by A N Sandra
“Are you ready?” Maddy was on the phone. “Sadie and I are ready. As ready as we’ll ever be.”
“Meet me by the elevator. I’m on my way out the door.” Tilly groaned a little, but she knew she looked fantastic in a crisp pink floral mini dress of her own design. She had even designed the fabric it was made from. There hadn’t been many chances to wear her own designs for television, so she knew she should appreciate this chance.
At the elevator Tilly was gratified to see that Sadie was wearing a soft gray shirt Tilly had made for her last spring and her hair was contained in a large knot that was messy and sexy as all hell. Tilly was proud to be seen with her. Maddy was wearing a sleek navy jacket Tilly had made her for a business school interview with a white lace camisole under it.
“Thanks for wearing my clothes,” Tilly gushed. She hadn’t cared about her career in fashion design at all the night before. She had been ready to throw it out the window for a grilled cheese sandwich and some tomato soup, but now, seeing her friends in clothes she had designed and made, she was rejuvenated. For a second. “Did you ever find out what happened with all those people running around last night?”
Sadie shook her head, already not interested. Maddy shrugged, and Tilly knew that whatever had happened the night before was going to stay the Hollister’s secret. The Plaza Level Ballroom was not full of food and flowers for a special event. Instead, medical people in scrubs had set up several stations around the room. Tilly’s stomach went from bad to worse. She couldn’t decide if she should have eaten breakfast, or if she would feel worse if she had.
Molly was wearing a crisp white suit, looking like some sort of pseudo nurse, and the camera crew waited while she gathered the One Tough Customer contestants at a group of chairs assembled for them.
“As a thank you to all of you for your amazing talent and making One Tough Customer the top rated reality show in the world, I arranged for all of you to get your vaccination chips early! You will be some of the first people outside of our control groups to receive a vaccination chip! I know you’re excited, and that you will have questions. So, my top research doctor, Roseanne Beldon, is right here to answer them!”
All of the contestants roused false excitement for the cameras. Doctor Beldon stood in front of them and explained the entire procedure to them. Tilly noticed that everyone looked a little nervous about an unexpected medical procedure, but Sadie looked very concerned. It didn’t matter, they’d all do it. The world was watching. Peer pressure and bullying were getting worse in Tilly’s life, not better. She remembered her mother comforting her over some hurtful thing that had happened at the end of seventh grade. “Honey, this is the worst it gets… I promise,” her mom had hugged her while she cried. Tilly thought of calling her mother right then. “Guess what, Mom? I’m still getting bullied! I’m twenty-four! How did this happen? You promised, remember? You promised!”
Halfway through the process Tilly realized that Blaine and Molly Hollister were capitalizing on One Tough Customer to promote the vaccination chips. America would see this on the episode of One Tough Customer that would be aired next, and on the dozens of promotional ads that the Hollister Foundation was constantly running and assume that everyone getting a vaccination chip at Hollister Manor was a devoted believer in Hollister agenda. People in their homes would see the ads and say to each other, “When can we get a chip?” Feeling sick, Tilly sat slumping in a chair at the edge of the ballroom.
“It’s your turn, Tilly,” a sweet young man with Scooby Doo scrubs came up and tapped her arm delicately.
“Oh, let someone else go now.” Tilly was out of feigned enthusiasm.
“You are the last one.”
Tilly found that hard to believe. Sadie had looked sick at the idea of getting a chip an hour ago, but Sadie was across the room smiling for the cameras with a chip. Sadie had a chip. Does the peer pressure ever end? Sadie looked so happy that Tilly wondered if the health care workers had given her a little something.
“I love watching One Tough Customer,” the young man told her as she situated herself in a chair and put her arm on a well-sanitized table. “Even my mom likes it! You guys are something else.”
“Exactly,” Tilly stretched her lips and hoped it looked like a smile. To Tilly the table smelled like the nursing home her grandmother had died in. It’s just disinfectant, not actual death.
