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closed and disappeared behind it. Alida looked from girl to girl. Some girls were sitting. Some girls were standing. Some girls were all the way down on the floor.
    She’d gone about halfway around the room when she finally noticed the black girl, and then it was all she could do not to make a face. It wasn’t just a black girl. It was a black girl with a bright red Afro that looked like a Brillo pad in the electric chair. It was a black girl with “ghetto” screaming out all over her.
    And it didn’t help that Alida knew that both she and the black girl were in this room for the very same reason—because
America’s Next Superstar
didn’t want to look like it was prejudiced.
    Alida shrugged slightly, and then turned away, looking for somebody to talk to who wouldn’t be an annoyance or a threat.
9
    Olivia Dahl thought she had a headache, but she wasn’t sure. She would have a headache, when all this was over, because she always did. Right now it only mattered that she kept going without hurting anyone, and especially without hurting Sheila. Executive assistantswere supposed to worship the ground their celebrity employers walked on, but Sheila wasn’t that much of a celebrity, and Olivia was from Brooklyn.
    She looked into the big room where she had put the final thirty. She counted them off. She had already made sure that there was plenty of video from the interviews. They could go through all that later and pick what they wanted to use. That was always a difficult choice to make. You wanted some losers as well as some winners. The viewers liked to second-guess the panel, and they really liked to watch the tearful exit interview with some poor girl who’d washed out completely before the game even got started. It was also important not to make everything too obvious. You didn’t want the audience to know who was going to end up in the house before the elimination that got them there.
    Olivia counted a third time—there should be thirty, there were thirty, she had to stop obsessing like this—and then retreated to the hallway outside to check on the recording equipment. There were a dozen men and women out there, carrying heavy things and tripping up everything with wires.
    â€œDon’t forget,” Olivia told one of them, “it’s like a news show, not a movie. You have to get them when they talk and it has to be clear. We don’t get to come back in and put the sound on later.”
    â€œYes,” said the man she was talking to. He looked faintly contemptuous. She blushed. Some of these people had been working with them forever. She could never remember them from one season to the next.
    â€œFine,” she said.
    She turned around to find Sheila walking in among the wires. She looked smug as hell.
    â€œDid you get that thing about whether she’d murdered her mother?” Sheila said. “That’s got to go in the final cut. Don’t you think? God, I’m beginning to like this. I thought I’d hate it when it started, but I’m beginning to like it.”
    â€œYou thought it was the end of your career,” Olivia said.
    â€œThat’s when I didn’t realize the potential,” Sheila said. “It’s gottenhuge, this reality thing. Oh, not the crap, you know, twelve people screwing one another’s spouses and voting each other off some island in the Pacific. I don’t understand why anybody watches that kind of thing. But this stuff. The competitions. They’re the biggest thing since television started.”
    â€œIf you say so,” Olivia said.
    â€œ
America’s Next Top Model
is in a hundred and thirty-two countries, did you know that? I want this to be just as big. Give us a few more seasons and we will be. It’s just a matter of striking the right balance.”
    â€œRight now it’s a matter of you remembering what you’re supposed to say in there. Please tell me