Instead, I winked at her. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” (In the episode, sinister music played in the background as I said it, but honestly, I thought it was one of my most likable moments of the season. One TikTok user agreed at least, telling her followers, “I don’t care what any of y’all say, I’d die for Jacqueline Matthis. A bitch who truly does not care. A Lady Macbeth with the Lord as her servant. QUEEN. Good for her, destroy them all.”)
Kendall rolled her eyes and turned away from me. (In her confessional, she said she knew I somehow caused it; Elodie probably straight up told her that.)
After we’d finally been dismissed from the girl chat, I’d smiled secretly to myself the whole way back to our hotel room. It hadn’t escaped Rikki’s notice.
“Andi fucked around and found out,” I explain. “She told Marcus I gloated about Hannah going home, which he saw straight through.” Something about him knowing it was bullshit made me so much more confident in my feelings toward him. “He didn’t want someone who spread lies.” I shrug.
Rikki sighs, looking over at me longingly. “He really cares about you, doesn’t he?”
I laugh, suddenly self-conscious of my own victory. “He cares about you, too. Otherwise, you wouldn’t still be here.”
“It’s not the same. We all know it’s between you and Kendall. But it’s fine.” Rikki gives me a shy smile. “Henry’s already mentioned 1 in the sun to me.”
“Rikki Ly finding love on my television this summer?” I say, feigning being overcome. “As I live and die.”
She tilts her head back, laughing in the way Rikki does everything, fully open, kind, and sharp-witted.
“Rikki,” I say, once our likely-sleep-deprived laughter dies out. “What do you even like me for anyway? No one else here can stand me.”
“I don’t know,” Rikki says, leaning back on her bed and putting her hands behind her head, stretching her body out. Then she admits, “You kind of remind me of my older sister.”
I smile, despite myself. Sometimes, taking in something that could even be read as kindness is hard for me. “What’s her name?” I ask.
“Sophie,” Rikki says then.
“How old is she?”
“She’s—uh.” Rikki swallows. “She’s dead. She died last year. She was twenty-eight.”
Normally I fret over hugging other people and I don’t know what to do when someone cries, but there’s something easy about immediately climbing into bed with Rikki and pulling her into me, us cuddling there with her crying and me holding on to her.
I never would’ve met Rikki if not for this stupid show, and I never would’ve been so close to her if this wasn’t such an absurd situation, and I find myself oddly grateful for that.
“Yeah,” Rikki says once she can talk again, the soft hair of her bun tickling my arm, “I don’t know. I felt sort of listless after she died. Like, I left school after her first stint in rehab and I never went back. I moved out to Santa Monica to be with her, and then I just never left. I teach spin and party, you know? I needed something so bad and here it was, and the show needed their token Asian girl, right?”
“That’s not what you are,” I say.
“Yeah, well.” She sniffs. “Sophie didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of her, like you, but I think maybe it did actually get under her skin. Sometimes, I wonder if she was so embarrassed about her addiction that she couldn’t face it. Not Sophie. Not perfect, straight-A, beautiful, Sophie Ly.”
“I’m so sorry, Rik,” I say. And I want to say I get it, but I don’t. What have my problems been in comparison with losing the person you love most in the world?
“I just see her in you, you know? The tough exterior. The marshmallow center.”
“Hey,” I answer, kissing the top of her black hair, “don’t put that evil on me.”
“You ever think you’ll write about this in one of your books?” Rikki asks me.
I snort, a sound so unladylike, we start giggling all over again. “God, you know, I thought maybe this would be inspiration or something, but instead, I think it would feel like picking a scab. There’s so much about this experience I never want to reexamine.”
“But it’s about love,” she says with a watery smile and the kind of hope you only have in your early twenties. “Just like your books.”
“Maybe,” I hedge. I prop myself up on my elbow, facing her. “I don’t even know why I started writing romance to begin with. I was never a romantic.” When she doesn’t say anything, my thoughts spill out. “You know, I think when people talk about romances, they think of them as simple: two people meet, fall in love, have a misunderstanding, and get back together at the end, right? But I think of them as so much more. Romances are about the complexities of human beings, about the way we all have a best and worst self, and they both live in the same body, and the most generous person you know can have the most toxic ideas of what a relationship is or how you can so desperately want the worst person to end up with someone perfect for them, can peel back all of their layers. I like how raw it is.”
“Is that what you told the producers?” Rikki asks.
“Nah,” I say. “I told them what they wanted to hear.”
“I’m going to buy your book when I get home,” Rikki says. “I tried to buy it at the last airport . . .” she starts, but trails off.
“Yeah, they didn’t have it. No shelf space for failures.”
“You’re not a failure,” she chides.
I am, though. I always have been. “She chooses her career,” I tell Rikki. “The main character in my first book. She chooses art instead of love. It was stupid. Everyone hated it, and I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Rikki swallows.
“I always get it wrong. Romance.” I bite my lip. “Even in fiction. Then I tried to fix it in book two and no one cared anymore.”
“You and Marcus are going to get married,” she says. “I can see it when he looks at you. You are romance.”
I give her an affectionate smile. “I wouldn’t have survived this far without you,” I tell her.
“I know,” she mutters into my skin, and I laugh.
We fall asleep like that, twined together, the way I imagine sisters do. I keep thinking about how I’d built up my life to be this great tragedy of millennial ennui and thought of the other girls as simple influencers, desperate failed models, and actresses on the prowl, but here was Rikki, a person with so much more to run from than me, and she was doing it without leaving utter destruction in her wake.
I’d kill to be magnetic like Rikki without hurting everyone around me.