“Look! We’re all done! Tomorrow you can take the bandage off and you’ll be so glad this is done!”
“Thank you!” Tilly said as enthusiastically as she could. The idea of thanking someone for doing something she didn’t want done was super annoying. Tilly walked over to watch Sadie taking promotional pictures with Molly Hollister. They were flirting with the camera. Tilly thought how much she would like to barf all over both of them. She got out her phone and saw she had a message from Sadie, sent twenty minutes ago. Making sure no one could read over her shoulder, she opened it.
We’re getting these chips removed this afternoon. XXOO.
Quickly Tilly closed the message and put her phone back in her pocket.
Doctor Justin himself removed the chips from Sadie, Tilly and Maddy in a black conversion van which was a small mobile medical clinic, in the parking garage of Hollister Manor. Taking them out was not the relatively painless procedure that putting them in had been. The chips had been set in such a manner that it would have been very easy to do nerve damage if someone less skilled than a surgeon tried to remove them.
He studied them briefly but intensely and then dissected one very carefully.
“These are tracking devices. You need to keep them with you at all times. At least for the rest of the show,” Doctor Justin said. He encased each chip in a clear plastic pouch, the kind someone would put illegal drugs in, and gave each woman back her chip with his stern warning. “I would suggest not losing them. I’m going to study the vaccinations in these chips.”
“What if it turns out that we really needed them?” Maddy wanted to know.
“We’ll get you new ones.” Doctor Justin said. “I hope it turns out that they are great and you do need new ones.”
“But you don’t believe that,” Tilly noted.
Doctor Justin shook his head. Maddy and Tilly left Sadie with Doctor Justin, heading back to their rooms via a small emergency exit that didn’t have a security camera.
“I need you to do everything in your power not to make Molly angry,” Doctor Justin told Sadie. “This situation is not good. I had a very long, very unhappy talk with Christina Harris’s former assistant yesterday. I am convinced there are real problems with these chips. The Hollister Foundation is up to things that no one would think possible.”
“I would never do anything to make Molly angry,” Sadie told him. “But women like her invent reasons to be bitchy to women like me. It’s nothing I do to them.”
“I’m sure,” Doctor Justin said. “I’m already concerned for you now. If I find a virus in the part of the chip I kept, I am going to need to do some really unsavory things. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Doctor Justin reached out and picked up Sadie’s hand. His own hands, surgeon’s hands, were carefully sculpted with exercise, with perfect nails, and no calluses of any kind. Sadie, who occasionally got hand modeling work, even though it was looked down on by her acting peers, had perfect slender fingers the softest shade of pink. The heat generated by the touch caused Sadie to perspire. They had gone running together several times, breakfasted, and indulged in a few flirty texting sessions, but nothing that could be construed to mean anything other than a serious interest in the other. Every encounter generated intense chemistry that neither of them could ignore much longer. They were never alone, but the time would come. A young man who had been assisting Doctor Justin worked carefully at something in the back of the van, and neither of them could freely talk.
“I guess I’d better leave,” Sadie finally said. They had done nothing wrong, even the secret medical proc
edure was not wrong. The wrong thing had been Molly Hollister springing the vaccination chips on them in front of a camera crew for her own purposes. If Sadie was caught leaving the van on camera, there would be consequences, so she knew she needed to hurry.
“Everybody okay?” Sadie entered Maddy’s room, where Tilly was sprawled on the bed, while Maddy was working on something on her laptop at a tiny table by the window.
“We’re good,” Tilly answered with relish, knowing that cameras were watching everything in the room. “Couldn’t be better.”
“Oh,” Sadie smirked, thinking of Doctor Justin and her unsatisfied lust. “I could be a lot better.”
“I hope that works out for you,” Maddy said without stopping typing.
“Me too.”
