Alternates: Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

Ours is not a particularly high-scoring game. The second round is much harder than the first, and one category - College Teams - stumps all three of us most of the time. Ruby and I trade off the lead several times throughout the game, but then she finds the Q Factor question in Ballet, a category we haven’t touched so far, and she confidently picks a factor of four, and she confidently says the wrong answer, and then there’s no catching up. Hank creeps up on me after that, although he never touches the lead, and because I’m not sure if I’ll know the Final Factor based on the category (Inventors And Inventions), I bet conservatively, just enough to stay ahead of Hank. In the end, I win, but with only 9900 points to Hank’s 8200 and Ruby’s 2000.

“That was a really tough game,” Hank says after Cab has come around for handshakes and we’ve all sanitized our hands and podiums and put our masks back on.

“Oh, my god, it was insane.” Ruby adjusts her mask as she says it. “I really thought I knew anything about ballet. Yikes.”

“Well, at least until after lunch, we’re officially the three finalists,” I joke. “Maybe everybody else will score a thousand or less.”

“I hate to say it,” Hank replies, “but I think you’re the only one of us with any chance, Mickey.”

Ruby flips her dark red curtain of hair over her shoulder. “I dunno. If our game was that hard I bet everybody else’s will be, too.”

“That’s a fair point,” Hank agrees.

We get our mics taken off and Morty appears to escort us to lunch.

“You guys were amazing!” Morty crows. “As a special treat, you get to have lunch with me. Mostly because we can’t have you talking to any of the other players, but also because I like to think I’m great company. Do you guys want to talk about the game or pretend it never happened and focus on other things?”

Almost in perfect unison, the three of us respond, “Pretend it never happened.”

Morty guffaws. “Did you rehearse that? Oh, you kids are amazing. I love doing the Student Showcase, it’s my favorite thing about working for The Q. Okay, let me think about what will distract you. Have you guys seen any good tik-tiks lately? Right? Tik-tik? Isn’t that what the youth are into these days?”

Morty keeps up his faux out-of-touch patter (“Is Vine still a thing? What about MySpace?”) all the way to the cafeteria, and the three of us laugh gamely at the idea that someone who lives in LA and produces a beloved game show for a living somehow knows less about what’s popular than three nerdy college students who spend their free time studying for a trivia show that’s been airing unchanged since their parents were kids. I order a tuna melt from the sandwich station in the cafeteria and notice that the guy making my sandwich is not the same guy who made Rafa and Laurel’s BLTs only yesterday - how was that only yesterday? I feel like I’ve lived about a month every day I spend here. Maybe the Jewel, or the Decameron lot, or LA as a whole, is some sort of time distortion bubble, and we’ll all emerge from our respective airports at home tomorrow night and realize that everyone we love has aged thirty years in our absence. Or else we’ll go home to find that only minutes have passed since we boarded the planes and our parents and friends will ask us why we didn’t end up going to California after all.

The tuna melt is really good. I think there must be multiple kinds of cheese on it.

We’re not in the large outdoor dining area that The Q has set up for us, but rather in a small gazebo on a green patch of lawn between the tall, blocky, featureless studio buildings. The gazebo has been featured in a few TV shows we might have seen, Morty explains, as a place for contestants on reality shows to shoot confessionals. Huge posters, massive faces advertising upcoming Decameron Pictures shows and films, gaze down at us from the sides of the buildings. A wholesome family wears one huge ugly holiday sweater, sewn together Human Centipede-style out of many normal ugly holiday sweaters, with the name of their wholesome family sitcom printed across it. A massive businessman wears a black suit with flames embroidered on the cuffs and stares out of his poster, arms crossed, with a cartoon speech bubble emanating from his mouth asking if I can take the heat. I don’t have an answer for him.

“Are all of these already out?” Hank asks, mouth full, gesturing to the posters.

“Most of them are,” Morty says, “but the premiere of Ragtag won’t air until June. We’re doing promos for it now.” He indicates a poster. A trio of old women and an attractive young man peek out from behind a huge quilt; their bare shoulders imply that the quilt is the only thing the four are wearing.

“It’s a comedy-drama about a quilting circle,” Morty explains. “A little weird for my taste, honestly, but I’m told it tested absurdly well with the focus groups, so I’m not complaining.”

“That sounds so wild,” Ruby agrees eagerly. “Does the guy fall in love with one of the old ladies? Or all three of them? Because that’s kind of what the poster makes it look like.”

“No spoilers,” Morty says. “Except, yes, spoilers, actually, because, no, he doesn’t. He turns out to be gay and the old ladies have to grapple with the generational divide and give him love advice.”

I perk up my ears. “For real? I didn’t think Decameron really did gay characters.”

Morty shrugs. “I guess we do now. We were one of the last major network holdouts on that one, I know, but I guess the execs finally decided that it’s 2021 and we can’t keep our hold on rural America forever. There’s been a big deal in the network about starting to target younger demographics. Which is part of why you guys are getting such huge money for being on the Student Showcase, actually.”

“Oh, man,” Hank says. “Based on the commercials for hearing aids and life insurance that air between rounds I was convinced only cool youths like us watched The Q.”

As Morty snorts, I add, “Yeah, wait, you’re telling me the primary audience for those AARP ads isn’t the eighteen-to-twenty-four demographic?”

“Tragically, no, it’s not,” Morty says. “We’ll get there, though. Baby steps.”

