The spiky hair guy—Jason—shrugs. “Sure! Just watch!”
He takes off at a dead run into the ocean, and the girl laughs. One of the cameramen follows him. The rest of us just stare.
I’m not going to be accomplishing any of my goals with this particular group, and my ability to remain likable on camera is diminishing the longer I stand here. It’s time to start figuring out who I’m going to be cuddling up to. I look for the girl from the sexy stewardess commercial. She’s standing over by the jungle’s edge, talking with Cece Martinez and a short, older, black man named Fez Richards. Him I recognized right off the bat—he’s a celebrity pastry chef, and Jenna used to watch all his baking segments on TV. I’m pretty sure she also had like three of his cookbooks.
I would get a signature for her, but it’s not like there’s anything for him to sign with. Or sign at all, I suppose.
But the girl. She looks about my age, her long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail—a difference from the sharp, face-framing bob she had in the commercial. She’s got a maroon top that looks like one of those buffs the girls wear on Survivor, only without the tribe logo, and small tan shorts that show off her long legs. She’s got slightly darker skin than Cece, but not as dark as Fez. I’m not sure if she’s Hispanic or black, or maybe Indian, but whatever her racial background, she’s gorgeous.
She’s laughing at something Cece says—she’s got a great laugh, too—but between how happy she looks to be talking to Cece and how happy she looked at the idea of meeting Krissy Calhoun, I can’t help but wonder if I’m not exactly her type.
“He’s going to be out there awhile, I think,” Green Bikini Girl says, shaking her head at where Jason is splashing around in the ocean. “But at least he’s happy. Like a big, happy puppy.”
I smile at her. She’s a good possibility. I don’t know anything about her, but I’m guessing she’s in her early twenties. She’s really cute, seems to have a good sense of humor, but has kind of a sweet, innocent look about her. I could see audiences finding her adorable.
Which means they might very well find me adorable with her.
“Hey,” I say to her. “You want to go see if we can forage anything from the jungle? I think we might have more luck finding something there than anyone’s going to have fishing bare-handed.”
She grins up at me. “Sounds great.” We peel away from the larger group, and one of the cameramen tags along with.
“I’m Alec Andreas,” I say.
“You’re a musician, right? You were in AJ? You’re the A?”
“Lots of people definitely think so,” I say, and she raises an eyebrow at me. “But yeah. That’s me.”
“Awesome! My sister Lan was a huge fan of yours,” she says.
I can’t help but notice the “was” in that statement. “That’s nice to—”
“She’s twelve,” the girl continues, perfectly happily, like it’s just a fact and not an insult.
“Okay.” I am starting to have regrets, and we’ve only barely reached the edge of the vegetation.
“I’m Su-Lin Liu, by the way,” she says, pushing aside a big green frond that swings back and slaps me in the chest. “Definitely not a musician, though I do like music.” She laughs. “Dumb thing to say, right? Who doesn’t?”
I don’t answer, but an answer clearly wasn’t what she was looking for anyway.
“I’m a YouTuber, actually,” she continues. “Sock puppets. I did The Real Sockwives of Los Angeles. It’s a reality show parody, like—”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” This does manage to impress me a little. My old bandmates Leo and Roxie were super into that show a couple years ago, quoting from it and then dying laughing. The idea of watching a sock puppet show, even an apparently funny one, makes me want to gouge my eyes out, but it seemed to have a lot of reach. “Are you still doing new episodes?”
“Nope. I’m between projects,” she says.
“Yeah, I think that’s pretty much all of us.”
She grins. Clearly she’s less bitter about this fact than I am. “So what kind of food are we looking for?”
I open my mouth to answer, but she keeps talking, practically bouncing as we walk through the pressing vegetation. “Probably whatever won’t kill us, right? Speaking of food, you know what you remind me of? Cheeseburger Lo Mein.”
