I clench the phone tightly. “You want to talk to Henry again?” I ask.
“No, I can talk to Henry whenever I want. You need to get back to your room.”
“Fine,” I say, feeling like a child being scolded by my mother.
“I’ll see you at After the One,” Charlotte tells me.
“I can’t wait,” I mutter.
“Are you going to ask?” she says.
“Ask what?”
“Fine,” Charlotte says. “I had a girl.”
THE NIGHT OF the next elimination ceremony is the coldest I can remember. None of the other girls say much about their dates, at least not to me. And we sit up there in front of the cameras and Marcus and shiver, awaiting our fate. I have on a slinky cobalt dress with spaghetti straps and a slit up to my thigh. It’s one I’d been saving for later in the season, but when I’d stared at myself in the mirror earlier, seen how striking I looked, it felt hollow. We put on coats between takes, but it’s not enough, the cold sinking into our bones. I stare across the distance to Marcus, wishing nothing but pain upon him, wishing I could run screaming away from all of this.
I had been so close to escaping. Out on the water, with Henry, twenty-five hundred miles away from this, I had been so close.
Now, I feel as far away from that girl I found for a day as I ever have.
“Jac,” Marcus calls, brandishing his first invite to stay, and like a traitor to myself, I smile. I win. I lose myself, but I keep winning this game.
I go back to my position and my eyes flick to Henry, who is studiously not watching me.
“Kendall,” Marcus says, and she lets out a breath, her small frame squeezed inside of a black and white blocked dress that looks stunning on her. I have this stupid thought that, if we were friends, I’d ask her to borrow it.
Becca and Brendan come out in matching orange outfits and somberly announce to us that one of the remaining contestants is not the one. Then Marcus calls Shae, and Eunice crumples. I don’t know her, won’t grieve for her the way I would Rikki, but it’s one step closer to the end.
I wear that dread like a second skin as we toast the final three with champagne.
“Are you okay?” Shae asks me quietly. Marcus and Kendall are talking to a group of producers.
“Just—a little under the weather,” I lie.
“I know what you mean,” she says. “This is exhausting, isn’t it?”
I don’t answer. It’s too late to make friends now to help me get through this.
“What now?” I ask Priya as she passes by me.
“Now?” she says. “Paris.”
Weekly Reprint Memo
HOT TITLE RUSH REPRINT: 50,000 copies of END OF THE LINE by Jacqueline Matthis to cover incoming Readerlink and Amazon orders plus 20,000 additional jackets to hold against future printings.
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France
22
In Too Deep
We take a brutal overnight flight from LAX to ATL to CDG in Paris, sitting with the producers. They did at least spring for the extended leg room. I read all of Persuasion, a comforting blanket of a book amid everything else. Shae, Kendall, and I ride in a van along with Priya and Henry to our lodgings, just outside of the Paris municipality. We each have our own room, stocked with a fridge and shower, a shared sink between the two of them. There’s a separate room for our usual girl chats, where Shae, Kendall, and I can talk or film B-roll, but even that is regulated to when the producers deem it necessary. I sit and talk with Kendall when Shae goes on her overnight date, and then with Shae when Kendall goes for hers two days after. We don’t see Paris—don’t walk the streets, don’t day-trip to Versailles despite the fact Henry promised he’d try to get permission to take us on one of the off days.
My life shrinks. To a mid-range hotel room, to producers and cameramen, to Henry and two beautiful girls disappearing and me disappearing in between.
I’d had this idea—this moronic idea—when I signed up for the show that it would at least be a chance to travel, to escape the smallness I’d started to feel in my life. But, instead, I am trapped in this tiny room, the ultimate cruel joke.
Henry did briefly take me on a walk yesterday, with another crew member who had the day off trailing behind us. I was so focused on how the two of us looked together that I couldn’t think of anything else. Today—the last before my overnight date with Marcus—Henry brings me a new book to read, just as he has every other day this week. A small consolation prize.
“It’s you,” I say when he comes in with a bag and closes the door behind him.
“It’s always me.” He lays the book out in front of me along with the bottle of red he’s brought me from one of the markets. It’s a Curtis Sittenfeld novel, one I’ve already read, but at least he knows my taste.
“Where’s my fromage?” I ask.
“Cute, but I know you’re barely eating. You’ve got two fromages in the fridge and your baguette from yesterday is going stale. You want me to get those out and we’ll eat?”
I lean back into the couch, crossing my arms over my chest defensively. “Who can eat under these circumstances?”
He doesn’t respond, only sighs and goes to the fridge to put in a couple bottles of water.
“What have you been doing today?” I hear Henry ask, but I’m completely focused on my hands, my arms, how pathetically small and weak my body looks and feels. I try to take a deep breath and I miss it. Tears well in my eyes and my hand goes to my mouth as I struggle to get anything in or out. I really can’t breathe now, my body physically acting out the thought, like it has more control than I do.
