Alternates: Chapter 2

Chapter Two

“Uh, no, I had not guessed that,” Rafa says. “Not even a little bit.”

“Will you tell us how we scored?” Joan asks.

“Yeah, what was the cutoff?” Rafa says. “And do we get to know why we didn’t make it? How was the audition even judged, anyway? You can’t put a number on charisma.”

“Now just hold on,” Morty says. “We’ll explain.”

“The scoring process is proprietary,” Yasmin says, “but we’re allowed to tell you which section you scored higher on and how you compared to the overall cutoff.”

“Well, do that, then,” Rafa says.

“Yes, please,” Joan echoes.

“Rafa, you scored much higher on the audition than on the knowledge test - relatively speaking, anyway, since you had to score high to even get to this point - so you were seven points below the cutoff overall. Joan, you got almost a perfect score on the knowledge test, but not on the audition, so you were four points below the cutoff,” Yasmin says, reading the numbers off her printout. “And McKinley -”

“Call me Mickey,” I say.

“Oh, yes, sure, Mickey. Let me make a note of that here. And are you the one with the pronouns?”

I feel a flash of annoyance as I’m forcibly transported back to my least favorite parts of college. Orientation week introduction circles where I’m the only one to share my pronouns while everyone looks on in what I’m sure is very well-meaning discomfort. Emailing professors in advance to warn them not to misgender me in front of the whole class and them doing it anyway.

Morty rolls his eyes at Yasmin’s faux pas and shakes his head with fond paternal disappointment, and my annoyance is quashed by another flash, this time of affection for Morty.

“Yes,” I tell the producers, “I am the one with the pronouns.”

“Do you want to know how you did?” Morty asks me. “You don’t have to.”

Do I? Rafa and Joan both look like they’re doing fine. Joan’s face betrays no surprise at having missed the mark on the audition, not that I’ve seen her face betray anything at all in the last ten minutes, and Rafa has propped a foot up on the bench next to him and is resting his chin on his knee, still grinning with those pointy white teeth. I don’t want to have to tell my dad that I didn’t make it, but I do have to, so I will, and when I do he’ll want to know why.

“Sure,” I say.

Yasmin consults her paper. “Mickey, you actually got the same exact score on the knowledge test and the audition. Which means you were two points under the cutoff. One point off on each.”

Oh.

“So!” Morty says. “With that out of the way, let’s talk about your responsibilities. You won’t be playing The Q, obviously, unless someone else is unable to play, but you’ll still come to the studio and watch the games with everyone else. You’ll still need to be tested for COVID, and we expect you to follow the same guidelines as the contestants. Plus, for your trouble, you guys are getting a thousand bucks each!”

“I thought it was twenty-five thousand?” Joan says.

“That’s for quarterfinalists,” Yasmin explains. “You aren’t actually playing the game. If something happens to a quarter- or semifinalist and you need to step in, you will of course get the twenty-five or fifty thousand dollar minimum, as will the contestant who was originally supposed to play. But if we don’t use you, you don’t receive contestant compensation because, strictly speaking, you’re not contestants.”

“But hey,” Morty cuts in, “a free trip to LA and a grand isn’t too shabby! Now, we’ll let you guys go catch up and make friends with everyone. See you bright and early tomorrow morning! And thanks for being here. The Q literally couldn’t happen - legally speaking - without you. Oh, and don’t forget to grab your water bottles!”

“Keep an eye on -”

“Our emails!” Rafa finishes the sentence for Yasmin, and she laughs. “Don’t worry,” he says, pushing his glasses up his nose, “we’ll be glued to our phones all night.”

“Like proper screenagers,” I add. “See you tomorrow.”

Rafa, Joan, and I put our masks back on and file into the lobby of the Jewel, not saying anything to each other. It’s a gorgeous hotel, one of the last beautiful Art Deco buildings finished before the stock market crash in 1929, with big filigreed windows and cream-and-black checkerboard tiles on the floor and marble fixtures. Behind the front desk, there are seating areas set off by accent rugs in neutral tones, contrasting the bright, rich crimsons and emeralds of the sofas and velvet-upholstered chairs. The woman who administered our COVID tests has a small folding table with three The Q-branded water bottles sitting on it. She waves us over, and we each take one in turn, thanking her as we do.

