Alternates: Chapter 4

Chapter Four

“Are you still cold?” Joan asks. The three of us are sitting alone in the audience section of the empty sound stage. The monitors above us are playing a silent live stream of what’s happening on the Q set. If I look up right now, I’ll see Annalise flashing a peace sign as she stands next to Cab Cabrini, which is why I don’t look up. Yasmin has vanished again and left us with a tall woman in a security guard uniform who definitely has better things to do than mind us. She’s playing a match-three game on her phone and paying us no attention, and we’ve taken the opportunity to sit beside each other rather than spacing ourselves all the way apart. We talk with our heads in close, Rafa on the left, Joan on the right, and me in the middle.

“No, I’m fine, this sweatshirt is warm,” I tell Joan.

“You’re fine?” she asks.

“I’m not,” Rafa says. “Cab Cabrini is one of the biggest connections in the industry. It’s absurd that we aren’t allowed to meet him. If I’d have known they were going to treat the three of us like second-class citizens, I wouldn’t have come.”

“I think I would have,” Joan says, her voice sounding much farther off than it did a second ago, like she’s reading lines. “Even getting to be an alternate speaks very highly of our competence. And I’m meeting people I never would have known otherwise.”

“I’m not saying that meeting you two isn’t worth a little humiliation,” Rafa says, raising an eyebrow that suggests maybe he is saying that. “Only that my self-esteem and career are worth more than a thousand dollars and some - admittedly - delicious tacos.”

“I wish they wouldn’t have dangled half a million in front of us before telling us we were alternates,” I say. “I think it would have stung less if we’d known up front that we weren’t competing. Or getting to meet Cab. Which is completely unfair, you’re right, Rafa. Even for those of us who aren’t trying to get into TV full-time, meeting someone you grew up watching is still a big deal. It’s not like it’s more effort for the producers to let us meet him, too. They could have just let us hang out on set for that part.”

“But they didn’t.” Rafa stands up, stretches his arms over his head, leans side to side, rolls his head until his neck pops. He turns to me and Joan. “There’s always sabotage.”

“There is always sabotage,” I agree, keeping my tone light and joking. “Although I thought that was Plan C.”

“And what would you say Plan B is, Mickey? Sit around here and complain about how The Q hates us?”

“You make a good point,” I concede. His tone is a little accusatory for my taste, but the point is still good. And I want to say I’m not considering it, but I am, because when you’re only under an arbitrary cutoff by two points it’s hard to argue that everybody else deserves to be here more than you do, especially when The Q runs through you like blood does. Only one third of these kids are even going to move onto the semifinals, so it’s not as if I’d be robbing them of their big dream, statistically, if I replaced one of them. They’d even get to keep their twenty-five grand minimum payout. And I could come home and tell my dad what I did, and he’d get to watch me on TV. I bet he’d invite all the neighbors over for a watch party. I could go home just for that night and make tea for everyone and have my dad throw his arm around my shoulders when my introduction comes up onscreen. That’s my kid.

Joan shakes her head. “You two aren’t serious.”

Rafa doesn’t laugh, but I do, saying, “Are you telling me we’ve got to move sabotage down to Plan D?”

“Or E,” she replies. “Maybe even F. As nice as it would be to be treated like contestants, I don’t think sabotage is worth the risk, even for that much money. I think it would just stress me out to have to make decisions about that money.”

“That’s a fair point.” I can think of a lot of things I’d do with hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I understand where she’s coming from.

“Besides,” she says, “Plan C - or F at this point - isn’t the kind of thing we could just do because we’re upset. We’d get caught right away.”

“Maybe you would,” Rafa replies, although there’s warmth in his voice.

“The risk just isn’t worth it without a good reason,” she continues. I feel like I can see the machinery in her brain whirring away again. “And I’m sure that reason is different for all of us. But unless we’re all completely serious-”

Before Joan can finish her thought, her whole seat begins vibrating, letting out a low, droning buzz. She jumps and scrambles for her back pocket to silence her phone.

“Oh, no,” she whispers, casting an anxious look at the two of us, then the security officer, then back to us. “I thought I turned it off all the way. I don’t want to get in trouble for-”

“You won’t,” Rafa assures her. “I’m pretty sure Robocop over there doesn’t care.”

Joan risks a glance at the screen. “It’s my mother. She never calls unless it’s important.”

“Just go find a bathroom so nobody sees you with the phone and take the call,” Rafa says. “If the producers come back we’ll tell them you’re in the bathroom. They don’t have to know why.”

“Are you sure?”

