This Is Not the Jess Show

by Anna Carey

  I could have punched him in the face.

  “So you’re saying…that our town is kind of like The Real World?” I said. “Or Road Rules? Swickley is a version of reality, but it’s not real. Things that happen here are kind of…orchestrated. They’re creating the drama. Or did that tornado actually happen—was that real?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t talk about this anymore. I’ve said too much already.”

  “You don’t have a choice now.” I jabbed him in the chest. He rubbed the spot where I’d hit him, as if it was immediately sore. “I already know. It’s over.”

  “You think they’re just going to let you out of here?” Tyler almost laughed as he said it. “There are hundreds of millions of people watching, from all over the world. You think they’re just going to give that all up?”

  Hundreds of millions of people. A rush of secret, shameful moments came to me, one after the next. Jumping on the trampoline in Kristen’s backyard and laughing so hard that I peed my pants. How I’d just stood there, silent, when James Ford poured a beer over Billy Barrett’s head. The day my mom handed me Human Sexuality, a book with a tattered blue cover, with graphic illustrations of male and female genitalia. And worse, the nights I’d pull the blanket over my head and read it with my Hello Kitty flashlight, studying the pages and pages of sex positions.

  My throat felt tight, and I counted the tiles on the floor until I was sure I wasn’t going to cry. I didn’t have time to be a self-hating mess. As tempting as it was to think and rethink through everything I had and hadn’t done in front of the cameras, we only had a few minutes before we had to go back outside. It was possible they already suspected something was off.

  “You need to tell me everything you know. The flu—it’s not…people aren’t sick, are they? All the people I don’t really talk to, the ones I don’t really know, it’s like they’ve disappeared…”

  “It’s an actors strike. The extras, the ones with no lines or less than a few lines an episode—they’re renegotiating their contract. It was only supposed to be three or four days, but it keeps dragging on.”

  He was talking, but the words floated past, and I only half heard what he said. Instead I had the clearest vision of my mom—tiny, thin, with her high cheekbones and perfectly sun-kissed hair. Her nose was so much smaller than mine, the tip of it dainty and refined. We didn’t look anything like each other, and I thought now of the gym set up in our basement, of waking every morning to the dull thumping of her feet on the treadmill.

  “So what are you saying? Everyone—you, Amber, Kristen, my parents—you’re all…actors?”

  Tyler practically smiled as I said it. “I mean, I like to think of myself as an actor, yeah. But not formally trained, no.”

  I sat down on the edge of the bathtub, working my fingers through my hair. I tugged out one of the metal clips that held back my bangs and kept popping it open and closed, trying to calm myself down. When Tyler didn’t say anything else I stared up at him.

  “I need to know everything. I’m serious, tell me everything from the beginning. And if you leave a single thing out, I swear I’ll go to the producers and say you were the one who told me the truth. That you sabotaged them.”

  He chewed at his nail. He was quiet for a moment, then he slouched against the vanity. “Everything? You sure you want to hear this?”

  I nodded.

  I’d never been so sure in my life.

  16

  “Start with my parents,” I said.

  Tyler sighed, then his finger dropped away from his mouth.

  “Okay, so your mom…” he said. “Helene Hart is her name, she studied acting in London, she has a master’s and everything. She’s kind of a force. A brand. She got famous online from doing all this interior design, fashion and lifestyle stuff. I never saw them, but apparently she used to do these long confessional videos about her personal life. That’s why they pitched her this. She’d been on and off with Carter for years—”

  “Carter?”

  “Carter Boon, your dad. He was still playing for the Red Sox when she met him, but he’s been retired for ages. They were always breaking up and getting back together, and then suddenly they were on in a big way. She made this whole twenty-minute video announcing her pregnancy. They were really popular then, with everyone following your birth and them being a new family and everything. When you were three they started the show. They signed these fifteen-year contracts saying it would run until you were eighteen. Initially they were the leads, but then they were in this really bad place, the fighting was so intense that the producers had to edit a lot out because they didn’t want to completely ruin the brand. I think it was around that time that Sara was cast as your younger sister. Things were better after that.”

