobby and saw that there were also doors on the left. This place was called a ballroom. Maybe they held dances here. Maybe there were dressing rooms. She had no idea.
She went through into a narrow corridor and looked around again. It was a shabby place. The carpet here was worn. The paint on the walls was faded.
The first room she came to was painted a sickly color of pink. There were already two girls in there, looking at magazines. The second room she came to was beigy-brown. It was empty, and it smelled a little bad, as if somebody had left a sandwich in the wastebasket overnight. She went farther along the hall and found it, the blue room.
Mary-Louise went in, and looked around, and put down her purse. There were windows. She went to them and tried to look out, but the only view she got was of a blank wall. She got her purse again and sat down in a big chair in the middle of everything. Then she took out her phone.
She was in the middle of calling her mother when she heard a voice from the hall that said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”
She looked up and saw a woman standing in the door, very thin and businesslike, running a hand through her hair.
“For God’s sake,” the woman said again. “You can’t have that here. Didn’t they tell you you couldn’t have that here? I don’t know what I’m going to do if they haven’t bothered to confiscate any of them.”
“Excuse me?” Mary-Louise said.
The thin woman came into the room and snatched the phone from Mary-Louise’s hand. “The phone,” she said. “You’re not allowed to have a phone. Well, a camera phone, actually, it’s the pictures she cares about, but this is a camera phone, isn’t it? Everything’s a camera phone these days.”
“Excuse me,” Mary-Louise said again. “It’s a very expensive phone. My boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday.”
“I don’t care if the pope gave it to you,” the thin woman said. “You’re not allowed to have camera phones in here, and you’re not allowed to have them at all during the competition.” She reached into the pocket of her jacket and came up with a small pad of Post-it Notes. “What’s your name?”
“Mary-Louise Verdt,” Mary-Louise said. “But—”
“You’ll get it back when you leave,” the thin woman said. “Honestly, I can’t believe they didn’t remember this. I hope all of them haven’t forgotten it. You said your name was Word?”
“Verdt,” Mary-Louise said. “V. E. R. D. T.”
“Right,” the thin woman scribbled something on the Post-it Note and stuck it to Mary-Louise’s phone. The woman’s hair seemed to have wired out and gone crazy in just the minute or so she’d been in the blue room.
Mary-Louise was wondering if she should make one more protest about the phone when another girl came up to the door, smiled faintly at the thin woman, and tried to squeeze in. She was a very unusual-looking girl. She was wearing almost nothing but leather, and she had seven piercings in the left side of her nose alone.
“What about you?” the thin woman asked. “Do you have a phone?”
The new girl looked confused. “Yes, of course I have a phone. Do you need to use it for something? I mean, I’m sure—”
“Show it to me.”
The new girl reached into an oversized purse that was very much like the one Mary-Louise had, and came up with a Samsung Propel.
The thin woman rolled her eyes. “For God’s sake,” she said. “You’re not all
owed to have a phone.”
Then she took the phone, brought out the pad of Post-it Notes, and demanded that the new girl deliver her name. Mary-Louise didn’t really hear it. Everything was happening so fast, and the thin woman seemed to be angry.
“I’ve got to go out and stop them before they do more of this,” the thin woman said. “Then I’ve got to get people to confiscate all the phones. This is a complete load of crap. It’s going to hold us up for half an hour.”
Mary-Louise tried to think of something to say, but nothing came to her. Then the thin woman was gone. She’d left the door open, so that Mary-Louise and the new girl could look out into the corridor where girls were arriving from the lobby, all of them looking insecure.
“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.”
“Everybody does know where Scarsdale is,” Shari said.
“I’m about ready to pop,” Linda said. “I can’t believe they left us standing out here in the rain. And I’ve got a million rosaries on me, and I’ll bet all of them are wet.”
“You didn’t look to me like the kind of person who would be carrying around rosaries,” Shari said.
“My mother gave them to me,” Linda said. “She wants me to win. But it’s no big deal. I mean, it’s not like you can’t have a tattoo here and there, and still be a good Catholic. I don’t have tattoos of the devil or anything. It’s just a snake.”
“It’s a snake the size of a swimming pool,” Shari said. “And I’ll bet you got it some night when you were out drinking. I make it a point only to drink when I’m safe in my own home. When I go out, I stick to one rum and Coke, or a glass of wine. You never know what’s going to happen to you when you go out.”
“That’s just because you don’t have advantages,” Linda said. “You blow a gasket some weekend and what happens? You go to temple and feel guilty. I go to confession and get it all taken care of, and then I’m on my way.”
“It won’t help you much if you end up with a warthog tattooed on your ass next time.”
Coraline looked up toward the head of the line. She really could see it now, and she could see that they were letting girls in one by one, or more like five by five. They were letting them in, in little clumps, at any rate. There was somebody with a clipboard.
Coraline was very cold, and she was wet in spite of the umbrella. There was a lot of wind. Rain kept slashing against her legs, and she had nothing on her legs but stockings. She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to think. It was all very well for Pastor Thomas to talk about what an influence she could be, and how much the world needed the example of a good Christian girl. How did he know what she would be like when she got away from home and around people who weren’t even Christians at all, or didn’t like them? She had heard that Sheila Dunham didn’t like Christians, and Sheila Dunham was running this whole show.
Besides, even people in the media who were in parts of the country who did like Christians went wrong. Think about Nashville. Country-music singers were always talking about how much they loved Jesus, and yet they ran around drinking themselves to death, and taking drugs, and sleeping with people they weren’t even married to or . . . well, or anything. There was something that went wrong when people got famous. Coraline was sure of that.
“Hey,” Linda Kowalski said. “You know, I think you’ve probably got a good chance to get on the show.”
“Excuse me?” Coraline said.
“I think you’ve got a good chance to get on the show,” Linda said again. “I mean, you must be pra
ctically the only person here from Alabama—”
“People get on this show from the South,” Coraline said quickly. “There was a girl just the season before last who was from Mississippi.”
Coraline didn’t know this from her own experience. Her mother had told her about it. Her mother watched the show every single week it was on, and she watched the extras and specials where they interviewed winners and contestants and talked about what they were doing now. Coraline’s mother thought it was absolutely the most wonderful thing in the world that Coraline was going to try out for this show.
“Pastor Thomas is right,” Mama said. “The world could use the example of a good Christian girl. Besides, honey, you’re the prettiest girl in this town and a hundred more like it. You’re prettier than Miranda ever could be. That has to count for something.”
Coraline didn’t know what counted for what, and she didn’t care. She had figured it out. Rosaries meant Catholic—Linda Kowalski was Catholic. And temple meant Jews. Shari Bernstein was a Jew. There was a Catholic church back in Southport, a really tiny one, but Coraline had never met any of the people who went there. She had never met a Jewish person at all. Her throat felt very tight. She thought she was going to cry.
“For God’s sake,” Shari said. “She’s just about ready to collapse. You’re scaring the hell out of her.”
“Oh, no,” Coraline said. “No, really. I’m just nervous. I’ll be all right in a minute—”
