Alternates: Chapter 5

Chapter Five

I meet Keeley in the lobby at seven sharp. She shows me the way to the Vietnamese restaurant, checking her maps app frequently and keeping up a constant stream of words the entire time, which is good for me because my head is still reeling from everything I’ve been part of today. All I have to do is smile and nod or say “that’s bullshit” at the appropriate places and she lights up with a chipped-tooth smile and keeps talking.

We sit at a tall two-top on the curb outside the restaurant and order summer rolls and pork noodles and Vietnamese pancakes.

“...and I just feel like everyone is getting so intense now that the actual competition is coming,” Keeley is saying once I finally zone back in. I’ve been listening, just not processing, and now I think my brain has finally caught up with my ears. “Like, I thought Annalise and I were friends but now she won’t even talk to me. She just keeps saying she needs to cram.”

I perk up my ears. “Is Annalise competing tomorrow?”

“Yeah, she is, and she’s making sure I know it. It’s like, most of us aren’t going to win, but everybody’s talking strategy and analyzing each other’s weaknesses. It’s so creepy. I kind of wish we could all just hang out like we did last night and not have to treat each other as enemies.”

“If it helps,” I say, doing my best at a self-deprecating smile, “I don’t plan on treating any of you as enemies.”

Keeley scoffs. “And thank goodness for that! I bet you’d wipe the floor with all of us if they let you compete.”

“Only in a trivia competition. Have you seen Laurel’s biceps? I bet she could crush most of us.”

“Like watermelons!”

“Oh, okay, can I ask you to finally tell me the chipped-tooth story? I feel like I’ve almost heard it about a dozen times but you’ve never actually gotten to tell it.”

“Oh my God, yes, I totally forgot! Okay, so I’m fourteen, and nobody has ever made a single good decision at fourteen years old.”

The story is indeed as gross, and the food indeed as killer, as Keeley promised. I savor the warm aromatics in my pork noodles and the relish with which Keeley talks about the chain they had to put on one of her teeth to pull it down into a gap in her mouth and the way she and the girl she took to the junior prom almost got stuck together, and the night is warm, much warmer than yesterday, and the cool snap of a summer roll in my mouth sends a peace running down my throat and into my stomach as I swallow, and for a while I get to forget about everything: my dad, Joan, Cab Cabrini, Rafa, Laurel, even half a million dollars. It’s just me and this food and a girl with a chipped tooth.

“Okay, you hyped it up, but that was even grosser than I was expecting,” I say as Keeley wraps up her orthodontic horror story.

“I know, right? Terrible teeth run in my family so we all have stories like that every family reunion. My little cousin Toby has to wear headgear.”

“Like a nerd in an ‘80s movie?”

“Exactly like a nerd in an ‘80s movie. Do you want dessert?”

I’m full, but she’s paying. “I wouldn’t say no.”

“Okay, good, because I looked online and they apparently serve sweet corn pudding here and I am dying to try it.”

I like the sweet corn pudding, and Keeley doesn’t, so she orders a scoop of fried ice cream instead, which comes right as I’m finishing my dessert, so Keeley insists I try a bite of hers, too, and we stay and talk after the check comes and then it takes forever for our server to get it back to us even when Keeley does put her card down, and we get a little lost on the way back to the hotel because I think I remember the way back without the maps app to guide me but then I definitely don’t, and by the time we enter the lobby of the Jewel, Keeley’s cheeks pinker than ever from the cool night breeze and the laughter in her throat, it’s already five after ten.

“Oh, shit,” I say, checking my watch. “I’m late.”

“For what? Bedtime? Because if you wanted to, you’re totally welcome to stay at mine tonight.”

I shake my head, aiming for rueful, before I can even process the fact that I think Keeley just propositioned me. “Alternates meeting,” I say. “I promised I’d be there.”

“This late at night? Yikes. Well, if you’re free after…”

She leaves the sentence dangling, and I nod. “What floor are you on?”

“Sixth.”

I press the elevator button and tell her, “That’s where I’m going. We’re meeting in Joan’s room.”

“Then I’ll walk you to her door!” She waves me into the elevator with a flourish. “After you, sir.”

“Oh, I’m a sir now?”

“I wasn’t sure which one you wanted, and ma’am is so stuffy and weird. Like you’re a governess.”

“No, you’re right, sir is definitely better.”

When I knock on Joan’s door, Rafa opens it, and he looks me up and down and says, “Lost track of time?”

“Yeah, sorry. We got lost on our way home. My fault.”

His eyebrows flick up, and there’s a sharp smile in his voice. “No worries. Joan was just kicking my ass at rock-paper-scissors.”

From behind him, sitting cross-legged on the bed, Joan waves.

“Okay, well, hopefully I’ll see you later?” Keeley says, and I nod.