I blink at her. “Um—”
“It’s a dish at this crazy restaurant I used to work at, Fong’s All-American. I think of everyone as having a spirit dish there, you know? I can usually tell within a few minutes of meeting someone. That’s definitely yours. Jason’s is the Mountain Dew Chicken, obviously, and—”
She chatters on at length about this random restaurant and its weird-ass food, barely taking a breath. With my growing annoyance at her perky, nonstop voice, and the even more sweltering humidity in the jungle, and the knowledge that my best chance for eating today lies in the hands of some oaf trying to grab fish out of the ocean, I’m hating Bobbi for ever suggesting this, and myself even more for agreeing to it.
And it’s only the beginning of day one.
“Hey, look, there are coconuts up there,” I say, cutting into her bubbly monologue about . . . the best kinds of felt for sock puppetry? She stops and looks up at the tall palm tree I’m pointing at. “I could probably boost you on my shoulders, and if you just climbed up a little farther—”
“Oh, hell no,” she says. “I don’t do heights.” Like everything else she says, though, she sounds happy about it. Even despite the fact that her face is flushed red with the heat and her black hair is stuck to her face with sweat.
“We could throw something up there, try to knock them down.” I look around, then pick up a rock and a stick.
“That sounds super fun!”
“Does it?” I say, way more sourly than I should. I’m already finding it easy to forget the camera trained on me. I toss the stick up and miss.
She picks up a rotten coconut and chucks it into the tree, missing by a mile, but laughs. “Hey, we should go back and organize some beach games! That could be amazing.”
“Not dying of dehydration will also be amazing.” I lob the rock up there. That toss also goes wide.
But Su-Lin has already dropped the next rotten coconut she picked up. “Eh,” she says, like the idea of actual survival bores her. “We could do like a coconut mini-golf course. Or coconut soccer! I wonder if these things would split when they’re kicked, though. But if we—” She stops and her eyes go wide. “Ooh, hey, are those mushrooms? I bet we could eat those! There was this dish at Fong’s that—”
And that’s when I decide I can’t take it anymore, and turn and head back. She doesn’t seem to notice, too busy talking at a patch of something that might be mushrooms, but most likely is not edible. The cameraman seems torn between which of us to go with, but stays with her.
Probably that’s better. I don’t need them to get a shot of me trying to hang myself on one of these vines. I suppose I should be glad that Su-Lin doesn’t seem any more interested in me than I am in her—I don’t need to be seen as a player or a heart-breaker—but the truth is, I’m not particularly concerned that anyone on this island is going to develop real feelings for me. Sure, I’ve been with my share of groupies since Jenna and I broke up, but once you’ve achieved a certain level of celebrity status, dating becomes transactional. Every dubious relationship I’ve had in the last year has been about trading sex for status—and there’s no shortage of women who want to sleep with a pop star, even one everyone hates.
I might be concerned about what this means for my future actual relationship prospects if I weren’t so much more concerned about my failing career.
These thoughts do nothing to improve my mood when I emerge from the jungle onto the beach, my shirt and shorts plastered to my body with sweat. There’s some excitement from the others, though—the big
guy, Jason, apparently found a mud crab, which is currently attached to his finger. He’s swinging it around, alternately swearing and laughing. Loudly.
“Hit it with a rock!” Ryan offers from where he’s crouching with a couple of sticks. He finds one and tosses it to Jason, who proceeds to gleefully smash the living hell out of the crab. Then he detaches the claw from his finger, and a long trail of blood drips down onto the sand.
Cece looks a little woozy; next to her, the sexy stewardess just looks amused. “How are we going to cook it?” the stewardess girl asks. “Did those sticks work out for you yet, Ryan?” It’s clear from her tone she has as much faith in his fire-making skills as I do.
“You know,” Melissa says to the group at large. “Raw fish is a delicacy in some parts of the world. It’s called sushi.”
Judge Liz groans and walks away. Jason grins up at Melissa. “Here you go!” he says, tossing her a chunk of crab, which she dodges with a shriek. It lands in the sand.
“Ryan,” she says, picking it up gingerly. “Do you want some?”
