Alternates: Prologue and Chapter 1

Prologue

When I get back home - not college dorm home or my mom’s house home but my house, my dad’s house, the house whose mortgage will never be an issue again - the first thing I do is unpack my suitcase and toss all my clothes in the laundry to wash the remains of the trip off of them. It’s the safe thing to do, since I was just on a plane full of potentially sick people. But I still feel a little bit like the villain of a murder mystery, scrubbing my bloody rags. Out, damned California.

The second thing I do is rummage around my old desk until I come up with a checkbook. I sit down at the desk, which feels a little too small for me now, although I’m not sure if that’s because I just haven’t sat at my desk in a while or because I’ve actually grown. I’m too old to have grown, I know that, but then again, maybe the gravity is different in L.A. Like those astronauts who come back taller.

I haven’t filled out a check in ages, but the muscle memory is still there. Amount? A modest four-figure sum, just over a thousand dollars. That’s nothing to me, not now.

Recipient? Joan Chaudhary. I double-check the last email the producers sent to make sure I’ve spelled her name correctly.

Reason?

After careful consideration, I leave that line blank. She’ll know exactly what it’s for.

Chapter One

My hands are shaking as I try to aim the cotton swab up my nose. I don’t know why I always drink coffee at the airport. I mean, I never sleep the night before a flight, but I usually fly early in the morning, so it would make the most sense to just drag myself through security and then doze in the air. But instead I always go, oh, well, I haven’t had breakfast yet, I ought to grab a bacon-egg-and-cheese from whatever coffee chain they’ve got in the airport, and while I’m here I might as well treat myself to a latte, too, right? But it doesn’t even wake me up. It just makes me jittery and sick to my stomach and I have to go to the bathroom every fifteen minutes, which is inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst depending on how bad the turbulence is at 30,000 feet.

I smile at the woman administering the tests and finally get the swab in the right spot. She nods back, evidently used to caffeine-jitter college students grinning maniacally at her with a cotton swab hanging out of their nostrils. I don’t envy her. The hotel - surprisingly nice; I expected a chain motel but it stands proudly on the street corner with its brick walls and its capital-H History - flows with college students, some dragging suitcases up the stairs and grumbling about the OUT OF ORDER sign on the elevator, others wandering out the back door and joining the lengthening, straggly queue for COVID-19 testing. They’ve only got the one nurse and only two tables for the tests, and she bounces back and forth between them like a pinball, whisking used test tubes away and setting down new ones to keep us moving while the producers urge us forward like we’re livestock. She’s pulling my test tube, just capped, from my table almost before I’ve set it down.

One of the producers (I think he’s Morty, but it’s hard to keep track when I’ve only spoken to him over the phone before) points to a circle of picnic tables on the patio behind the hotel. Obediently I readjust my messenger bag on my shoulder and shuffle over, joining the few other early arrivals who have already made it through testing. There are four of them, each sitting at the four far ends of the picnic table benches, which the producers must have instructed them to do to keep their distance. I put my bag down on the table next to them, pull my mask off, and sit alone on the end of one of its benches.

“Hey!” one of the girls crows, with bright eyes and bleached hair and pink cheeks rounded in a sunny grin. “What’s your name?”

“Oh - McKinley,” I say. “Or Mickey. I don’t know why I gave you my full name, please just call me Mickey. And they/them, if we’re doing pronouns. Are we doing pronouns?”

“Named for the president?” asks another, a tanned, broad-shouldered boy with a fade ending in a mop of black curls and heart-shaped glasses perched on the end of his nose. He grins at me, flashing incisors that are pointier and whiter than anyone’s teeth that I’ve ever seen. That pointy smile quirks at the edges like he’s expecting me to say no.

“Yeah,” I say, and Heart-Shaped Glasses Boy raises an eyebrow. “My mom has a whole thing about the gold standard.”

“That’s pretty cool,” says the girl with the pink cheeks. “Oh, by the way, once this whole intro thing is over a bunch of us were gonna go get snacks at the Joe’s Foods down the street, and then maybe get dinner together. Do you want to come with?”

“Sure,” I say. “What’s dinner?”

“There’s supposed to be a good taco place like half a block from here,” says a boy with his long dark hair swept up into a messy bun.

“Cool,” I say. “Also, what are your names?”

The four of them go around and introduce themselves - Keeley (the pink-cheeked girl), Rafa (the boy with the glasses), Hank (the bun-headed boy), and Annalise (a tiny girl in a massive men’s rugby sweatshirt that I suspect she stole from a boyfriend).

“Awesome. I won’t remember any of that,” I tell them.

“We won’t remember your name either!” Keeley assures me. “It’s totally fine. So, this is wild, right?”