I finish my sandwich and wonder how these nameless execs, who I picture as faceless men in business suits - maybe with flame embroidery - in a shadowy boardroom voting on which direction to steer Decameron, feel about me being a baby step.

Instead of returning to the empty sound stage, Morty leads us back to the set of The Q instead. Because we’ve already competed and can’t change our scores, we’re allowed to watch the other two semifinal games take place from the studio. “Plus,” Morty adds with a smile in his voice, “we’re all pretty sick of having to add in canned applause whenever someone finds the Q Factor. Are you three ready to be loud enough for an entire studio audience?”

“Hell yeah we are,” Hank replies.

With the exception of a few brief moments while we were shooting promos, I haven’t gotten to see The Q from the audience’s perspective. The studio audience seating area, with auditorium seats just like the ones on the empty sound stage, is perpendicular to the contestants. The game board, while it’s directly across from the podiums, is angled slightly, like an actor cheating out for his adoring fans, so the studio audience can see the questions, too. The huge cameras block some of the view toward the contestants’ podiums, and anyway we’ll only be able to see the sides of their heads when they take their places, so there are several monitors positioned near the audience area that aren’t visible from the stage. I hadn’t even noticed them either of the times I walked on from the backstage area to the right of the studio audience, although I had to walk right past one to get to the podiums. Maybe it wasn’t turned on when I passed it, or maybe I was already in Blackout Mickey mode, but it’s on now and displaying a view of the empty Q stage, sourced from one of the cameras, although there are so many and they’re so huge that I can’t tell which is providing the footage. When London, Mark, and Natalie walk out to get their plastic bags checked, sanitize their podiums, and get their makeup touched up, I try to watch them, but I discover within a few minutes of craning my neck and tilting my head that it’s easier to watch the monitor instead.

The second semifinal game isn’t a particularly exciting one, at least not compared to my neck-and-neck race with Ruby and the tense Final Factor betting. In the first round, the categories are vague, things like Science and Literature and Adverbs. Mark, as in his last game, pulls ahead very quickly. His technique, from watching the monitor, seems to be holding his buzzer with two hands and mashing down on the button with each of his thumbs in turn, alternating to press it, theoretically at least, twice as fast as his competitors. It’s working for him, and the only times London and Natalie get to buzz in are when Mark doesn’t know or doesn’t want to answer a question. There are several of those instances, but if Mark doesn’t know it, London and Natalie don’t seem to either. There are over half a dozen questions over the course of the game that stump all three of them. A few of those I know (and in one particular case I have to force myself not to scream “who is Anne Brontë?” at the contestants), but many of them I don’t (I’m sure I’ve heard the word “angiosperm” before but there was no way I, or evidently any of the contestants at the podiums, would’ve been able to come up with that given its definition).

At the end of the game, though, things do get interesting. Mark bets conservatively while London and Natalie attempt to gain back some of their lost ground, and Mark and London get the final question wrong. The category is Four-Letter Words, the question something to do with a “passionate” word derived from the Greek for jealousy. London and Mark both guess “fury.” The answer, by the way, which Natalie gets correct to nearly double her score, is “what is zeal?” I guess correctly too. I wouldn't have known the answer except that a very similar clue, also in the Four-Letter Words category, came up on a regular episode of The Q a few years back, when I was a senior in high school, and I had a midterm in calculus class the next day that I was supposed to be studying for but my dad and I got so curious about the etymology of the word “zeal” that we stayed up late learning about it and other weird Greek words, and I faked sick the next day so I could study. That’s another one that I had to restrain myself from shouting out.

Either way, London barely cracks 3000 points, meaning he won’t be a finalist, but Mark has 10500 and Natalie’s huge bet brought her up to an even 10000, meaning Hank is out of the finals, too. Hank, Ruby, and I clap and cheer as the lights fade out and someone tells the cameras to stop rolling, and then we lean in, heads together.

“So Mark and Natalie are joining me,” I murmur.

“That game was way easier than ours,” Ruby says.

Hank’s eyebrows shoot up, and I feel mine doing the same. “Really?” Hank asks. “I thought it was about the same.”

“I was shocked none of them knew angiosperm.”

“What’s your major, Ruby?” I ask.

“Biology,” she says.

Hank and I nod in unison and he says, “That explains it. I have yet to get a single mechanical engineering question.”

“I don’t think The Q does a lot of those,” I say. “I’m honestly shocked my religion major hasn’t come in handy more. I did get that Bible Final Factor, but that’s been it, I think. Across all the games.”

“Yeah, that is weird,” Hank agrees.

“I think religion questions are usually tough,” Ruby says. “Maybe they’re saving them all for the final?”

“I hope so,” I say. “If I get in, anyway.”

“Well, there’s only one game left, and Mark and Natalie only beat you by a few hundred points,” Hank reasons. “I’d say you’ve got a decent shot.”

Mark, who, even with a mask on, is looking a little too smug for my taste, especially considering how narrow his victory was, leads the way up to the audience section with Natalie and London trailing behind.

“Great game, you three,” Hank says. “That was a tough board.”

“It really was,” London agrees. “Honestly, I’m happy with my fifty grand. I’m kind of glad it’s over.”

“Oh, god, I wish it was over for me,” Natalie agrees. “That was so stressful.”

Mark risks pulling his mask down when the producers aren’t looking to pop a stick of gum into his mouth, and he congratulates everyone as he chews. “I’m so scared to face you in the finals, Mickey,” he says.

“You never know,” I reply. “You might not have to.”

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