Rafa and I nod. Joan gives us a nod in return and creeps out of the room, holding her phone to her ear as she does so. The security guard doesn’t even look up: not at the sound of a toilet flushing and a sink running somewhere behind us, not at the sound of Rafa banging his elbow on an armrest, not at the sound of Rafa swearing because of the armrest-elbow collision. Not even when Joan comes back a few minutes later, in the middle of Rafa absolutely demolishing me in a best four out of seven rock-paper-scissors game despite his bruised elbow, with her thick TV makeup half-washed off her cheeks in wet waterfalls and her eyes staring dead ahead into the middle distance like she’s seen a ghost.

“What happened?” I ask her. “Is your mom okay?”

Joan’s eyes land on mine, and I feel as if they’re burrowing into my head with their intensity. Suddenly she squeezes them shut, sniffles, chokes something back. She speaks with a catch in her throat. “My sisters. Diane was driving and Francis was in the passenger seat. A truck ran a red light and…”

“Oh, lord,” Rafa says.

“Are they - alright?”

“They’re alive,” Joan says, answering the question I was really asking. “They’re in the hospital, but they’re okay. Diane just got a concussion and some internal bruising, but Francis broke a couple of ribs…” She trails off, still sniffling. I open my arms, not knowing what else to do, and Joan huddles close to me, burying her face in my chest. I rub her back until her sniffling subsides. She takes a few deep breaths.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Rafa says.

“I know,” Joan says to my chest. “My mom said the doctors said so. They’re so strong, both of them, and broken bones and concussions heal. I’m just afraid.”

“Of course,” I say. “Are you going to fly home early to see them?”

Joan pulls back, leaving the last of her makeup on my sweatshirt, and shakes her head. Her voice sounds far away again. “I’d have to pay for my own flight home - remember that part in the travel contract we had to sign? - and it’s not as if I have the money for a last-minute flight just laying around. I think that would be something like five hundred dollars. Even if I did, I’d rather spend it on Diane and Francis. There are - there are going to be so many medical bills.” She swallows, takes a deep breath, and concludes, “My only option is the flight The Q booked for me.”

“Joan, that’s awful. I’m sure if you talked to Morty he’d help you reschedule,” I say. “If you tell him about the medical bills and everything. I mean, these are some incredibly extenuating circumstances.”

She looks up at me. The fluorescent lights above us glint off her glasses so I can’t see her eyes. She takes another long, deep breath, then sits up and turns to Rafa.

“Are you actually serious?” she asks.

“About what?”

“About plan C.”

Rafa doesn’t hesitate. I can tell he’s flashing us that bright sharp smile underneath his mask. “Dead serious.”

“Good.” She rounds on me. “Mickey, what about you?”

My eyes flick back and forth between them like I’m watching a tennis match. “You guys. No. Joan, you just said -”

“I said it wasn’t worth it if we didn’t have a good reason. But if I’m going to stay here,” Joan says, her eyes burning into me, “I’m going to make the most of my time. I’m not going to lose this opportunity to help my sisters. I’m not going to sit in this room all day and watch things happen to other people.”

“But you don’t have to stay here -”

“Yes, I do.” Her voice is fierce. There’s fire in her eyes. Her eyebrows arch up her forehead and one of her braids has started to come loose. I want, suddenly, to reach up and tuck those strands behind her ear, but now is definitely not the time.

I remember her telling us yesterday that her sisters are her best friends.

“But - wouldn’t it help your sisters more to be there for them?” I ask. I know it sounds weak. Of course it sounds weak. Part of me wants it to sound weak.

“It would help them more to have half a million dollars,” Rafa says, acid in his voice.

“It would,” Joan agrees. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“Technically I don’t think sabotage is ever -”

“It is,” Joan insists, her tone rising into the back of her throat, strident. “Mickey, it is right now. It is.”

“If we’re going to do this,” Rafa says, voice low and smooth and slippery, a perfect contrast to Joan, “we need you, Mickey. Joan said it yesterday - you scored the highest of the three of us, so they’ll put you on first. Joan can’t go on until you do.”

“And what about you?” I ask.

“I’m going on too.”

“But you don’t -”

Joan nods. “He is. It’s mutually assured destruction. The only way to prevent one of us reporting the others is if we’re all involved. If we go down, we go down together.”

“Did you plan this? How do you both already-”

Rafa rolls his eyes. “No, dumbass. Just be logical, Mickey. Think about it for a second.”