I wander over to one of the velvet chairs, this one as purple as a crushed blackberry, and collapse into it. I have to text my dad. I don’t want to text my dad. I’m pretty sure me being on the show means even more to him than it does to me. He’s been watching it longer, anyway - at least since Cab Cabrini took over hosting, which was back in the ‘80s. I turn my water bottle over and over in my hands, watching The Q’s logo rotate out of view and back into it. Getting to watch the entire Student Showcase live in the studio audience is incredibly cool. A couple months ago I think I would’ve paid a thousand dollars for the privilege, if I had a thousand dollars to pay, and now they’re giving it to me for free, for literally doing nothing. A free trip to LA and a grand.

Five hundred thousand dollars.

“Hey.” I look up. Rafa and Joan are sitting on the crimson sofa across from me. Joan is screwing the top back onto her water bottle. Rafa slouches down on the sofa and rests his feet on the coffee table between us. “This is bullshit,” he says.

“I’m inclined to agree,” I reply. “I mean, to be fair, Morty’s right about the trip to LA and the thousand dollars being a really good deal.”

Rafa scoffs. “Not as good of a deal as twenty-five grand. Or five hundred for that matter.”

“The money aside,” Joan says, prompting another scoff from Rafa, “I’m not sure how I feel. I think, to some extent, I’m relieved not to have to get up behind the podium. I always get so nervous I throw up before a Quiz Bowl competition, and those typically aren’t even on TV.”

“Haven’t you been competing since you were little?” I ask.

“Yes, and I’ve thrown up before almost all of them.”

“Why didn’t you quit?”

“I like winning more than I dislike throwing up.” She pauses, then continues, “Besides, it made my parents happy, and it was something my sisters and I did together.”

“Older or younger sisters?” I ask.

“One of each. Diane is older, Francis is younger. They’re my best friends.”

“That’s really nice. I always wanted -”

“I don’t even want to win,” Rafa announces, cutting me off. He remedies the situation with a shiny apology grin that does not, to me, anyway, feel the least bit apologetic. “I was just psyched to be on TV, is what I mean, although 25 grand would buy a much better agent than I have now. I’m an actor,” he explains, “and I’d like to actually get paid to do it someday, which means getting to make industry connections. Being on the show was supposed to be my entrance into the TV world. And I was counting on being able to put an episode of The Q in a reel. Or at least to be able to show it to my grandfather. He loves game shows.”

“So does my dad,” I say. “It’s gonna crush him when I tell him I’m not competing.”

“You don’t know that you’re not,” Joan reasons. “You were the closest to the cutoff, so it stands to reason that if anything happens to one of the real competitors, you’ll be the first one the producers pull in to replace them.”

Rafa takes his feet off the table and leans forward. “But what’s going to happen? We’re all vaccinated and we’ve all been getting tested constantly, so we know nobody’s sick. Unless someone is catastrophically stupid - which nobody is, because they’re all smart enough to be on The Q - I think we just have to sit back and watch. Much as it pains me to say that.”

I snort and say, “There’s always sabotage.”

Rafa lets out a laugh that’s warm and deep and bubbling, a laugh that shakes his whole body until even the curls on the top of his head bounce, and I feel myself laughing too, and I understand why he did so well on the audition.

“First of all, I don’t believe you could do it,” Rafa says, and the warmth toward him that bloomed in my chest just moments ago cools just as quickly.

“I certainly could,” I say, and my voice comes out sounding way too shrill and indignant for my taste. Backpedal, backpedal. “Not that I would. Also not that my hypothetical skills as a saboteur are relevant because I’m pretty sure anything we could do would be at least moderately illegal. So, y’know, maybe we can call it plan B.”

“It would be awfully difficult to do with all the distancing,” Joan says. “You couldn’t just trip them when they were going down the stairs and tell the producers it was an accident, because they’d ask why you were so close to them in the first place. It would raise too many questions. Maybe you could do something while we’re all here at the hotel and the rules are relaxed, but then you’d have the other contestants to reckon with…”

Joan trails off, peering at us with her eyes wide. I can practically see the gears and levers and cogs and steam working inside her head.

Rafa clears his throat. “I think Mickey was joking-”

“So we’ll call it plan C, at the most,” Joan finishes, dissolving into a fit of bright giggles. After a moment, Rafa and I join her.

“So what do we do now?” I ask.

As the last syllables leave my mouth, Rafa is already pulling out his phone. “I think everybody already got snacks,” he says, scrolling at lightning speed through what must be dozens of group chat messages already, “which means those of us who need a nap take one, and then all of us meet everybody else at Casa de Flores at 6:30 for, allegedly, the best tacos in California.”