“If I’m not completely exhausted, yeah. Are you competing tomorrow?”

“Oh, my god, no. No offense, but I wouldn’t be inviting you over if I had to play tomorrow. I'm on day two.”

“Okay, amazing. Good night, Keeley.”

She winks at me and says, “Text me if you’re coming over! Good night, Sir Mickey.”

Rafa shuts the door behind me as I take my mask off. Joan shoots me a look from her place on the bed and says, “You promised you’d be here at ten.”

“I know, I’m sorry. We really did get lost.”

She sighs. “Well, I’m glad you made it back okay.” She says this with the air of a loving but long-suffering wife whose husband just got back from The War, full of shell shock and expecting her to keep the house in his impossible standard of order. I suddenly feel very bad about being late. But, like a loving but long-suffering wife, Joan pats the spot on the bed beside her anyway, and I go over and sit next to her.

“Let’s talk strategy,” Rafa says. “I still think we need to come up with a backup for the pop plan.”

“We don’t,” Joan insists, saying it so quickly that I realize they’ve been having this conversation for a long time now. “It said, in the medical forms we signed, that we agreed to have nasal swabs administered on ourselves and we agreed to self-administer rapid tests. You can fake a rapid test result using soda. A bunch of kids at my sister’s high school were doing it to get out of classes this year.”

“Just because it was in our contracts, that’s not a guarantee it will happen.”

“They wouldn’t put it in there if they didn’t plan on using it.”

I cut in and say, “Can we save that for day two, or even the semis? We’re alternates until the finals hit, and that isn’t until day four. If we come up with a better plan in the meantime, great, but if we don’t, I mean, it’s better than not having a plan at all, right?”

Rafa crosses his arms. “If we save it, that means I get stuck waiting for it. They’ll put you two on before me.”

“So I’ll do the puff and you’ll do the lunch switch tomorrow, since we’ve got both of those ready to go,” I say. “What was it you said earlier, Rafa? There’s lots of ways to fake an outbreak, or something? If we do them both on the same day, then the producers will think there’s an outbreak of something, whether it’s COVID or not, and then they’ll be way more likely to have us do rapid tests. Right?”

Rafa and Joan look at each other. Joan shrugs, and Rafa turns to me with what I’m beginning to think of as his Hot Vampire smile. Maybe it’s just that mask he wore digging into my brain, but, I mean, he looks like he wants to drink my blood, and I, like any human being with eyes, would probably let him.

“Good enough for me,” Rafa says. “For now, anyway. Unless and until I, in my infinite wisdom, come up with something better.”

“Your wisdom isn’t even infinite enough to win a game of RPS,” Joan points out.

“I must have won at least one.”

“No.”

I move to get off the bed. “I’ll get going, then, if there’s nothing else we have to do. I have the peanut oil all ready to go - I’ll spray it tomorrow morning and do an extra spritz during the day if I need to.”

“Are you sure she’s going tomorrow?” Rafa asks.

“Definitely. I found out from Keeley.”

Rafa smirks at me. “Oh, so that was recon. Nice.”

“So unless there’s anything else…” I put a hand on the bed behind me to push myself up, but I feel Joan’s hand, soft and long-fingered, on mine, and I stop.

“Stay a little while,” she says.

“How long?”

“What time is it?”

I check my watch. “Ten-nineteen.”

“A couple more minutes.” Her fingers squeeze my hand, just a little. “Stay until ten-thirty-two, at least.”

I feel a little thrill of panic run through me, the same one that propelled me up the stairs earlier tonight, and I laugh to cover up my nerves and say, “Okay, sure, but know that I’m an even worse RPS player than Rafa is.”

She takes her hand off my hand. “That’s a low bar. I may have to see for myself.”

“Well, night, guys,” Rafa says, stretching his arms over his head and yawning like a cat, mouth wide open. “My infinite wisdom and I are off to bed.”

“Good night!” Joan says, waving him cheerfully out the door.

She and I play several rounds of Rock-Paper-Scissors. She destroys me in the first several, but as I watch her lovely hands form the shapes, I begin to pick up on something. She likes to throw paper twice in a row, but only ever throws rock once at a time, and she’ll get into long runs where she throws nothing but scissors. Rafa played completely at random, or at least I couldn’t figure out any kind of pattern while I was playing him, which is maybe why I kept losing, but whether Joan’s aware of it or not, she has a method. Paper, paper, scissors, scissors, scissors, scissors, rock. After a few more rounds I’m reliably beating her.

“I thought you said you were bad at this,” she says as I bop her outstretched fingers with my fist: rock beats scissors.

“I usually am. I think I just have you figured out.”

I look up from her hand, still in scissor position, to find that her wide, unselfconscious eyes are fixed on me.