“It’s certainly not what I expected,” I say.

And it’s not. The only person who knows I’m here is my dad, and I made him promise not to breathe a word about it to Mom or my grandparents or his coworkers or anyone else, so he and I have kind of been feeding on each other’s excitement for the past month. With nobody else to talk to about it but each other, we’ve been concocting increasingly ridiculous scenarios. Maybe they’ll put us up in a five-star hotel, maybe I’ll meet my soulmate on set, maybe Cab Cabrini will take a shine to me and offer me a full-time position on the show, maybe I’ll win the hundred grand and get myself out of student loan debt for good, maybe all the news outlets will want to interview me for being the first queer contestant on the show, maybe I’ll be famous, maybe, maybe, maybe. But as a counter to all that maybe I’ve been trying to be realistic. TV productions need to save money where they can, so we’ll probably be in a motel, or maybe several motels spread out across LA. The producers will probably be rude and dismissive in person as they try to scrape a dozen shows together in a week. Other contestants will surely be Quiz Bowl kids, National Geography Bee champions, and people who have spent years instead of weeks studying for this, and they’ll probably be mean and cutthroat and not want to talk to me, who doesn’t really know what I’m doing. I spent every waking moment cramming since I got the call, sure, but that was only in February, and it’s only April now. Unless watching the show itself counts as cramming, in which case I’ve been cramming for this since before I could read.

I grew up watching The Q with my dad. Every night at eight on the dot we’d be in the TV room with our drinks - a cup of tea for him, a cup of cranberry juice for me - ready to shout out the answers along with the contestants on the screen. Excepting times when he was away for a business conference or I was at camp, I don’t think we ever missed a night of The Q. Even the day when Mom served him the divorce papers, when he was an absolute wreck and couldn’t make his own tea, I did it for him, and he was waiting in the TV room for me when it was finished steeping. He bought me a streaming subscription for college so I could still be sure to watch it every night. Call it a ritual, I guess, but my dad and I really don’t talk about things. Nobody in my family does. I came out by adding my pronouns to my Instagram bio and all Mom said about it was “I saw your Instagram” and then we never talked about it again. So my dad and I communicate through game shows. Sometimes when I’d had a bad day at school I wouldn’t yell out the answers and then my dad would turn to me after and say, “I know you knew some of those,” and I’d nod, and he’d take my cup from me and refill it with hot tea from his pot and I’d drink it, tasting the bitterness of oversteeped tea and the tang of the leftover cranberry juice and feeling it warm me up from the inside out, and we’d both go to bed and I’d feel better the next morning.

But if you don’t count watching The Q, I’m sure I’m underprepared compared to all of these people.

There are more of them now, people finishing their COVID tests and sitting down at the extreme ends of the picnic benches with masks looped around their wrists or dangling from their ears. I glance around at the other people filling out my table. The two people on the other end from me are engaged in what sounds like a heated argument about Catherine the Great, and most of the other new arrivals are watching them with wide-eyed owlish interest, but the girl sitting across from me isn’t watching them.

She’s watching me.

It’s hard to tell sitting down, but she looks tall, probably taller than me, with a thin face and a pointed chin. Her brown eyes are so wide as to be almost perfect circles, framed by thick dark lashes, behind a pair of square silver-rimmed glasses. Her lips are pursed inquisitively. She toys with the end of her thick black braid, wrapping and unwrapping it around her index finger. I’m not sure she realizes she’s doing it. She takes a breath in, as if to say something, but then doesn’t. I’m kind of taken aback by how open she is about staring at me. But I’ve been watching her watching me for too long. This is definitely awkward now.

“I’m Mickey,” I say, extending a hand across the table for a handshake, which only makes it more awkward because I’m still unsteady from the coffee as I offer it, and then I remember none of us are technically allowed to touch each other - I feel the eyes of Morty the producer on my back - and I withdraw my hand before she has the chance to shake it.

“Joan Chaudhary,” she says. “What were you thinking about?”

“What?”

“You looked like you were thinking about something.”

“Oh. Um. Yeah, I mean, I was mostly just making myself nervous. Thinking about how all of you are probably Quiz Bowl champions and stuff.”

The argument about Catherine the Great reaches a fever pitch as Joan leans towards me.

“Didn’t you do Quiz Bowl?”

“Uh, no. I didn’t.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I… that’s a broad question. Like, in high school? I painted sets and made costumes for the theater shows, mostly. Uh, and I worked at the hardware store in the summers.”

Joan furrows her eyebrows at me. “You’re not a trivia person?”

“Not outside of The Q, no. I’m here because I love the show, I guess.”