Ryan looks torn between his desire to do anything he can to get inside Melissa’s string-bikini bottoms, and his desire to not eat raw crab of indeterminate safety, which is covered in sand and Jason’s blood. “Sure,” he says, after a long pause, and pops the small chunk in his mouth.
The rest of us stare. Sexy Stewardess wrinkles her nose, and Fez the chef makes a gagging noise.
“Hey, Alec,” one of the cameramen says. He taps an earpiece he’s wearing. “Producer says it’s time for your aside.” He motions me over to a spot out of listening distance from the others. “So, day one,” he says, keeping the camera trained on me. “You got any thoughts about your castmates?”
Oh, I’ve got thoughts all right.
The challenge is going to be keeping them to myself.
Three
Alec
By the time I get back from my interview with the producers, I’m pretty sure my plan isn’t going to work. There may not be a girl on this island who is straight, available, and a person I can listen to for more than thirty seconds without wanting to jam a pointed stick in my ear.
Given how few people in the world fit all of those qualifications, I guess I should have anticipated that. Maybe I should just fake a life-threatening injury and go home. I wonder if fake-doctor Ryan knows how I could best pretend to be dying.
Back on the beach, Jason is digging in the sand, presumably for more crabs to feed to Ryan, while Ryan and Chad are gathered around Melissa, Ryan not even pretending not to stare at her chest. Fez, Liz, and Cece are huddled, discussing something, and Sexy Stewardess is standing back, taking it all in.
This is my opportunity to feel that situation out, so I wander over, trying to look casual and probably failing.
“Hey,” she says. “You’re Alec, right?”
She knows who I am, which I once would have thought was a good thing. I manage a smile. “Yeah. And you are . . .”
“Jillian. Did you just abandon that girl in the woods?”
I look over my shoulder. “I was called away for an interview. Is she not back yet?”
“No,” Jillian says. “Maybe she got lost.”
I’m betting high on mushrooms, but I decide not to say that.
“Did you have any luck finding food?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “There are coconuts in one of the trees, but they were pretty far up there.”
Jillian smiles at me. She has an even better smile up close, and I sure wouldn’t mind looking at it for the rest of our time on the island. “Not planning on climbing the tree to get them?”
I would probably break my neck. I tilt my head towards Jason, whose hole in the sand is getting so large, I wonder if he’s trying to tunnel off the island. Not that I would blame him. “I was thinking about aiming Mr. Excited over there in that direction.”
“Ah,” Jillian says. “That sounds like a good plan.”
No time like the present. “Hey, Jason!” I shout, pointing into the woods. “There are some trees with coconuts back there. Think you can get them?”
“Sweet!” Jason shouts back, and runs off through the woods.
If Su-Lin is out there hallucinating on mushrooms, I wonder if Jason will even notice.
I turn back to Jillian and catch her checking out my chest through my open shirt. I smile and check her out right back. She’s got a great body—I know from the commercial she’s a kick-ass dancer, so that’s no surprise. She smiles at me like she notices and appreciates this.
Maybe I am her type, after all. I start to feel a little flicker of hope.
I nod toward Cece’s little council. She, Fez, and Liz clearly represent the older generation in our dysfunctional island family, and I wonder if they’re banding together already. Setting aside finding someone to flirt and be generally attractive with, I’m going to need to find some allies fast if I want to stay on this island long enough for anyone to develop any kind of opinion of me at all.
“I hope that’s the brain trust over there,” I say. “Because I don’t want to try surviving off raw crab.”
“Aw,” Jillian says. “But in some cultures it’s a delicacy. Ever heard of sushi?”
We exchange a look, and I’m grinning widely, not because it’s funny, but because Jillian clearly feels the same way as I do about these people. She’s just not wearing it plainly enough on her face to get called off to do an aside. Yet.
“So I watched a lot of Survivor to prepare for this,” I say.
“Did you really?”
“Yeah. And as far as I could tell no one ever started a fire with a couple of sticks.”