I think I’ve gotten all the coffee out of my system at this point, and exhaustion is setting in, and my bed is huge and plush in the way only hotel beds ever are and covered in sheets so white they gleam, but I still can’t doze off. I find myself obsessively refreshing the new group chat - people splitting off from the crowd to make their own dinner plans so Casa de Flores doesn’t have to accommodate thirty college students, people asking each other for outfit opinions for tomorrow’s promo shoot, people already making jokes about the most absurd purchases they’d make with half a million dollars. Amid the bonhomie, a message from Annalise: does anybody know who the alternates are?

I turn my phone off and stare at the ceiling. If I were at school I’d be studying right now, watching old episodes of The Q online or calling my dad to make him drill me on movie trivia or trying to beat my own high score on the geography app I downloaded to prepare. I’m sure the real contestants are all in their rooms, too, napping with NPR podcasts in the background so they absorb information even while they sleep. But I’m not going to be on the show, so I don’t do that. I don’t know what I should be doing. It’s been weeks since I filled my free time with anything but The Q.

I’ve just about decided to pull out one of the books I was too wired to read at the airport - an old mystery novel I picked up for free while the library at school was getting rid of half of its stock to make way for God only knows what, some new expansion of the medical library, I think, which is no help to me or my religion major - when my phone buzzes. It’s a text from my dad.

How’s it going, kiddo? Anything you can tell me, or is it all classified?

My dad calls me kiddo an awful lot. He used to have other pet names and nicknames for me, but a lot of them were things like ‘princess’ and he stopped using all of them when I came out. For whatever reason, though, I don’t think he ever came up with anything besides kiddo and now he uses it more than he uses my name. It always makes me smile when he does.

I can’t tell him. Not yet.

After a few moments of phrasing and rephrasing, I send back, it’s awesome so far! i’ve met some cool people already and the promo shoots are happening tomorrow. gonna do some reading right now, ttyl!

None of that’s a lie, anyway.

The mystery novel isn’t great - it’s about a production of Hamlet descending into actual murder, but it’s foreshadowing the director doing it so hard that there’s no way that’s the actual twist, so my money is on the new girlfriend, or possibly the understudy - but it manages to keep my attention until I can plausibly start getting ready for dinner. I close the curtains, strip off my clothes, which still have that particular airport scent clinging to them, and run the shower until it’s piping hot and the entire bathroom is steamed up. Only then do I get in. I’d never do that at home (my dad would have a conniption about the water bill) or at school (communal showers make it rude to spend more than ten minutes in there), which is part of why I enjoy hotels so much. All the normal rules are out the window when The Q is paying for your shower. They’re paying for our everything, actually - the hotel, the flights, the shuttle to and from the airport, even our food. Morty wasn’t kidding about the trip being free. They gave us each five hundred dollars to spend on meals for the week, although I’ve never been to Los Angeles before, so I’m not really sure how much that is relative to the average price of a meal around here. Especially since we can’t cook, not that we’d want to even if we could except to save money, because there are so many restaurants around here. That’s one of the things I would do before the trip: when I physically couldn’t cram another fact into my brain I’d scope out the area around the studio on my maps app and take note of all the food that sounded good to me.

I let the water turn my skin bright red as I wash the day off of myself. I’m exhausted, I still feel unsteady even though there’s no more caffeine in me, I miss my dad, I missed the cutoff to be a real contestant by two points, and I’m not going to get to be on The Q. But real contestant or alternate, five hundred grand or one grand, The Q is paying for a hot shower and the best tacos in the city. 

It’s still not enough.

But at least it’s a start.

Once my fingers have started to prune I step out of the shower and shake my head like a dog. If I towel-dry my hair it refuses to lie flat for the rest of the day, so the best I can do is shaking out some of the water and combing it back to dry the rest of the way. Which I do, smushing the cowlicks into place with my hands when the comb isn’t enough. A little eyeliner, a button-down (green) and a pair of jeans (blue) pulled at random from my suitcase, and I’m ready to take on, if not the world, at least a bunch of other college students.

I think, at 6:15, I’m the first one in the lobby, but then I spot Annalise on one of the sofas, with her giant sweatshirt tied around her waist to reveal a tie-dyed crop top. Her mask, also tie-dyed, matches her shirt. I wonder if she bought them as a set or dyed them herself.

“Hey!” she calls, waving me over. I perch on the arm of the chair across from her.

“You’re Annalise, right?” I say.

“Yep. And you’re - oh, wait, shit, don’t tell me - Joan?”

I shake my head. “Mickey. Joan’s the girl with the black braid and the glasses.”

“Right! She was sitting across from you. God, I hope I know who some of you are by the end of this.”