The early morning didn’t seem cooler than midday at all, but Sadie kept running. Partly because she had eaten more than she should have the day before due to boredom from sitting around Hollister Manor for the last week without a single clandestine date with Doctor Justin. And partly because she needed to blow off the steam that was building inside her before they filmed the next episode of One Tough Customer. In three hours the limos would come to take the remaining contestants to Crackhouse and Sadie needed to be as calm as possible.
“Oh!” Sadie almost fell face first as someone reached out to grab her arm. “What the—”
“Come right now!” Sadie recognized the young man who had been assisting Doctor Justin in taking out the vaccination chips five days ago. “Now!”
Sadie followed the young man without a word. The two of them ran together until they came to a car with dark windows. The young man unlocked the passenger door with a clicker and smoothly opened the door. Sadie slid inside.
“We finished testing the vaccination portion of the chips we took from you last week. There is a virus on those chips that killed four people in the lab as they experimented with it.”
Sadie was so shocked she didn’t know what to say at all. She looked straight ahead at the car in front of them and bit her lip. Why tell her now, right before filming? She should be on her way back to Hollister Manor to shower and put on her makeup. No one is beautiful enough not to need primer and contour and Pomegranate Power blush for television.
“Why are you telling me this, now?” Sadie asked, shaking. Molly Hollister had tried to kill her. Not just her, but everyone who’d gotten a chip. The rest of the contestants had no idea they were walking time bombs. Maddy and Tilly had theirs removed, but there were fifteen contestants that didn’t know they were going to die.
“Doctor Justin is going to be on today’s show. You need to spill something on him, make him mad, and let Molly Hollister ‘rescue’ him so that he can get close to her. We’ve thought a lot about it, and that’s the best idea we have to try to stop this.”
“Why isn’t he telling the world the plan?” Sadie could not believe that Doctor Justin’s best idea was a junior high style spy tactic. How could a man make such brilliant points in his Ted Talks and not be able to tell the world what they needed to know?
“Christina Harris already tried to tell the world. The Hollisters shut her down. She’s hiding God knows where and her assistants are running around the world trying to vaccinate people against this. Just because your chip is removed doesn’t mean you won’t get sick. This virus will become airborne when triggered. The people in the lab didn’t take proper precautions, even though they were told to, and they were dead in six hours.”
“You mean I will still die from this disease even though Doctor Justin took out my chip?” Sadie was livid. She would kill Molly Hollister herself. With her bare hands. Sadie would wrap her lovely fingers around Molly Hollister’s ugly bumpy neck until—
“We are going to try to get you vaccinated. We need to know as much from Molly as we can. We need to know what she knows. Today, you need to make sure that the world thinks you and Doctor Justin lost all that chemistry you had two shows ago.”
“No problem,” Sadie said angrily. “I just lost all my chemistry for him if this is the best he can do.”
“I’m sorry,” the young man said. He didn’t seem sorry, though, he just seemed scared.
Sadie got out of the car quickly and glanced back once at the car before running back to Hollister Manor. The car disappeared into traffic and Sadie realized that she didn’t even know the young man’s name. I sure as heck know how to spill soup, though.
“You can’t spill soup on Doctor Justin… you’ll get voted off… and we need you…” Tilly gasped at Sadie’s revelation as they all waited outdoors for their limos, which were stuck in traffic.
“Spill the damn soup. Get away! Don’t look back.” Maddy was always practical.
“I’m not spilling the soup to hurt the team. Four people died from those stupid chips Doctor Justin took out!” Sadie wasn’t able to be diplomatic. She felt like a kindergarten child. She wanted to stomp up and down, wave her hands, and demand what she wanted. She had wanted real discussion, but Tilly and Maddy had given in too easily, so she tried to make them talk.
“He could be lying,” Tilly bit her lip.
“Why?” Sadie demanded to know. “So that he could win a big bet about a stupid reality show?”
“We are rated number one,” Maddy commented. The limos were coming up, the mid-morning sun glinting off the windshields.
“Like anyone cares,” Sadie fumed.
