by Jane Haddam
The surge could not have come from directly behind them. There wasn’t much of anything directly behind them. There was still a surge. Coraline felt herself pitching sideways, against Linda Kowalski’s back. Shari Bernstein caught her so that she didn’t fall.
“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.
“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.
“It’s the wrong thing for you,” Dennis had said, over and over again. “You don’t belong with those people. It’s like you want to change into one of the pod people. You’re going to start going on about world peace—”
“Of course I’m not going to start to go on about world peace,” Ivy had said.
“—And about helping other people,” Dennis had continued. “You know how those people talk. How all they really want, besides world peace, is to help other people. We talked about it. We agreed. It’s stupid.
“Of course it’s stupid,” Ivy had said, but then her mind had wandered, and she had known that Dennis had noticed it. It wasn’t that she had changed her mind about the pod people. It was just that she didn’t necessarily want to spend her life holed up in an emotional bunker, keeping the world at bay by looking as weird as possible and talking in a code nobody but other geeks could understand.
By the time the woman had come to take her cell phone, Ivy had been ready to hang up on Dennis and turn the damned thing off. The only thing stopping her was the knowledge that she would surely have to go back home someday. She didn’t want the scene she knew would come if Dennis got her voice mail every time he tried to reach her.
The woman who had come to take their phones was holding back the canvas flap. Ivy stepped into the little interview area and looked down the table at the judges. She knew all the judges. At home, they watched the show and threw popcorn at the screen when something really stupid came on.
The judge in the middle was Sheila Dunham herself. Ivy thought she was trying to look fierce. What she actually looked like was . . . desperate.
Somebody cleared his throat. It was one of the men. Ivy wasn’t sure which one. If she’d had to guess, she would have said Pete Waldheim. The other two of the men were gay.
Sheila ruffled the papers in front of her and ran a hand through her thick black hair. Her face had the hard angles of someone who’d had too many lifts after taking too many drugs. Her mouth was the mouth of a world-class bitch.
“So,” she said, “tell us something about yourself.”
Ivy put her hands behind her back. “My name is Ivy Demari. It used to be Demaris, but my father changed it—”
“Your father changed it?” one of the men said. That was Johnny Rell. He was the gay guy who practically screamed gay. The other one, Mark Borodine, you only knew was gay because he said so.
“My father changed it,” Ivy said.
“Why?” Mark asked.
“I don’t know,” Ivy said. “I was a baby at the time.”
“Do you think he was trying to hide something?” Sheila said. “Had he been in jail? Was he covering up for something he did?”
“It wasn’t much of a change,” Ivy pointed out. “If he was covering something up, he’d have changed it to Smith or Petrelli or something, I think.”
The only other woman was Deedee Plant. Ivy was not old enough to remember when any of Deedee’s television series had been on the air in real time, but she’d seen all of them anyway. The Family Tree, that was one of them, about a family whose last name was Tree and there were seven children. Everybody had terribly serious teenaged problems, like whether people liked them or what they were going to do if they didn’t get a date for the prom.
Deedee Plant was leaning in and staring. “Is that a real tattoo on your neck,” she said, “or one of those temporary ones?”
“It’s a real one,” Ivy said.
“Do you have a lot of those,” Deedee asked, “you know, all over your body?”
“I have a few,” Ivy said.
“Where?” Sheila asked.
“Well,” Ivy said, “I’ve got one in the small of my back that’s a picture of the one ring that binds them . . .”
“Star Wars,” Sheila said.
“Lord of the Rings,” Ivy said. “It’s J. R. R. Tolkien. He’s—”
“Where are you from?” Sheila asked.
They weren’t really like questions anymore. They were more like demands. It was very stuffy in here, and very hot. Ivy thought she was sweating. She knew she was having trouble trying to breathe.
“I’m from Dallas,” she said.
Suddenly, Sheila Dunham was leaning so far forward, she was nearly climbing over the table.
“Dallas,” she said. “That’s where they tried to kill Kennedy. They did kill Kennedy. He died. I’ve seen the pictures. Are you a racist?”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what they’ve got down there in Dallas,” Sheila said. “Racists. That’s why they killed Kennedy. They didn’t like it that he gave all those rights to black people. Are you a racist? Do you think racists should be superstars?”
“Well,” Ivy said, and suddenly it was no trouble at all to breathe. Everything was perfectly fine. “I do have an irrational revulsion against all Romulans. But I don’t think it’s likely to come up on America’s Next Superstar.”
“What the hell is a Romulan?” Sheila demanded.
Pete Waldheim was smirking. “It’s an alien race. From the Star Trek series. It’s—”
“Illegal aliens?” Sheila demanded.
“Aliens from space,” Pete said again.
“Christ,” Sheila said. “What do you think you’re doing? Are you wasting our time? Because, let me tell you, we’ve got a lot of people out there who’d like to be where you are now. They didn’t get invited to these interviews.”
Ivy wanted to point out that lots of people had been invited to these interviews, hundreds of them. She’d just spent several hours standing in line with them.
“I’m not going to put up with racists on my show, no matter what kind of racists they are,” Sheila said. “I’m not going to put up with fag haters, either. Are you a fag hater?”
Johnny Rell was wincing. Mark Borodine was staring at the ceiling.
Ivy said, “I’m not a fag hater, but I understand why it is everybody keeps expecting you to turn up dead.”
8
Alida Akido had been feeling confident all morning, even when she was standing out there in the rain at the back of that God-awful line. It was easy to see, just by looking around a little, that there were almost no other Asian girls trying out for this cycle. They dotted the crowd like separate little miracles. They were also completely impossible. One of
them was Korean, so Korean that her face was as flat and ugly as a pancake with acne. One of the others was that Asian-indeterminate that spelled mixed ancestry with a white person, or maybe even worse. Alida had never understood the mania Americans had with pretending that race didn’t matter. Of course race mattered. Race said everything you needed to know about a person, at least as it applied to people in any of the other races. You saw that very clearly in Japan.
The panel at the front of the room was all trying to look encouraging, except for Sheila Dunham, who always looked sour. Alida stood very straight and waited, patiently. There was something about the girls she’d been seeing all day. None of them could be patient. None of them could be calm. They were all jumping and hopping all over the place.
“So,” the one called Deedee Plant said, “your grandparents were in a Japanese internment camp in World War II—”
“My great-grandparents,” Alida said.
“What?” Deedee said.
“My great-grandparents,” Alida said again. “I’m only nineteen. It was a long time ago.”
“Your great-grandparents,” Deedee said.
Pete Waldheim leaned in and tried to look aggressive. Alida nearly giggled.
“I think the point here,” he said, “is that we’d like to know if you knew these people. These great-grandparents. The ones who were in the internment camp.”
“I knew my great-grandmother a little,” Alida said. “She died when I was six. My great-grandfather died before I was born.”
“Your mother died, too, didn’t she?” Sheila Dunham said.
Alida would never in her life have done anything as stupid as take a deep breath, or shift on her feet. The important thing was not to let go of your emotions, only to look as if you had. There was something else the Americans had a mania about: showing your feelings. Only idiots and savages showed their feelings on their faces, as if it didn’t matter who could see what.
Alida was counting to thirty in her head. Finally, she said, “Yes. My mother is dead. She died when I was twelve.”