“You will,” I assure her. “Or you won’t, but if you don’t I bet nobody else will either.”

More and more of us wander into the lobby until the sitting area where Annalise and I are is packed with college kids. Rafa sits down in the chair I’m perched on, and as we make eye contact his eyes narrow a little before he tilts his head and raises an eyebrow at me. I barely catch it above the flash of his glasses and I can’t tell if it’s mocking or serious. His mask, I notice, has vampire teeth dripping with blood printed on it. Across the coffee table amid the crowd I spot Joan, listening politely to a tall, wide, freckled girl who’s gesticulating wildly. The noise level in the lobby is rising to a dull roar as conversations compete with each other for the air. I risk a peek over my shoulder and see the concierge staring daggers at us.

“Hey!” I say, clapping my hands together. The noise mostly dies as people turn to look at me. “Is this all of us?”

“I think so,” Hank says. He’s let his hair out of its bun for the occasion and it streams over his shoulders in tangled waves. “Mfoniso said not to wait up - she still needs to shower - so we can head over.”

“Great. In that case, let’s go. I’m starving.”

As we move in a herd down the sidewalk, I marvel at the buildings around here. With the exception of the Jewel, which rises like a brick-and-gold angel above the skyline, the tallest things in this part of town are palm trees. Houses and offices and restaurants are low-slung, their roofs gentle terra-cotta slopes, everything looking like an old Spanish mission or a silent film. In the distance I see a water tower lit up with floodlights. Through the fronds of the palms between me and it I see that the water tower has ‘Decameron Pictures’ splashed across the side in glossy black paint. The production company that owns The Q.

I point toward it, nudging Rafa, who’s walking beside me, with my shoulder. “We’ll be there tomorrow,” I say. “Well, not in the water tower, hopefully, but you get what I mean.”

Rafa’s eyes twinkle as he retorts, “We might be in the water tower. Who knows what they’ve got planned for the promo shoots?”

From behind us, Keeley leans forward. “Oh, haven’t y’all heard? If you get a Q Factor question wrong they throw you in the water tower.”

“To think about where you went wrong in life,” I add.

Rafa clears his throat and says, in a surprisingly good impression of Morty’s booming voice with its expansive California vowels, “You can come out when you remember the capital of Micronesia.”

“Palikir,” Keeley and I say at the same time.

Rafa’s eyebrows flash up. “Damn,” he said. “I picked one I thought nobody would know.”

“I spent last week memorizing all the world capitals,” Keeley says.

I shrug. “I only know some of them, but Palikir came up in the geography category like three days ago. It’s one of the ones that The Q really likes to ask about for some reason. When you binge-watch the show you start to be like, ‘why are they so big on Micronesia? And Nelson Mandela?’”

“And the war of 1812,” Keeley adds. “I swear to God the Final Factor is always about the war of 1812.”

In front of us, the big girl with the freckles who was talking to Joan turns around and says, “It’s the worst. It’s always something obscure about the war, too, never just the straightforward ‘who was this general’ or ‘who was the president at the time’ stuff that they do with the rest of world history. I mean, Russian history in particular gets so shafted -”

“Oh, it’s American bias for sure,” Keeley eagerly agrees, cutting the girl off. Maybe to forestall another Catherine the Great debate, I’m not sure, although if she did that on purpose I’m awfully grateful. Mostly because I don’t want it to be obvious how little I know about Russian history. “But,” Keeley continues, “I guess when most of your viewing audience is Americans -”

“Older Americans,” I add. “The commercial breaks are all hearing aids and life insurance.”

“- Older Americans, you’ve got to put in some American bias or else they’ll accuse you of being a communist or something.”

“A Quommunist? Like the Q, but communist - never mind.” The girl rolls her eyes at herself and says, “I’m Laurel, by the way.”

Casa de Flores already has a long table set out for the (as it turns out) fourteen of us under a canopy on the sidewalk, and by the time we sit down at it, I’ve introduced myself to several more people and our conversation about The Q’s favorite topics has swelled to encompass half the group. There’s a nip in the air that wasn’t there when we left the hotel. I make a beeline for a chair directly under one of the electric patio heaters. Across from me is Annalise, who is once again drowning in her giant rugby sweatshirt, and Joan is next to her. Rafa sits down on one side of me and Keeley takes the other. Once we’re all seated, we take our masks off - Keeley’s is printed with tiny rubber ducks - and she grins at me with her whole face, round pink cheeks and, I notice for the first time, a chipped front tooth.

“What happened there?” I ask, indicating my own front tooth with my tongue.