Jillian raises an eyebrow. “You don’t think you could start a fire with your wood?” She says this with such an exaggerated teasing tone, it’s clear she’s both making the innuendo and mocking it at the same time.
I laugh. “Not a fire you want near your drinking water.”
Jillian smiles. Yeah, she’s definitely into this, and surprisingly, so am I.
"Actually," Jillian says, "they eventually did figure out how to start fire with sticks on Survivor. Rob Mariano did it, his third time playing."
Huh. I'm now familiar with Rob and his genuinely adorable wife Amber, but I didn't make it through quite enough seasons to get there.
"I don't think either of us is Boston Rob," I say.
Jillian smiles. "Good point."
“If we don’t have fire,” I continue, “then we can’t get water. But I don’t see that happening any time soon. So we’re probably better off building a shelter and hoping they decide to give us a flint at the first challenge, or with our luxury items.”
Jillian nods. “Agreed. So we’ll need some branches, and maybe some vines to tie them together?”
“Possibly.” I eye the trees back towards the jungle. “And probably a bunch of palm fronds to thatch the thing.”
“Palm fronds,” Jillian says. “Very technical.”
I shrug. “They remind me of church growing up. They’d give them to us to wave around on Palm Sunday, but I’d mostly use mine to slap my sisters in the face.”
Jillian looks surprised. “Church boy. I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“My family is Greek Orthodox,” I say. “But now I’m a heathen. At least according to my mom. She’s always worried about me with my rockstar lifestyle, which I think she somehow imagines is all cocaine and prostitutes, even though the best years of my career were in a committed relationship.”
“Ah,” Jillian says. “So she was only right about the cocaine.”
“AJ had mandatory drug testing, actually. I don’t even smoke pot. But I’m also not moving back to Michigan and marrying a nice Greek girl who’ll pop out a dozen kids, so there’s no convincing my mom of that.”
There are two cameras eagerly glued to us as we ta
lk, and I’m not sure if talking about my family like this is making me more or less sympathetic. My whole family is going to watch it, for sure, but I’m not sure I can lower their opinion of me more than I already have by not coming home much since I’ve been out in LA.
“So the shelter,” I say, not particularly inclined to think about them right now. Besides, it appears that if this group doesn’t get some actual work started, we’re not only going to be without water, but we’re going to sleeping right on the sand, which I imagine feels far less charming than it sounds—especially if it rains. “We could try to enlist help from the brain trust. I don’t think those guys—” I indicate to Ryan and Chad “—are going to be much use.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jillian says, a mischievous look in her eyes. “Watch and learn. Hey, Melissa!”
I expect Melissa to be annoyed that Jillian is calling her away from the adoring attentions of Chad and Ryan, but she hops up and trots over like a happy poodle.
“Hey!” Melissa says. “You’re Alec, right? And Jillian.”
“Right,” Jillian says. “We were just thinking about trying to build a shelter, since none of us want to sleep out in the open. What do you think?”
“I think that’s a great idea.” Melissa says. “I don’t think the sand is going to be great for my skin. I mean, I’ve done treatments that have sand in them before, but they’re always mixed with something else, like organic oatmeal.” She pauses. “Do you think this sand is organic?”
My mouth hangs open, but Jillian somehow smothers her smile. “I don’t know,” she says. “We’d probably be better off in a shelter, anyway. Do you think you could get Chad and Ryan to help us get some wood?”
Melissa turns and looks back at Chad and Ryan who are sitting uselessly in the sand. “Oh, yeah, totally.” Melissa lowers her voice conspiratorially. “I think maybe I could make a wood joke.”
I decide not to point out to Jillian that she and Melissa apparently have the same taste in suggestive phrases.
“Great idea,” Jillian tells her, and Melissa bounds happily back over to Chad and Ryan, and puts her hands on her hips. Chad and Ryan watch raptly as she issues her challenge, then hurry off towards the jungle as if in a race to see who can fulfill Melissa’s wood-related wishes first.
The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour Page 13
