MARISSA: I know people don’t want to hear it, and aren’t going to act differently, but y’all leave that girl alone online. She’s already going through it.
JULIA: I can only imagine the kind of hate contestants get.
MARISSA: No need to imagine, happy to show you my inbox. All part of the fun of being the first Black lead.
JULIA: Disgusting behavior.
MARISSA: I’m used to it at this point.
MARISSA: But I can tell you from watching the episode previews for the next couple of weeks, it’s all downhill from here.
Cancun
17
Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off
Cancun is so sunny, I wonder if it’s going to make me sick. At least in cold, rainy Chicago, being locked away all the time hadn’t felt so unnatural. Now, being stuffed inside a dark room to interview for hours and then trotted out like a prized pony felt even more dystopian.
We get there, and the remaining five of us are forced into our bathing suits, each pulled one by one to walk up and down the beach filming B-roll. As instructed, I stare out into the sun, the wind whipping my hair, then I stare into the camera, the hot sun on my exposed skin. This suit is green with an elaborate top of interwoven fabric across my breasts that is slightly too tight, a present in our gift bag from when we arrived. The beach is empty in the space production has cleared out, save for me and the crew. I can imagine how it might be peaceful in another life, but instead it is endless and exhausting.
“You don’t really look wistful enough,” Henry says, but he’s laughing. With a straight face, I flip him off and turn away from him again, trying out a different angle for the camera. Several of the crew members cackle and whistle. But I don’t give them what they want, what would make them feel better. I don’t smile.
“You aren’t making any friends,” Elodie tells me when she comes to adjust my hair and re-tie my bikini string.
“Good,” I answer.
“You’re not here to make friends,” she says, smiling at me.
“Please, don’t try to cheer me up,” I tell her. “I’m tired, I’m grumpy, I’m over it.”
“This is the part of the season when everyone hits that point. You look really good, if it’s any consolation?”
“Of course,” I say. “I starved myself for three months, got ‘tasteful’ Botox, waxed all the hair off my body, cleared out every bad picture of me from social media ever, and now I get to look great in a bikini in a place where no one cares. This is thrilling.”
“The important thing is that you have a good attitude,” Elodie says without missing a beat. “Now smile,” she says, giving me her own bright smile as she goes over to stand next to Henry. They immediately start whispering to each other, and for some reason, that only makes my despair grow.
We finish shooting the B-roll, and I get shuttled back to the house we’re staying in, a shared villa a short walk from the ocean, still sleeping two to a room so that the remaining bedrooms can be transformed into ITM rooms and spots for girl chats. It’s there that I start to feel the walls closing in on the tiny bedroom decorated with kitschy beach paintings. Time contracts and expands in on itself, and still, I don’t know what I want. I don’t have Henry and I don’t really have Marcus. I open my books and stare at them blankly. I try to write in my head, all the things I can’t admit out loud, but I keep losing the thread.
I’m putting on makeup because the day is not over. I’ve developed some sort of tremor in my hands, I think, but I’m not sure because I’m tired. I just keep styling my hair and applying eyeliner, and some stranger stares back at me in the mirror.
(I could’ve chosen right then to quit. They probably would’ve let me, and I should’ve let myself, but I chose to keep going. I was in a hole and I kept digging.)
After, we’re sitting around playing cards when the first date card of Mexico arrives. Kendall begins reading it, and I’m shocked to hear my name called out.
“‘Jac,’” Kendall says. “‘Our relationship is climbing to new heights.’” She sets the date card down. “Again.”
Immediately, I look to Rikki, who had been hoping to get her first one-on-one, but she’s just smiling sadly over at me.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell her.
She shrugs, the easy way she does. “It’s not your fault,” she tells me.
I look over at Henry, and of course, he’s looking at me.
He averts his gaze and doesn’t speak; Shae tells him something and he laughs, the fake way he does.
“Jac?” Rikki says, and I look over at her. She’s watching me curiously.
I get up. “I guess I better go get ready.”
MARCUS AND I take a Jeep through a mountainous area a few hours outside of Cancun. We drive across dirt roads, talking and laughing when we can over the noise of the road, Marcus touching my thigh every now and then in between shifting gears. Every time he does it, my brain practically short-circuits. I feel desperate for someone to be tender with me, someone to care for me in an uncomplicated way, and Marcus’s touch still triggers that. Maybe this is what my life should be—living like other girls do with fake hair and buffed skin, malnourished, but looking beautiful and light and easy. Maybe Henry is just me falling back into my old, terrible ways, late-night pizza and too much bourbon and smart, unavailable men.
Neither really sounds like a winning scenario in my head, but I at least know what kind of destruction the latter wrought on my life.
At the end of the dirt road, we get out and head toward a hiking path. Janelle carefully outlines the route to us at the start of the trail. As she tucks the map back into her leggings, she says cheerfully, “The good news is, we haven’t lost a lead yet.”
“At least we know that if we go out, you’re going with us,” I say, and Janelle looks like she takes that as a threat. I wish it had been.
Marcus and I start up the path, and he immediately grabs my hand. It’s a little hot for that, but I allow him to pull me along, admiring the muscles of his arms and calves in his hiking gear. I’m happy to be outside, in the air, doing something that feels like real, useful work. I’m moving my own body, sweating in a way that makes me feel real again, even surrounded by crew members.
I say so to Marcus.
“I know,” Marcus says in return. “I hated how regulated my workouts were as a contestant. ‘You have forty minutes in the hotel gym.’ Couldn’t even get all my reps in on those schedules.” He’s right. We’d been free to do whatever we wanted at the mansion, out by the pool, but that had changed once we’d gone to Chicago.
“It’s more than that, though, right?” I say lightly. Like I so often do, I sense Henry’s eyes on me. He’s around so much more than he was at the beginning of filming, with Charlotte gone, and it gets under my skin, always knowing he’s there. Always feeling him observing me and wondering what that means, even though I know his job is to observe me. “Like, part of being a contestant is feeling like your personhood has been taken away. But out here, where we can breathe air and work our muscles to achieve a goal, it’s beyond working out, right? It’s feeling like yourself in your own body; it’s autonomy. That’s different. That’s freedom.”
Marcus laughs. “Sometimes, I worry you’re too deep for me.”