“Oh, that’s such a gross story,” she says. “I’ll tell it after dinner, but I don’t want to spoil your appetite.”

“Give me a preview, then.”

Keeley leans in, her silver-blond hair falling in a curtain toward me, and I can smell that she’s been using the same hotel shampoo as I’ve been. Bergamot sage, the little bottle said. It smells wonderful on her. “It involves my gums being cut open,” she whispers like she’s sharing a terrible secret. I grin and recoil theatrically.

“Scandalous,” I say. “Can’t wait to hear the rest of it.”

“Hey, Mickey,” Rafa says, elbowing me. He indicates Laurel, sitting across from him. “Do you know who the alternates are? We’ve been trying to figure it out.”

Rafa’s mask is dangling from his ear by one of its loops, and my eyes dart down to the blood dripping from those vampire fangs. There’s a challenge glittering in his eyes, and the faint light of the patio heater reflects off of his glasses, throwing heart-shaped patterns onto the table in front of him.

I force myself to shrug, hoping it looks easy and not like all my bones have suddenly turned to gelatin. “I don’t think everyone will know until the actual competition starts.” Not technically a lie.

Rafa nods slowly. “Makes sense.”

Before I can say anything else (or, as I kind of want to, surreptitiously kick him under the table for putting me on the spot like that), a waiter in a t-shirt patterned with marigolds comes to hand out the menus. He nods at all of us as we pass them around the table.

“Hi,” he says, “I’ll be your server tonight. I’ll get you folks started with a round of ice waters - you’ll see the drinks and cocktails are on the back of the menu - but in the meantime, I also wanted to ask about any dietary restrictions?”

“I’m super allergic to peanuts and tree nuts,” Annalise says. “Like, I can’t touch anything that they’ve touched or else I swell up and my throat closes.”

“Oh, damn, that’s rough,” says a boy I don’t know.

“It’s fine. I have an EpiPen for it and everything.”

“I’ll let the chef know,” the waiter cuts in. “Anything else?”

“I’m gluten free - Celiac,” Laurel says.

“I’m vegetarian,” Hank adds.

“Great, our vegetarian and gluten free options are labeled - there’s a key at the bottom of the menu. I’ll grab that and those waters.”

When he walks away from the table, I turn back to the seat next to me, expecting Keeley, but she’s not sitting next to me anymore. Joan is.

“Oh! You weren’t there a second ago,” I say to her. She stares me steadily down with crinkles at the corners of her eyes, although her mouth is set flat. Her hair is still braided, but some of the strands have come loose and are floating around her cheekbones. She’s added a chunky white cable-knit sweater to her outfit. Belatedly, her mouth catches up with her eyes, and she smiles and shakes her head.

“No, I wasn’t. I was cold, so I asked Keeley to switch seats with me. This is closer to the heater.”

I glance at Keeley, who shrugs her shoulders (clad, by the way, in a linen top with flowy sleeves, so thin I can see through the fabric at the shoulders and wrists) and then back at Joan and her sweater.

I open my mouth, not sure what’s going to come out of it, when Laurel saves me from myself by leaning across the table.

“So, Mickey,” she says, “how much do you know about the Russian monarchy?”

“Oh, do not drag them into this,” calls a boy from the far side of the table. “You don’t - wait, sorry, I know Laur just said it, but what’s your name?”

“Mickey.”

“You don’t have to answer that, Mickey,” he says. “Also, hi, I’m Jake.”

“Oh, we haven’t even done introductions!” Keeley says. “Can we go around and do name and college and stuff? Oh, and pronouns!”

The first few people introduce themselves - Keeley starts, then Annalise and Laurel, then a serious, sandy-haired boy named Duncan - but we quickly get off track. By the time we finish going around the table, with some diversions for people realizing they have friends at each other’s colleges and long explanations of weird nicknames, the waiter has come and gone and come back with food for all and cocktails for almost as many. My mojito is weak and a bit too heavy on the lime juice for my taste, but my tacos al pastor are melt-in-your-mouth delicious.

“I was skeptical,” Keeley says through a mouthful of birria, “but these might actually be the best tacos in LA.”

“They’re certainly the best tacos I’ve ever had in LA,” I say.

“Have you ever been to LA before?”

“Nope.”

Laughter - Keeley’s, and then everybody’s - spreads over me like the warmth of the patio heater, and I laugh along and feel my shoulders shake in time, and the laughter feeds on itself until we’re all out of breath and Joan is leaning into my side with a bad case of the hiccups, and as soon as we get back to the hotel, I think, I’m going to tell my dad about this. Just this part.

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