“I’m surprised.” She falls silent for a moment, casting her eyes down at her lap, although the rest of her expression hasn’t changed so it doesn’t quite seem like she’s doing it out of shyness. Maybe she just noticed how long she’s been looking at me for.

After a moment she takes another sharp breath in and stares at me again, wide eyes like spotlights. “I’m sure most people will tell you that puts you at a disadvantage, but still, I think that’s nice. I’ve been doing memorization competitions and Quiz Bowl and things like that since I was young - my parents have always made sure of that - so this was the next logical step for me.”

“The Q specifically, or just going on a game show in general?”

Joan shrugs and says, “It’s the most prestigious televised trivia competition in the country. Maybe the world. So in that context, The Q specifically. I like the show, too, of course, but I’m glad that somebody is here just because they love it.”

“Thanks.” I don’t know what else to say.

Joan falls silent again and gazes over my shoulder. She’s pretty, and definitely smarter than me, and I think, for what I suspect will be the first of many times, that I’m completely out of my depth here. At the next table over, the girl in the giant sweatshirt - Annalise, I’m pretty sure - shushes the other people sitting with her and points over my shoulder, where Joan is looking. I turn. The producers are approaching.

All the picnic tables are full now, and those of us sitting with our backs to the producers swivel around. There are two of them here, a man and a woman, and they wave to us and flash Hollywood smiles.

“Thanks for doing the first of many COVID tests, but more importantly, welcome to LA, guys!” the man says. “I’m Morty.” Good, I think, I managed to remember one name, at least. “I’m the guy you’ve been talking about contracts and background checks with for the past month. Thank goodness that’s over with, right?”

“And I’m Yasmin,” says the woman, flipping her blond bob out of her face. “You might remember me as the one who called to tell you the good news! How does it feel to be on The Q, guys?”

We clap and cheer. I look around at all the other people here, college students from, presumably, across the country, all shapes and sizes, all whooping at the top of our lungs for our parts in a show that I, at least, consider as much a part of me as my hands or my voice.

“Love that energy,” Morty says, “but from here on out, we’re asking that you guys be as secret with this as possible. The Q’s Student Showcase tournament this year is a big deal, bigger than ever before, and we don’t want any spoilers to get out before it airs in June.”

“What if someone asks us why a herd of college students is staying at the Jewel?” asks a skinny redheaded boy with a mouthful of gum.

“Debate team competition,” I say.

At the same time, heart-glasses boy (Rafa?) says, “Underground gambling ring.”

Most of us chuckle, but Morty and Yasmin, in almost perfect unison, grimace. “Just be vague,” Yasmin says. “Tell them you’re here to shoot a TV show, but not what you’ll be filming. We just don’t want to spoil the magic for the viewers at home.”

“And speaking of the magic,” Morty says, pulling a stack of index cards from his back pocket, “let’s talk about how this is gonna go. Don’t worry, you’ll get an email with all this information tonight. This is a tournament-style competition. The top twenty-seven students in the nation are our quarterfinalists, which means nine semifinalists and three finalists. The three highest scores from the semis make it to finals, plus whoever comes in fourth gets to stick around, step in, and play in the finals if one of the real finalists can’t do it for whatever reason. Now I know you’re all familiar with the usual prizes on The Q. Anyone wanna shout those out for me?”

The skinny ginger raises his hand. “Fifteen hundred for third place, three thousand for second, and the winner gets however much they won and comes back to play again the next night.”

“Very good! And what about the Student Showcase? Anyone know the prizes for that?”

Several of us recite it at once, having listened to Cab Cabrini recite it every night for a week at a time, watching the Student Showcase from our couches each year. The spiel never changes. I know it by heart. “Quarterfinalists take home five thousand dollars. For semifinalists, it’s ten thousand dollars. And our top three student contestants will take home twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred thousand dollars!”

“You all have that memorized?” Yasmin asks. We nod.

“Impressive!” Morty booms.

“But wrong,” Yasmin adds. “This year, at least. When Morty said the Student Showcase is a bigger deal than ever before, he meant it. Folks at home have been watching more The Q than ever before, probably because we’ve all been trapped inside for a year. Long story short, we’ve got a lot more cash to give away. Quarterfinalists are getting twenty-five thousand. Semifinalists, fifty thousand. And our top three are getting - get ready for this, kids - a hundred, two hundred, and five hundred thousand!”

Five hundred thousand dollars. Half a million. I could buy a house with that. I could buy two houses with that. I could pay off my loans seven times over. Hell, I could put a significant dent in them even if I lose in the quarterfinals. That’s an order of magnitude more money than I thought I’d ever see in my lifetime. Yasmin and Morty are smiling those Hollywood smiles at us again, and someone, I don’t know who, erupts into cheering.