“It’s pretty funny that you don’t,” Tilly grinned just a little. “You are a celebrity. Millions of people are your fans.”
“I never wanted it like this!”
“It was your life’s dream and now you have it,” Maddy answered. The limos were sliding to the curb. “You got what you envisioned. Just not the way you envisioned it. Be careful what you wish for.”
“I never wished for any of this.” Sadie had pictured herself as a classy celebrity. She would endorse great causes and small children would bring her flowers at important events. But that dream was for a world that Sadie wasn’t sure was going to exist. Even if she didn’t have a virus laden chip in her wrist now, the odds were that if Molly Hollister wanted Sadie dead, Sadie would die.
The driver’s assistants all got out of the limos to gesture the contestants to their seats. People were taking photos with their phones and Sadie waved with a huge grin before turning back to Maddy. “Fine. The soup is getting spilled.”
“I hope it’s not creamy,” Tilly said. “Creamy soup burns the worst.”
“He’ll get what he gets,” Sadie answered. She slid into the air-conditioned limo and poured a big Tanqueray and tonic. “I think I’m getting a little drunk on my last day.”
“Even if you spill the soup I’m not voting you off,” Tilly said.
“Today’s soup is vodka lentil,” Jesus announced at the roll call for servers. All of them crowded around, trying to ignore the cameras in everyone’s way. “The house cocktail is Peachy Sangria Punch—”
Sangria isn’t a cocktail. Tilly frowned. All the servers continued to listen as Jesus went on to explain about the Yellowtail Salad with wonton crispies and the current wine selections. Molly Hollister had opened the Hollister Cellars for this episode and part of the show had already been filmed in Hollister Tower in her father’s renowned wine cellar.
Sadie wasn’t surprised that the soup was vegan. Molly Hollister had probably made sure that there were plenty of vegan items for Doctor Justin to choose from. Now that Doctor Justin knew for certain that the Hollisters were planning mass destruction with the vaccination chips, he was about to be Molly Hollister’s newest friend. Sadie knew how it would go. She would spill the soup, Molly would swoop in to save him, Molly would be his new hero and Sadie would be voted off the show.
In theory Sadie should strike out on Broadway to extend her fifteen minutes of fame, but the idea of fame had lost a great amount of appeal after having lived under the Hollister microscope for the last five weeks. Already, fans had decided who she was, based on the way Molly Hol
lister and her staff had edited One Tough Customer. Her public image in no way matched her real personality. Sharleen, her agent, said that she’d been offered film roles, Broadway parts, and porn gigs without any need to audition. One Tough Customer had made her famous in four weeks when she had been taking acting, dancing, and singing lessons since she was tiny, and had only managed a lot of community theater and one Off Broadway lead on her own.
“—let’s go!” Jesus ended the roll call with dramatic flair for the cameras. Once Jesus had gotten past the idea of not wanting his mother to see he worked in a restaurant, he had taken to reality television with serious gusto. If Sadie had to guess who the winner would be at the end of the season, she was sure it would be Jesus. Once Brandon was gone Jesus had stepped up as head chef as if he were born to it. Many people in the kitchen had more culinary experience than Jesus, but he had genuine leadership style.
“Some Riesling for you today?” Sadie asked Doctor Justin as he smoothed his napkin on his lap. Four other tables needed her attention, but there was no way Sadie wasn’t going to play this out to the fullest extent possible. It might be her last acting job.
“Oh, I’ll take a soda water with lime today,” Doctor Justin said.
“Of course.” Sadie knew he wouldn’t be drinking for a long time. He was going to watch his back until he figured out what the Hollisters were up to and he had a plan to stop it. “I’ll be right back.”
At the soda fountain Sadie filled up an icy glass with soda water and put a huge slice of lime on top. She carried it back to his table, waiting for the soup order, which came right away.
“I would like a wasabi garden burger with soup,” Doctor Justin said quickly when Sadie returned with his drink. “The Vodka Lentil.”
