I’ve taken up watching survival shows.
Not the kind where a bunch of people sit around talking and eating their eighth coconut of the day while planning each other’s ouster, but the ones where they drop someone off in the middle of a forest and tell them they’ll give them a million dollars if they survive for a year. Really sick stuff, but in, like, the most transparently honest way.
I think I relate to them.
I’m in my apartment in Charleston, the one I rented out before I left for the show. My living room is dark. I’m curled up under a blanket with my dog, watching a guy build a shelter in below freezing temperatures while nursing a broken finger, when someone rings my doorbell. I almost jump out of my skin, and Yank starts barking like it’s the end of the world. Heart pounding, convinced that some the 1 superfan bent on my destruction would show up to my door unannounced in the middle of a weekday, I look through the peephole.
It’s Rikki.
I open the door.
“Are you good?” she asks when she sees me, an eyebrow raised. Her hair is freshly dyed, but shorter than the last time I saw her. She’s tan and made up, and I’m in a fifteen-year-old holey T-shirt with a Clemson blanket wrapped over my shoulders.
“Am I . . . good?” I repeat, not even giving in to the shock of seeing her at my door.
“Fair enough,” she says with no preamble, and slides a rolling suitcase past me and into my foyer, closing the door behind her. She keeps walking through the hall and past the half wall that leads into the den. Her gaze goes to the TV screen. “Why is that dirty man crying?”
I follow behind her, looking over her shoulder. Yank circles her feet merrily as she bends down to pet him.
“He could die if he doesn’t get a warm place to sleep soon? Aw, I don’t think he’s going to make it even the first month,” I say as the man onscreen curls up on the ground, adjusting his camera to film himself.
Rikki is giving me a pitying look. She reaches out and puts a hand on my arm. “Why don’t you take a shower and I’ll order pizza?” she asks. “And maybe we don’t watch TV?”
I shrug.
An hour later, we’re at my kitchen table, both eating pizza from my place down the street. Rikki remembered I like an obscene amount of red pepper on my pizza and had asked them to send extra packets.
“How’s LA?” I ask.
“Fine. Spin classes are fine, absolutely raking in the spon-con deals right now, to be honest.” She frowns at the look on my face. “Hey, a girl has to make a living. Also, I’m dating someone at my spin studio.”
“Oh?”
“She’s quite sporty. You’d like her.”
“Oh.” I half laugh. “We lived together so long, I just assumed I knew everything about you. Is this . . . a new thing? You’re bi?”
“Bi?” Rikki laughs. “God, you’re such a millennial.”
“Yeah,” I agree, laughing myself. “Factual.”
As we quiet down, I catch Rikki surveying the scene, the dirty dishes in the sink and the dead plants all over the kitchen. “Are you leaving the house much?” she asks like she already knows the answer.
“What, and end up all over Instagram?” I answer, setting my pizza slice down. “I think not.” One of my neighbors had spotted me out in my sweats walking Yank and snapped a picture, which had ended up on TMZ. Even setting aside being photographed looking so ragged, it had unsettled me to see a picture of myself so close to where I live.
Rikki shrugs, tilting her head to the side, as if conceding the point. “So, how’s the writing going?”
“What’s the point?” I ask. “Who would want to read a book by me?”
“Come on, Jac!” she says, exasperated. “You can’t lock yourself away in your house forever. Sarah literally called me and begged me to come out here because you were only answering every tenth text she sent.” Sarah had texted me that she connected to Rikki over DM on Instagram, but I didn’t expect her to send a search party.
“You didn’t have to get involved in my personal life,” I say, taking a swig of an old, flat Sprite I had poured from my fridge. “Didn’t sound like you were interested in that the last time I saw you anyway.”
“Don’t play dumb,” Rikki says, her voice solid in a way that belies her refusal to argue with me. “You got Elodie fired, and I liked Elodie. She liked you. I never would’ve agreed to help you humiliate her.”
“Elodie would’ve done the same to any of us without a moment’s hesitation,” I answer. She’d texted me last week. I’d blocked her number.
“Maybe she would have,” Rikki says, “but it seems worth a conversation.”
“Production sent you, didn’t they? I already told them I’d come to the fucking aftershow. I’m not trying to get sued.”
“Charlotte isn’t so sure you’re going to show up,” Rikki concedes. “But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I care about you. You’re my friend, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“And you still believe they’re your friends?” I ask her, incredulous. I push my food away. “I’m not hungry.”
“Eat,” she says.
“I can’t.”
“I like to think of my relationship with the producers as mutually beneficial,” Rikki tells me. “They like me, I get good edits. I get good edits, I make more money. I’m a popular contestant; they want me back on the shows.”
“For now,” I mutter.
“Well, that’s on my own head.”
I snort, picking at the pepperoni on my pizza.
“I know it’s not the same volume, but I know how they are online. I cried for like an hour the first time someone sent an actual racial slur to my Instagram.”