I think about it for a second. I lower my voice to a whisper, casting a look over my shoulder for the security guard, not that she would care - but she’s gone. We’re alone. I whisper anyway. “But that means we have to get three people out of the competition. Won’t that start to look really, really suspicious?”

“It will if we try to Tonya Harding them all,” Rafa replies, “but not if we each do something different, at different times. They’re going to be hyper-vigilant for anybody who seems sick, and they sure as hell won’t let anyone take their mask off to compete if they’ve got anything resembling COVID symptoms. There are a lot of ways to fake an outbreak.”

“I don’t want anyone to get actually hurt,” I protest. “Like, inconvenienced, maybe, but I won’t -”

Rafa rolls his eyes at me again. “That’s why we’re not going to Tonya Harding anyone.”

Up on the monitors, the contestants are playing a practice game. Someone’s podium lights up green - a correct response - and Cab Cabrini says something that must be a joke, because the camera cuts to all three contestants laughing uproariously. Without the audio feed, their open mouths and squeezed-shut eyes and shaking shoulders could be anything. Laughter. Weeping. A scream. It occurs to me that not letting the alternates participate in the practice game is setting us up for failure if we ever do get to go on the show. It occurs to me that they’ve set us up for failure in a lot of ways.

It’s for a good cause. It’s for Joan’s family. It’s for family.

Even after my student loans are paid and my savings account is padded and I’ve started a retirement fund, I could buy my dad a lot of green tea with five hundred thousand dollars.

“Fine,” I say. “Who?”

In the afternoon twenty-seven contestants pile into the empty sound stage that used to hold Race To The Bottom and now only holds us, chattering excitedly about their practice games, their strengths and weaknesses, who the best players were, how nice Cab was. Yasmin follows them in, reminding them in high-pitched, exhausted tones to please stay six feet apart. People are making sightseeing plans, dinner plans, send-that-meme-in-the-group-chat plans. I get up and grab my bag and make eye contact with Annalise, who is reaching down to grab hers.

“I didn’t realize you’re an alternate,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

She turns away.

“Keep an eye on your emails!” Yasmin shouts. “If you’re competing in tomorrow’s group, your call time is 8:30! For everyone watching, it’s 9:30!”

Rafa, Joan, and I have taken care to position ourselves apart from each other as the herd of contestants leaves. I feel like I’m in that part in every heist movie where the team walks out of the casino one at a time with nobody the wiser. I hope we don’t get to the part in a heist movie where the police interrogate the team separately. The thing is, I don’t really know for sure - it’s not like I’m an expert on California law - but I don’t think the plans we’ve made could get us arrested, not if we deny, deny, deny. It’s all simple mistakes and unfortunate coincidences. Things you could buy at a grocery store.

As the herd moves out of the studio and into the sunshine, making our slow collective way off the lot, I feel a hand on my elbow. “Hey!” Keeley says. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Tonight as in now or tonight as in dinnertime?”

“Either! Or both? I don’t know your life. I was wondering if you wanted to hang out.”

“You don’t have plans?”

As we step onto the sidewalk outside the Decameron Pictures gates, Keeley takes her mask off and grins at me. “Not unless you do! You’re cool and I feel like we haven’t really gotten to hang out except a little bit at dinner.”

From behind me, I hear someone clear their throat loudly. I turn. Joan.

“I have to run to the Joe’s Foods for some snacks,” I tell Keeley, turning back to her, “but I’m free if you want to get dinner?”

“Of course! There’s supposed to be this Vietnamese place a few blocks away that’s apparently killer. My treat!”

“You don’t have to -”

Keeley shakes her head. “No, seriously. I’m really sorry if this is, like, a sore subject for you, but it’s ridiculous how they’re treating y’all. You have to be here just as long as we do and sit in that freezing cold studio all day and they’re giving you this tiny fraction of what they’re giving us. This is just a little bit of wealth redistribution.” She closes with an over-the-top wink, and I can’t help but feel touched.

“Thanks, Keeley. Seriously.”

“Don’t mention it! So I’ll meet you in the lobby? Seven? Seven-thirty?”

“Seven sounds perfect.”

Once everyone is going their separate ways at the hotel door, Joan and I catch up with each other on the corner. Rafa darts ahead of Laurel as she heads into the lobby, holding the door for her and pushing those heart glasses up his nose. He says something to her, and Laurel snorts and gives him a little shove with her shoulder. If that goes according to plan, they’ll get breakfast together tomorrow.

“So you’re getting dinner with Keeley,” Joan says. It’s not a question.

“Yeah,” I say. “She invited me. Oh, also, I thought we should stop at an ATM before Joe’s. I know it’s nothing really but I still don’t want to put this stuff on my card, you know?”

