“She isn’t going to want to do this,” he whispered.
“She doesn’t have a choice, lover boy.” Deja patted him on his broad shoulder. “Go meet your lady, Mr. Big Balls in Cowtown.”
Charity guffawed, but Linda’s attention was on Sabrina, who stood rapt as she watched herself, gaze glittering with the film’s reflection.
“I look like I love him,” Sabrina said as the TV version of her rushed into his arms.“What are we doing today?” her televised self said.
“I thought you could show me what you’re made of!”
The lovebirds entered the nondescript building, and TV-Sabrina’s eyes widened as she realized what she was in for. He’d brought her to a butcher.
“What the shit?” Charity revisited her earlier crouched-up posture, gathering her whole body into the chair, her knees pulled against her chest. “What the actual fuck?”
Slabs of meat hung from the ceiling, and TV-Sabrina shivered as she stepped into the room.
“Fast-forward, please,” the real Sabrina said, cringing away from the images.
“What is this? What kind of season are we on?” Curio shops, butchers, and haunted manors. The Groom seemed to have gone off the rails, and Linda didn’t want it to take her down with it. She tugged at her shirt not because the room was hot—it was—but because she was suddenly feeling constrained.“You never told me about this.”
“It was weird, okay?” Sabrina covered her eyes. “They wanted us to pick a pig and then cook it over a pit. Stuff its mouth with an apple.”
“And did you?” Linda said.
“Well…yeah…”
“And you like this sick fuck?” Charity said.
“He grew up on a farm. His parents still run it. I’ll have to get used to livestock if I want to be with him.” Sabrina’s voice went small.
Charity poked her finger into the keyboard to fast-forward.
As Linda watched, too intrigued to look away, the camera remained zoomed-in not on Sabrina’s face while she chose her meal, not on Tristan’s while he struggled not to gag, but on the carcass as the butcher cut her choice down for them. Maybe Deja knew what she was doing. The wet slap sound of the pig’s body flopping onto the floor evoked a sick satisfaction.
Finally, Charity reached the end of the recorded date and let the dailies resume. It was more of Sabrina, so Charity clicked away to search through the files for someone else. She found the file labeled LINDA and pulled it up.
Linda leaned forward in her chair. She expected to see lingering glances and sweet, sloppy kisses. She expected to see herself fawning over Tristan while he offered drawled-out platitudes in return. She didn’t expect to see shot after shot of her face, lost in fevered stares . She watched as the lens caught her eyeing Marion with bared teeth.
“Wow, you hate her,” Charity said.
“But I don’t…”
The dailies cycled through more shots of the veins on Linda’s neck pulsing as Linda leered at Marion, at Deja, at every minor inconvenience. In one scene, she dropped a glass on the kitchen floor, and they cut the footage to show Marion cutting her foot on a shard, followed by Linda laughing at her bleeding foot.
“That’s not how that went…” Linda muttered as bile rose into the back of her throat, leaving a sour taste on her tongue. “I was laughing at a joke she made. She was being a good sport.”
In another scene, Linda narrowed her eyes at the back of Tristan’s head as he sauntered in front of her into a restaurant.
“The sun was in my eyes,” Linda said. She gulped a breath as panic tremored through her. She rubbed her hands over her legs, wiping the sweat across the goosebumps rising up over her skin. She wasn’t that person, but the proof was recorded. She’d made those faces.
Charity shifted uneasily in her seat.
“Keep going,” Linda whispered.
“Are you sure?” Charity asked.
“Yes.”
Charity fast-forwarded from scene to scene: Linda clinking glasses and grinning when women were eliminated; scenes cut together to make Linda look gleeful at their failure; Linda teasing Tristan, with his laughing response chopped off so it looked like a serious insult; Linda in the interview room, shaking as Deja asked her about her past.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Linda said, referring to her meltdown on screen. That one was uncut, a brutal truth.
“They make you look like a psycho,” Sabrina said, a nervous edge to her voice.
“Is that who I am?” Her stomach twisted. She didn’t feel like a psycho, not here, not in this room beside Charity, even if outside of the manor she may have wondered from time to time if she held the capacity for evil. But worse, Deja had promised Linda she would emerge from the other side of this with a clean slate. The dailies were anything but clean. She felt her mouth mirroring the grimace projected on the wall—those veins, like some supervillain, popping.
Sabrina rested her hands on Linda’s shoulders. “Of course not, sweetie.” But her hands squeezed too hard, digging into the tender muscle.
They watched Deja sit Linda down for an interview and ask her one prying question after the next. She mentioned Linda’s family whenever possible. Your father, your father, she said, until Linda shut down and refused to answer. “You said you’d make that go away,” Linda hissed on camera.
“Turn it off,” Linda said to Charity. She stood and reached to exit out of the video herself. “I don’t want to see anymore of me.”
“What happened with your father?” Sabrina said.
Linda felt a different haze come over her. It was the one she lived inside as a kid, the one composed of tobacco smoke. The one that made her feel like some other person trapped inside her child body. “My father died when I was young,” she said, but it was like another person speaking.
Charity frowned. “It’s like she’s trying to get you to break. Like she wants you to lose it.”
“Kind of like you lost it today,” Sabrina said.