  Sara was cast as your younger sister. I had to go back to it, turning the words over like I was translating from another language. She was cast, not born. I remembered them bringing Sara home from the hospital, though. It was hazy, but it was there—the memory of sitting down on our living room sofa and holding her for the first time. She was my baby sister.

  “Sara’s family gave her up for adoption?”

  “Ohhhh…” Tyler’s mouth was a perfect circle. “Yeah…this might sound strange, but Lydia? Your family friend? That’s Sara’s mom. I think her dad died before she was even born.”

  Lydia. We’d always joked that they looked alike, but Lydia had freckled skin and huge gray eyes. I knew she dyed her hair, I could see her dark roots, but Sara had a completely different complexion. She must’ve looked like her dad, because she had full eyebrows and wavy black hair.

  “The show was always supposed to be more about the family, and your parents’ dynamic, but the last few years there’s been rumors that Carter and Helene hate each other’s guts and are just waiting out their contracts. Besides, I think the audience likes you better now. Since seventh grade, and that whole fight with Kristen where she stopped talking to you, and there was all that drama around the Bon Voyage dance? Suddenly the fan base exploded. Teenagers were watching with their parents, whole families were following along.”

  Tyler sat down beside me on the edge of the tub. He was almost unrecognizable. I felt like I was shrinking into myself and he was somehow taking up more space, coming alive. He casually threw out these names and phrases I’d never heard, and he was smiling—actually smiling—as he told me all about the people in my life who’d been lying to me.

  “Mr. Henriquez? Jen Klein? Kim?” I asked, trying to think of the most normal, genuine people I knew. “They’re all acting?”

  “They’re all guest stars, smaller parts. I was only supposed to be an extra on the set. Like, just another one of the nameless, faceless people who populate the town. But then you hit me in the head with that ball in fourth grade. That was my big break.”

  I felt like I might puke.

  “Guignard’s Disease,” I said. “It’s made up. It’s not real.”

  Tyler didn’t say anything. He just sat there, his elbows on his knees.

  “They just made it up, and there was no real way I could know…” I said. My hands felt numb. I tried to shake the blood back into them, but I couldn’t. “But that means Sara isn’t really dying. She’s going to be okay?”

  Tyler waved me off. “Technically she is dying, at least for the purpose of the show. She’s being written off. This season is supposed to be about you coming to terms with Sara’s sickness, and soon her death. She might’ve had a chance if puberty hadn’t hit her so hard. People hate watching her now, like really, really can’t stand her. She’s garbage for ratings. The audience just finds her really annoying and gawky and—”

  “Will you stop?” I said.

  He looked like I’d pushed him. It was hard to listen, when everything he did and said was so completely different from who he was before. Even his voice had somehow changed. It was highe
r pitched and faster, almost frenetic as he spoke.

  “So Fuller died, and they replaced him with another dog…”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “There’s a rumor one of the disgruntled extras snuck into the set and stole him, just to screw over the producers. They thought they’d hold him hostage and the producers would freak, but they ended up just finding another dog that looked like him.”

  “They didn’t think I’d notice?”

  I kept counting the fourteen tiles on the floor, trying to steady myself. Fuller. Helene Hart. Carter Boon. My parents had names and lives I knew nothing about. My dad hadn’t spent the past twenty years building a successful extermination company, he’d been coasting on a reality-television contract. He wasn’t stoic, he just couldn’t stand being around us. My mom was using me to build her lifestyle brand. It had started as early as I could remember, the constant photos, the outfits she’d bring home that she’d want me to pose in. We couldn’t do anything—go to the park or bake cookies—without it being this huge production.

  They were liars.

  They were both gross, manipulative liars.