“That makes sense. Good idea. I think there’s an ATM outside the store.”

We walk to Joe’s in silence. I withdraw a pair of tens from the ATM. In what feels like a conciliatory attempt to make conversation, Joan says, “There are 292 ways to make change for a dollar, you know.”

“Really? I thought there were only 242.”

“It’s 292 with half-dollars. 293 if you count the dollar coin, but nobody does.”

“Oh.”

I don’t know what else to say to that. Joan, giving up on the conversation, turns to go inside, but I stop her.

“Hey. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Of course I am. And I hope you’re not thinking of backing out.” I study her face for signs of hesitation, but I can’t find any. Just fiery eyes. I sigh.

“No, I’m not.”

“Good.”

We walk through the sliding doors into the air-conditioned hum of the grocery store. Joe’s Foods isn’t crowded right now: a few older people wandering through the frozen section and a mom pushing her toddler in a cart down the produce aisle. Joan and I wander between the shelves, putting on-sale snacks into our basket more or less at random. We have a few ninety-nine cent bags of chips and an individually-wrapped hunk of maple fudge. Joan pauses over a package of off-brand fun-size candy bars.

“When I was little,” Joan says, “I used to go all out for Halloween. All three of us did. My parents didn’t get it, but they couldn’t stop us. We would coordinate our costumes - when I was eleven we were a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe, and I remember Francis was so angry with us because we made her be the wardrobe - and we would come home with so much candy we could barely carry it all.”

I giggle. “How did she even dress up as a wardrobe?”

“A cardboard box with arm holes. We painted doors and fancy doorknobs on it. She still has that box in her room.”

“God, Halloween is such a good holiday.”

“It’s my favorite,” Joan agrees. “My birthday is November first, actually, and when people asked I used to insist it was October thirty-second. Because I didn’t want Halloween to be over.”

“That’s kind of sad. I love my birthday. I would throw these big themed parties for the whole neighborhood. I did a game show theme one year, actually. My dad wrote all the questions.”

“That sounds fun. And it’s not sad. I love my birthday.” Joan raises her eyebrows. “Ten-thirty-two is my lucky number. I use it for everything.”

Once we have enough non-suspicious snacks, we pick up a bottle of soda from the cooler and a bottle of peanut oil cooking spray. We go through the self-checkout, only to realize it doesn’t take cash, so we pile everything back into our basket and get in line for a real cashier. She rings us up, disinterested, mask pulled down under her nose.

“Okay, so with tax, your total comes to ten dollars and thirty-two cents,” she says.

I knock my shoulder against Joan’s. She turns to look at me, we make eye contact, and both of us burst out laughing. We’re still giggling when we emerge back onto the sidewalk. Joan takes her mask off as I swing the grocery bag over my shoulder. Flyaway strands from her disintegrating braids frame her thin face.

“I’m going to be on the lookout for ten-thirty-twos in my everyday life now,” I say, taking slow breaths to calm down between my words. “I mean, that was fate.”

“It’s a sign of good luck for certain,” Joan agrees. “That means this is going to work out.”

“I really hope you’re right.”

Our silence is companionable as we get back to the hotel. I hand Joan the soda and some chips and keep the fudge and the cooking spray in the bag. Joan presses the elevator button.

“You’re on a high floor?”

“Yes,” she says, “the sixth.”

“Oh, I’m only on the third.”

“See you soon.”

“Yeah, I can swing by after dinner if we want to run through the plan again.”

Joan tilts her head, and the lenses of her glasses flash. “Right. Dinner.”

“I’ll be free at ten?”

“Sure.”

“Hey, Joan.”

“Yes?”

“You have - uh -” I feel like I’m not completely in control of my body as I reach out my hand, wrap a few strands of Joan’s loose hair between my fingers, and tuck them behind her ear. “Your braids,” I finish lamely, before turning and almost sprinting up the stairs.

What the fuck, why did I do that, why did I do that, what the fuck, Mickey, she’s going to think you’re a huge weirdo, which you evidently are, what the fuck.

I’m completely out of breath by the time I get to my room. I feel like I’ve just run a marathon. You can’t touch people’s hair just because they’re pretty! One of the only actual friends you’ve made here isn’t gonna talk to you anymore because you’re a huge weirdo who goes around fucking with people’s hair.

As I catch my breath, I realize I do have some small consolation. Joan may think I’m a crazy person, but she can’t stop talking to me. Not now. Not when we’ve got plans to execute.

But first, dinner.

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