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her perfume, which is like oranges if oranges were mostly made out of metal.
    â€œI’m going to need you all to pay attention to the rundown because I will open a wrist if I have to repeat it. Dress rehearsals are on Tuesdays. Live PST performance show is on Wednesday nights. Live eliminations on Friday nights. Do you know what it means that they’ve put us on Friday nights for a limited run? Hint: Friday night is the anus of the television week. It means we’re plugging a hole until the network unfurls its new awkward genius crime solver. Do you know what that means? It means viewership expectations aren’t very high. And what does that mean for me? It means I could really shine.”
    When she says “shine,” she separates her hands like she’s accepting rays of light from heaven.
    â€œBright like a diamond. But back to the schedule. Mondays through Wednesdays will be your heaviest days of scene tapings.”
    The show’s casting notice originally caught my mom’s eye because the new idea behind Spotlight is that it’s part singing competition and part reality soap opera. On the live shows, our performances will only take up half the hour. The other half will be scenes of us bonding and having fights. I’m more nervous about whether I’m going to bond than I am about getting up onstage and singing.
    â€œYou will know when the cameras are in the house,” Catherine says. “These periods will be limited, and you will not be taped without warning, because some of you are considered children, and I will have the child labor people deep in my Friday-night anus if they think I have kids on tape around the clock.”
    â€œThe ladies don’t think I’m a child,” says McKinley, the youngest on the show. He’s fourteen. His angelic mom, Shannon, is with him, and she keeps on fixing the curl that’s supposed to fall over his right eye. (It wants to go straight down the middle.)
    McKinley also has this habit of winking if anybody calls him by name. When a PA was taking roll to make sure that everyone made it over here from the hotel, the rest of the contestants said, “Here,” but McKinley just winked while the PA was looking at her clipboard, so for a second she got scared we’d lost him.
    â€œI don’t think the sixth graders commenting on YouTube are ladies,” Catherine says. Then she continues, squinting one eye as she asks, “Are these scenes going to be real?” as if this is a really tough question coming from someone else. “Mooooostly. We’re not going to invent story lines out of thin air, like a cancer scare, for instance. But there will be gentle guidance so we end up with something to use. And all that means is say if you, Dillon—”
    She gestures to Dillon, who’s twenty and comes out of some pretty big Midwestern Jewish temple where he sings rock songs, except he just swaps out lyrics about boyfriends or girlfriends for God. On the van from the hotel, he told us he got into rock singing when his temple decided to try to compete with all the local mega churches, but before that he’d personally been more into rap. The thing is, he looks a lot like Jesus.
    â€œHappened to get into a fight with Belinda—”
    To Dillon’s right is Belinda, twenty-one, who definitely looks like a hippie on the outside, but then when you make eye contact with her, you’re not so sure there’s a hippie on the inside too. There’s something sharp behind her pupils that’s especially surprising after you first take in her long, flowing skirt with tiny bells and her long, flowing hair. The color of her hair is so soft, it’s almost peach.
    I used to go to Disneyland all the time as a kid, and often you’d see the same eye thing in the women they hired to dress up as the princesses. They would kneel down next to you (well, it was more like they’d kneel down near you