  Even over the rush of the faucet I could hear it, the sound of a car pulling up the gravel driveway. When I opened my eyes Tyler seemed panicked. The front door slammed shut. Someone was home.

  “It’s my stepdad.”

  “Is he…” I whispered. “He’s an actor?”

  Tyler nodded, but before he could say anything else Craig was in the kitchen, his voice clearer now. He was calling to him. To us.

  “Tyler! Tyler Michael Scruggs! What the hell are you doing home?”

  17

  The bathroom felt impossibly small. For the first time I noticed there was no window—the door was the only way out. Even with the faucet running I worried they had heard us, that somehow the producers already knew that I knew.

  “Why is he home? It’s not a coincidence, right?” I asked. “Are there mics in here? Could they have heard what we said?”

  My fingers went to my throat, and I felt along the collar of the sweater, then down over the front, checking if it was possible I had a mic on me, like the ones I’d seen talk-show hosts wear. I studied the buttons on my jeans and squeezed the little metal grommet thing at the seam, but they felt normal. At least I thought they did.

  “I’m not stupid,” he said. “There aren’t any microphones in bathrooms, not these at least. I think they have a few right by the sinks in the girls’ bathroom at school, and they definitely have some in the locker rooms, cameras too. But not here.”

  I thought about tugging off my gym clothes on camera, or Kristen talking to me in her bra as she took ten minutes to flip her tee shirt inside out. I felt sick. He must’ve noticed my expression because he added, “They have a female editor who cuts out the visuals whenever you’re changing. It goes to a black screen. Some of the actresses are older, like eighteen or twenty, so they show those shots sometimes.”

  As if that made it any better.

  I pressed my ear to the door, trying to gauge where Craig was. I couldn’t hear much beyond the rushing water, just the occasional creak of a wooden floorboard, or what sounded like the refrigerator opening and closing. Tyler squeezed next to me. He checked and rechecked the doorknob, making sure it was locked.

  “Look, I don’t know how much time I have left on the show,” he said. “You’re supposed to date Patrick Kramer. You were always supposed to date Patrick Kramer, that was the plan from the beginning. The audience likes him better.”

  It was the way Tyler said it, like it was a truth neither of us could escape. We’d just have to accept what the producers wanted, what the audience wanted, as if that was the most important thing. What about what I wanted? Didn’t that matter? Why couldn’t I set my own course now, knowing what I knew?

  “Who cares if the audience likes him better?”

  “I know, right? You don’t have to explain it to me. But I guess he tests really well with teen girls and the over-forty set, which is kind of creepy if you think about it.” Tyler’s face scrunched tight, like it enraged him to even think about Patrick. “Males ages eighteen to thirty-four like him too, which is really annoying, because he’s so vanilla. I mean, what do people see in him? He’s like a cartoon version of what a high-school guy should be.”

  “He has no personality.”

  “I know.” Tyler leaned in close, and I could feel the warmth of his breath. Only everything between us was different now.

  “I mean, I feel like that moment in the storage closet was beyond romantic, right? That’s the kind of stuff all classic nineties TV shows have. Joey and Dawson from Dawson’s Creek, like every scene in 90210. The kiss in Jen Klein’s bedroom felt real, didn’t it?”

  I tried to back away but I knocked against the sink. There was nowhere to go. I couldn’t believe I’d ever kissed him. That I’d ever liked him.

  “Are you serious?” I finally said.

  “You don’t even know the whole story,” he went on. “Patrick and his family already have a contract for a spin-off show. They live inside the set in this huge, decked-out house, with all this fancy tech and crap, while the rest of us commute in every day like a bunch of plebs. And you haven’t even been over there yet, that’s the worst part. You haven’t even set foot in there, and they’re living large.”

  There were footsteps on the kitchen stairs. His stepdad’s voice was getting closer, and even over the water I could hear him repeat Tyler’s name. Tyler grabbed my hand. I stared down at it, as if it wasn’t part of my body.

