“Something like that,” I agree.
“You’re tough,” she says.
I chew on that for a minute, still surface-level smoking my cigarette. “You don’t really know anything about me,” I say.
She barks out a laugh. “No,” she says, eyeing me. “Just that you don’t know how to smoke.”
My eyebrow goes up and I half smile. “How’d you get into this?” I ask her.
“I wanted,” she says, tilting her head over as she looks at me with a hint of irony, “to be a writer. It’s what I went to school for.”
“Ah,” I say, not really knowing what to say.
“What did you go to school for?” she asks me.
“Advertising,” I say with a self-deprecating grin. “Didn’t think I’d ever make enough money to be a writer, full-time. In some ways, I was right.” I ash my wasted cigarette against the concrete behind me. “Did you ever write anything?”
“Half a screenplay,” Janelle says, “before I got hired to work on this high school reunion reality show. It was all up from there.”
“Do you like it?” I ask.
“Like it?” She smiles. “I love it.”
“Plenty of stories to tell now, I guess.”
“Something like that,” she agrees, tossing her cigarette down. “I’ll see you later, okay, Jac?”
She leaves me standing alone, staring off at the girls who hate me, staring back at me.
RIKKI IS GONE the next night, on a two-on-one with Grace-Ann, where one of them will be asked to stay and the other will be told she’s not the one, joining Andi and another waif of a girl—Miley or Missy or something like that—who was eliminated last night. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sweating that my best friend, my only friend, could be gone after tonight. It didn’t take a relationship expert to see that her connection with Marcus was thin at best, her life at twenty-two in California vastly different from his at thirty-four in Chicago.
Her saving grace is likely that Grace-Ann is dull as dishwater. (Proven by the fact that, at dinner, Rikki had too much wine and briefly fell asleep while Grace-Ann was talking, which Marcus purported to find endearing instead of absurd. Though I’ll always think him keeping Rikki was a favor to me.) I doubt, once the show airs, Grace-Ann will merit more than fifteen minutes of screen time getting whittled down to the final seven. The camera loves Rikki, and the producers do, too.
Or at least, that’s what Charlotte told me.
She’d been in earlier, just to check in. Something about the check-in made me bristle, like I’d known there was an ulterior motive (I always suspected there was) but been unable to ferret it out.
“There’s a certain inevitability,” I told her, “to all the relationships here, isn’t there?”
She was sitting on Rikki’s bed opposite me and tilted her head to the side, not skeptically but genuinely curious. “What do you mean?”
“Well, obviously you, me, and everyone else know Marcus and Rikki won’t be getting married. And, like, come on, I knew Shailene was picking Bentley last season. I know you guys knew. And yet, you have to convince each of us that Marcus is in love with us, and we know deep down he’s not, right? It’s all about the story we’re telling ourselves, what we want to believe. You’re just enablers.”
Charlotte smiled gently. “And what do you want to believe, Jac?”
That I’m not a piece of shit, I don’t say. Instead, “I want to believe in the fairy tale. That’s why I write romance books. There’s a missing chip in my head that’s supposed to make me want to be the heroine in romance books, but I can’t so I write them instead, looking for myself.”
“I guess so,” Charlotte said after a minute.
Charlotte noticed I had bought five books (one each by Mhairi McFarlane, Bora Chung, Robinne Lee, Kiley Reid, and Adrienne Brodeur) at the last airport we were at but didn’t try to confiscate them, for which I was grateful. Maybe her pregnancy was making her soft.
I am reading one of those books right now—one, per the back cover, enthusiastically recommended by an author I used to run into in New York publishing circles, who could never be bothered with remembering my name, no matter how many times we met. I had the fatal flaw of not being successful or likable enough.
I’d seen Henry pulling Aaliyah and Kendall into a girl chat earlier, so I knew he wasn’t on the two-on-one date. I’d started to realize that the whole setup of the producers this season seemed to aim to keep Henry and Marcus out of each other’s eyesight, which made a certain kind of sense. I wondered if Marcus had been the real reason Henry didn’t want to come back to the 1 this year, as he clearly had no problem with any of the other heinous shit he did on a daily basis.
What had Marcus done that so offended Henry’s delicate sensibilities?
I have a glass of wine and a lot of time to kill. I go to the bathroom, put on a face mask, and as I’m making my way back to my bed, I notice a binder shoved in the side of the entertainment center where a television would be had it not been removed before we arrived. It’s pushed way into the back, almost suspiciously far into the back.
I remember the binder. Charlotte had been carrying it when she came into the room. Suspicious, I pull it out and look at the cover.
the 1 Season 32
The thing is, I know I will hate whatever this is. Know I will hate it deep down in my bones, the way you send an angry email and dread seeing the reply. I open it up anyway.
First, there is a shooting schedule, some notes written on it. Cancun. Paris. Saint-Étienne-Vallée-Française. Hotels scratched out, hometown locations jotted down, rental companies listed. It is both unsettling and an inevitability that I see my parents’ address written in what I assume is Charlotte’s sloppy handwriting.
The next section is room numbers for all the contestants and producers, plus the crew members, who mostly appear to be staying in a nearby, not-quite-as-nice hotel.
Then I reach the real meat of the binder. Pages on each of the contestants. Charlotte has meticulously combed through and put giant red X’s on anyone who has been eliminated. Her notes are scattered though, scribbled around the margins of the papers, which have our basic bio info laid out next to a small picture of each of us in the upper left-hand corner.
Someone—the handwriting doesn’t match Charlotte’s on the other pages, so I’m not sure who—has gone through and given each girl a nickname in green marker that sits prominently on top of each page, even above our names. I ascertain that the words have been on these pages from the very beginning because each girl has one, even the girls who were eliminated on night one (one aptly named CANNON FODDER). Some girls have gone through transformations with their original name written and then scratched out. Kady exchanged from THE MANIPULATIVE INFLUENCER to THE HEART—based on what I assumed I’d find out when the show aired in a couple of months. Rikki has undergone several changes from THE DRUNK ONE to THE WEEPY ONE back to THE DRUNK ONE.
And then, there is me. My title hasn’t changed since the first night apparently.
THE CUNT
I sit with that for a long time, skimming down the page to see what other notes have been included. Drinks too much. That seems a bit unfair since everyone drinks too much on the production, but I’ll take it. Petty. Probably. Whatever. Superiority complex. Fuck, goddammit. Fuck. I spent so much of my life trying not to know what people thought about me and yet here it is. Here’s what everyone thinks about me.
