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to be a thoughtful way, a way that indicates anything but that she’s freaking out, a way that says, I think thoughtful things , a way that says she’s interesting. The guys leave applications with each of the girls and tell them that if they’re interested in auditioning they should show up at this time and place the following week with the completed application and a headshot. Do we need to, like, prepare a monologue or something? Priscilla asks, immediately sure it is the dumbest question ever asked in, like, the history of dumb questions.
    Before we proceed, we should probably mention that when Priscilla uses the word “like”—and she uses it often—it is invariably merged with the word that came before it, forming a compound word of sorts: tolike , inlike , islike . If we didn’t know better, we might think she believed it to be a grammatical rule, and that, in her universe, the rarely used comma is reserved for sarcastic pauses only.
    The guy named Ted smiles but doesn’t laugh and says No, all you have to do is just be yourself . Priscilla is over the moon. She is so good at that. She is going to spend all weekend practicing being herself.
    Ted and the other guy leave and the girls agree that the time has come to go shopping, that for this auspicious occasion they will need new outfits. Priscilla gets a 50 percent discount at Express, where she works, so they head there first. It’s not Priscilla’s favorite store by a lot (her taste runs to pricier brands), so she buys and wears the minimum she can get by with to work there, but her friends all like it just fine, and she’s happy to let them buy stuff with her discount and show them how to wear it, which all agree she has a knack for. If you take that $19.99 knit dress , Priscilla says about an item Taylor’s looking at, and splurge on one really badass pair of knee-high boots that you can wear with everything, it’s like practically a fashion miracle. All the girls nod at Priscilla’s great truth.
     
    IN THE END, ASHLEY and Danielle won’t even show up to the audition, Taylor will, but she’s really only sort of half into it. Taylor confides this to Priscilla the day of the audition, and Priscilla is for once silently outraged—silently only because they’re in the waiting room and she does not want to call attention to herself in this way. Well then why are you even here , Priscilla whispers, to which Taylor says I dunno, I just thought I’d see . Priscilla makes a loudish huff through her nose. This is, like, her life’s dream. She’s wearing a pair of designer jeans with a tank top and a long cardigan sweater she found on sale by a designer whose name she recognized from another reality show. The only part of the outfit that isn’t brand new are her boots. The tank top by itself was sixty-eight dollars. Priscilla has put the entire cost of this outfit, minus the boots, on her credit card, adding up to almost $370, or what Priscilla might make in forty-one hours, which will take her close to a month as she only works twenty hours a week, and of course, she has been charging other things, and will charge more things, and will not be paying off this credit card anytime soon. Unless she gets this TV show. Which she will, she’s so sure.
    Taylor goes in first, is in there for ten of the longest minutes of Priscilla’s whole entire life. Have any of the other girls been in there for ten full minutes? Priscilla wishes now that she’d noticed. They’re scheduled ten minutes apart, but some of them have come out a minute or two earlier. Ugly ones, Priscilla thinks. Beasts. She looks at the photo she’s brought for them. Is this what they want? Is it too sexy? It’s not a professional headshot, it’s one that Ashley had taken of her right before a party. She had bangs then, doesn’t now, hopes it doesn’t matter but is thinking Shit, shit, what if it matters? She tries to think about something else, anything, can’t for a minute, scans the