The rest of us follow suit. Half a million dollars. There’s nothing to do except cheer.

In the midst of the giddy chaos - five hundred thousand dollars - Joan raises her hand, her face still placid and unchanged behind her shining silver glasses.

“What’s up?” Morty asks, waving a hand at her.

“You said there were twenty-seven contestants,” she says.

“There are,” Yasmin says.

“Okay.” Joan looks around at the group, quickly pointing and counting under her breath as her eyes swivel from table to table. “Then why are there thirty of us?”

As soon as the number thirty is past Joan’s lips, I see several people begin surreptitiously counting for themselves. Morty holds up his hands and says, with half a laugh in his voice, “Don’t worry, we meant to do that, I promise. The three others are alternates, in case someone can’t play before the final. You all were chosen based on your cumulative scores in the qualification test, which was scored based on your knowledge, and the audition, which was scored based on your ability to appear natural and charismatic onscreen, and the alternates are the top three students who didn’t make our cutoff for the combined score. We’ll pull the alternates aside at some point to explain your responsibilities, and you three will get emails with that information, too, so you’ll know who you are. In the meantime, you don’t have to worry about it. Let’s talk about the rules of the game! I know you’re all experts on The Q, but it’s still important to go through the rules so we’re all on the same page.”

Morty and Yasmin, trading off, explain the rules of the game. I do my best not to zone out, but somewhere between ‘we give you the A, you give us the Q’ and ‘remember to search for those Q Factor clues to double, triple, or quadruple your points,’ the zone-out happens anyway. It’s fine. I know how to play the game.

I let my eyes wander from table to table, wondering who the unlucky extra three people are. The alternates. Nobody stands out - or rather, everybody stands out in ways that make it obvious that they deserve to be here. I see copies of Mexican novels and Welsh poetry collections sticking out of people’s bags, homemade flash cards in their pockets, and intentionally nerdy socks printed with the text of the Constitution or the image of The Scream on nearly every ankle. These people are smiling, nodding, watching Morty and Yasmin with the intensity of intelligence. Maybe the people with strong opinions on Catherine the Great were too hot-headed and provocative for the screen? Maybe Keeley, with her all-American charm and TV-ready pink-cheeked smile, didn’t score high enough on the knowledge test? I even consider Joan - I could see how some might find her wide-eyed, unselfconscious stare off-putting, although I entertain the thought that on TV it might just look intense and focused. But she’s been doing this her whole life. She’s definitely too good at trivia to be on the sidelines.

“And I believe that covers it!” Yasmin says, clapping her hands together with finality. “Again, this will all be in the email. In the meantime, we have another surprise for you.”

“Before you all rush off to get snacks and dinner and make friends - or scope out the competition - The Q was kind enough to get you all Student Showcase water bottles!” Morty does jazz hands. “We’re handing them out in the hotel lobby, but to make sure we keep the social distance, we’re just gonna send you guys in there three at a time to grab them and then you’re on your own for the rest of the night. Call time tomorrow morning is 8:30, and make sure you’ve eaten a good full breakfast beforehand! We’re shooting promos, and you don’t want to do those on an empty stomach.”

“Keep an eye on your emails,” Yasmin says, “and go over all the info we send you again. Now…” She pulls a folded printout from her pocket. “Forgive me if I mispronounce your names. Let’s start by sending in Keeley, Mark, and Mfoniso.”

Keeley, the skinny ginger boy, and a petite girl with long dreadlocks all stand up and file into the hotel. As Yasmin calls Theodore, Catie, and Jake, and then another trio, and another, and another, the other people from Keeley’s table turn to the rest of us and explain the plans about the snacks from Joe’s Foods and the good taco place like half a block away.

“Sounds fun,” says a girl - is that Georgia? - with about six piercings in each ear. “Should we have a group chat? To coordinate this stuff?”

The moment the words ‘group chat’ are mentioned, everybody whips out their phones. The next several minutes are spent negotiating who will add whom and what time we’ll meet for dinner and how far away the Joe’s Foods is and how many of us need to take naps.

“I love this,” Morty says, leaning over our picnic table. “You guys are so on top of things.”

“Next three,” Yasmin says, “Georgia, Annalise, and Sam.” The girl with the piercings stands up. Sweet, so that was Georgia. I’m getting good at this.

People file out in threes, already sending memes in the group chat and promising to meet up at various times throughout the afternoon, until there are only three people left. I feel my leg bouncing as Morty and Yasmin sit down at my picnic table. Joan and I turn to look at them. Next to us, Rafa pushes his heart-shaped glasses up his nose.

“So,” Yasmin says, “as I’m sure you’ve all guessed by now, you three have a very important role here. You are our alternates.”

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.