  “You know how people are always walking in on us, how Jen interrupted?” he said. He didn’t wait for my answer. “And then they sped up the whole Sara storyline, making her slip into the coma last night, because they thought that would throw me off. But they didn’t count on you having real feelings for me. You really do like me better than Patrick. They can’t stop this, no matter how hard they try. I’m a real player now.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s your point?”

  Tyler held my hand up. He was clutching it now, holding it tight between both of his, and then he did the grossest thing. He pressed it to his cheek.

  “They’re threatening me,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment. “I know this is going to absolutely crush you, Jess, but they want me off the show. They’re never going to let a ginger be the love interest, and they refuse to let me dye my hair. Now they say I’m distracting you too much, and they want you with Patrick, even though—for the record—I’ve really grown my following in the last two months and it’s only a matter of time before I have more followers than Patrick. Seriously.”

  “Following? What do you mean?”

  There was a knock on the bathroom door. Tyler’s stepdad was right outside now—I could hear him clearly.

  “Tyler? You in there?”

  The doorknob turned half an inch, then stopped.

  “One second, Craig!” Tyler called out, like he was delivering the punchline of a joke. Then he lowered his voice to a whisper. “They’re pissed that I went rogue. That I dared become more than the shitty little best friend part they assigned me. They’re going to write me off. Boarding school. Maybe ol’ Craig here will have to move home to Michigan to take care of his dying mother. Some crap like that. But you can change it, Jess—you can force them to keep me here. I told you everything you asked, I answered every single question. And from now on I’ll make sure you have whatever info you want, and then you’ll be in on everything. Let’s just act like we’re going to go back to being friends for a while. We can just slow this all down and pretend we had a change of heart. Then I get to stay, and you’re in on everything moving forward. We’ll plan and decide on things together. Like business partners. Isn’t that genius?”

  It was like I wasn’t there. He wasn’t asking me, he was telling me how it would be, how we would be together. Wh
en I stood up my legs felt unsteady. He’d spent years pretending to be my friend, and the last three months luring me into a fake relationship. He’d been to my house hundreds of times. After Sara had gotten sick he’d brought her a basket of candy and YM magazines and gave this whole shy, rambling speech telling her he hoped it “lifted her spirits.” Then we’d had a movie marathon in the treehouse, as if watching Dazed and Confused for the third time could replace all my bad thoughts with good ones.

  I’d been so excited when he’d offered to help me with the talent show. One time we’d stayed up late, practicing in the garage for an hour after our bassist went home. We made Bagel Bites and I played him a song I’d written on my guitar. I’d believed him when he’d told me I was “crazy talented” and “really something else.” He’d actually said that, in this low, breathy voice I didn’t recognize. You’re really something else, Jess Flynn. Do you know that?

  “Just date Patrick Kramer for a little bit.” Tyler kept going, squeezing my hand tight. “Or what about a love triangle? People are obsessed with love triangles. You date Patrick and I fall back, become the best friend again. Steady. Dependable. I’ll pretend I’m waiting in the wings, the unsung hero type. But then they’ll get what they want and I’ll get to stay.”

  I tugged my hand out from between his and turned the faucet off. Tyler was still staring at me.

  “So…” he started. “What do you think?”

  This was his version of sincere. He actually thought he was being considerate, kind. He thought we were a team.

  “I think you can go fuck yourself,” I said.

  Then I swung the door open and stepped out into the den, where Tyler’s stepdad was waiting. He acted surprised to see me.

  18

  When I was eight my family planned a vacation to Disney World. Sara and I had been obsessed with the commercials, and every time they came on we’d call each other into the room, like they contained the meaning of life. Circling, overhead shots of Mickey perched on the Epcot Center globe or waving from the top of Cinderella’s castle. Imagine yourself here, the voice would say, and there’d be an explosion of confetti and lights and music as all the characters came together to dance.