“What exactly have you figured out?” she asks.

“Well, if I tell you that, you’ll start winning again. And, I’ll be honest, I kind of like having the upper hand.” I tap her hand again with my fist. “Literally.”

Joan’s non-scissors hand is twirling the end of her braid between her fingers, and she’s still staring at me. My throat feels tight when I swallow and I try very hard not to think about the fact that she’s probably thinking about me tucking her hair behind her ear earlier. To continue not thinking about it, I glance down at my watch.

“Hey,” I say. “It’s ten-thirty-two.”

I show Joan my watch, and she smiles. “Make a wish.”

“That’s eleven-eleven.”

“Not for me.”

I close my eyes and consider wishing for my dad to see me on The Q, but it seems silly to wish for something that I plan on making happen. Like wishing for a burger when you’re already in the drive-through. It defeats the purpose of wishing. So I wish for half a million dollars instead.

That’s more reasonable.

Joan’s looking at me again when I open my eyes. “What did you wish for?” she asks.

“Won’t it not come true if I tell you? Or does ten-thirty-two have different rules?”

“I haven’t thought of all the rules yet, I suppose.”

“I should really go.”

She drops her gaze. “Right. Have fun.”

“I think I might just go to bed, honestly. It’s been a really long day and I’m kind of exhausted and all three of us will need our brains fully on if we’re gonna pull this off tomorrow.”

“You’re right. Sleep well.”

“You too. And - it’s hard to believe this is happening.”

Joan shakes her head. “No, it’s not. I need to take care of my sisters. You and Rafa have your own reasons. This makes perfect sense.”

She’s right. I can believe it just fine. I say, “I guess so. See you in the morning.”

I put my mask on and shut the door gently behind me. I wait for the click before pulling out my phone and, after considering whether or not to actually go to bed for about a second and a half, text Keeley. I could use an outlet for my stress a whole lot more than I could use an extra few hours of sleep. Her room is all the way at the other end of the hall from Joan’s, and I’m relieved about that for reasons that, much like the hair thing, I’m definitely not thinking about.

Keeley is sweet and surprisingly shy and her whole face flushes as pink as her cheeks when I touch her, and I really would like to be mentally present for the whole thing, but there are so many other things on my mind right now, and all of them keep coming back to the little can of peanut oil cooking spray in a plastic shopping bag on my bedside table.

When it’s over, Keeley lays next to me, breathing deeply, an arm thrown across her forehead. She turns to look at me, half-smiling. “You good?” she asks. “You seem a little out of it.”

“Just tired.” That’s not even a lie. “It’s been a long day.” Neither is that. “And besides, I can’t exactly be expected to be operating at full mental capacity right now. Not after that.” I don’t think that one’s a lie, either. I think I wouldn’t mind trying again to find out.

Her half-smile turns into a full one, and she says, “Well, then, go to bed! Do you want to stay over?”

“I think I should probably be in my own bed.”

If she’s disappointed, she hides it awfully well, saying, “Okay, good, because I like to starfish. See you tomorrow!”

I gather my clothes back up and say goodnight and head back downstairs to my room. I think I hear a door on the sixth floor open and shut behind me as I enter the stairwell, but I’m not sure. I’m trying not to let my nerves make me paranoid, which is kind of difficult, because I’m not a particularly calm person at the best of times and I wouldn’t consider the night before a life-altering act of sabotage to be the best of times.

I’m not sure if I feel bad about it or not. The thing we’re about to do. I feel bad in the sense that I know I should and I feel bad anytime anybody gets hurt, but I don’t think I feel worse than I would if I sat through four days of watching other people live my dream from that cold, dark, yawning maw of an empty studio. I feel bad in a different way, obviously, but if there’s any way to objectively compare two different bad feelings, sabotage feels less bad. I know from dinner at Casa de Flores that Annalise carries an EpiPen, and I know from Morty and Yasmin’s briefing that contestants who get replaced still get their baseline prize money, and I know from the bottom of my heart that I deserve to be on The Q.

Despite the fact that I am actually tired, and more so after my time with Keeley, I’m still too freaked out to go to sleep right away, so after I shower and brush my teeth and everything I spend the next couple of hours memorizing the rest of the world capitals. I get most of them pretty quickly, but I practice the pronunciation of the capital of Slovenia (Ljubljana) over and over just in case they count me wrong for mispronouncing the L-J combinations. When it’s finally tripping smoothly off my tongue like I’m a true Slovenian, or at least a true pretentious study-abroad kid who went to Slovenia one semester, I turn off my lights and turn over so my back is to the bag with the peanut oil in it and count my breaths in sets of ten until I fall asleep. But the next morning, when I wake up, I’ve turned back over in my sleep, and the first thing I see when I open my eyes is that can of peanut oil cooking spray.

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