For a moment, everyone is staring at me—the other girls, the camera crew and lighting crew and sound crew and producers. Then Rikki screams, “Party foul!” and everyone laughs. An assistant hurries over to clean up the broken glass.
No one is looking at me anymore. No one except him.
My palms are sweaty and my hairline is sweaty and my armpits are sweaty, which shouldn’t even be possible given the current amount of Botox in my glands. I leave the bar before I get into more trouble, and I lose sight of him, weaving through cameramen and tech and lighting crew, running headfirst into Aliana and Bonnie from my limo, who have apparently decided they are friends.
“Y’all having fun?” I ask them, and Aliana smiles wickedly.
“Not as much as you,” she tells me.
Bonnie tilts her head to the side like a confused puppy. “‘Y’all’ sounds fake when you say it.”
Great, now my Southern authenticity is being questioned. “That’s because I enunciate,” I tell her.
“Guess what Bonnie did?” Aliana says excitedly.
“I’m guessing she took off her dress and paraded around in a bikini and sash,” I answer, only clocking that I sound like a sarcastic bitch after the words leave my mouth. They both blink at me. “How’d it go?” I try again with a smile.
Ali, almost reluctantly now, says, “She looked hot as hell. Marcus was eating it up.”
“I was runner-up Miss Texas,” Bonnie says proudly, grinning. My returned smile is halfhearted, my eyes searching desperately for anyone else I can latch on to, but most of the crew is busy and the other girls are sitting in separate rooms together, paired off by the limo they arrived in. I’ve never been very good at making fast friends, and here I am marooned as usual, with my choices of who to talk to ranking from bad to worse. Then I see our last limo mate, Rikki, sitting alone in a chair, guzzling her drink. I make an excuse to the other girls and hurry over to her.
“Hey!” I say enthusiastically. I hear the hint of desperation in my own voice, hoping no one else will notice.
“Jackieeee,” Rikki says, drawing out a name I only allow my mother to call me and leaning her head into my arm, where her hair tickles my skin. It’s dark but highlighted to a brassy blond with an ombre fading down to the tips. She has on a loud sparkly pink dress that she is almost spilling out of and a slit cut dangerously high on her thigh. “None of the other girls are being nice to me.” She pouts.
“Fuck ’em,” I say, a line I know they won’t be able to air on television (actually, they absolutely air that line on television, between thirty and fifty times in previews for the season).
“Do you want to be my best friend?” she asks.
“Yes,” I agree without hesitation. Whatever.
“Did you see the hot producer that came in with the second set of girls?” she asks me, her voice like a whine.
I feel my face heat up. “Hot producer?”
“That girl over there,” she says, pointing at a slender redhead who is delicately holding a glass of champagne. “Shit, I can’t remember her name,” she slurs. “Anyway, her, she told me his name is Henry. That’s totally a hot name, isn’t it?”
“What about Marcus?” I ask her.
“I think I met him in casting,” she says. “Henry. He asked if my tits were real. Wait. Actually, maybe that was Charlotte.”
“That’s kind of a fixation for you, isn’t it?” I ask, and she laughs loudly.
“’Course my tits aren’t real!” she yells into the room at large. My eyes scan again, looking for the producer in question, but he’s still nowhere to be seen. I’d met all the producers, too, hadn’t I? Charlotte and Priya and Janelle? There were even more, and they’d all interviewed me on that final casting call.
Except the one producer who hadn’t been there. The one who’d had a family emergency. The producer was Henry.
Shit. Fuck. Hell.
“Ladies, can we gather round?” Charlotte yells over all of us. “Brendan and Becca will be here shortly.”
Brendan and Becca. The co-hosts of the 1, who had met and married after the fifteenth season—one of the few successful relationships to come from the show. Even if you didn’t leave the show with a spouse (and few did), scoring a spot on the 1 was different than other reality shows. It had a certain cachet, a certain level of perceived classiness that streaming reality shows could never hope to match. Sure, the antiquated idea of engagement or bust, of a man deciding which of twenty-five women met his exacting standards, were all the antithesis of me as a person. But when had being me ever gotten me anywhere? I was great at creating characters for books, and I could certainly create one for this show. I’d play their game, and I’d win it. Not win a man, but win an audience.
Becca and Brendan meant Marcus would follow shortly.
We all wait in anticipation and Rikki reaches down and laces our hands together, giving mine a squeeze that fills me with momentary warmth. Then the double doors to the mansion open and Becca and Brendan come inside, flanking Marcus.
On cue, we all scream and catcall accordingly. “Hello, ladies!” Becca calls to us with a smile, getting us going all over again. I’d like to say I play it cool, but I get caught up in the mob mentality of the moment.
“Marcus has come here tonight to meet his wife,” Brendan tells us. “Just like I did, in this very same mansion, over ten years ago.”
“Aw,” Becca says, “he’s such a softie.” I hadn’t watched Becca and Brendan’s season of the 1, but I’d seen the pictures, and it was clear that both had made significant changes to their faces since airing, slowly becoming less wrinkled and more plastic over time.
“You ready to do this, Marcus?” Brendan says, pumping him up like the huddle before a football game.
“Well, I don’t know.” Marcus looks out at us, his smile dazzling. “Are you ready to do this, girls?” he asks. Girls. I bristle at that.
I haven’t been a girl for a long time.
“I can’t wait to meet as many of you as possible tonight,” Marcus says. “And for us to start this journey together.” He holds up his champagne glass, and we all do the same in unison. “A toast,” he says, “to finding the one.” He winks. “To season 32.”
“Season 32,” we all chant back, and Rikki hits her glass against mine so hard, champagne splashes onto the girl next to me, all over her ivory dress. She swears and then starts crying, immediately moving to cover herself with her hands. My eyes go wide.
“I’m so sorry,” I apologize, but she’s not listening.
I look up and he’s there. He’s looking at me. Henry. It wasn’t an illusion.
“Fuck,” I say.
