This Is Not the Jess Show

by Anna Carey

  “There’s no one behind us right now,” I said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “Maybe we just pull the car onto the golf course and leave it there. They won’t find it until morning. It’ll at least buy us some time.”

  “Sure, great.” Kipps peered out the back windshield, then the front, checking for oncoming cars. “Go now.”

  I turned the wheel to the right and our front tire hit the curb first. The impact threw us back in our seats, but we kept going, breaking through a bush and out onto the golf course. The hill we were on sloped down and we picked up speed. We hadn’t counted on the lake that split the green.

  “Turn the wheel, just go around,” Kipps yelled.

  “I can’t.”

  I tried to guide the car off to the left, but the momentum was too strong. When I braked we just skidded over the damp grass. We went down one more slope and crashed into the lake, water splashing over the front bumper.

  “This is not good,” Kipps said, as the vehicle floated out, slowly coming to a stop where the water was deep. I went to roll down my window but couldn’t. I banged on the glass, my heart alive in my chest. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end, not here. Not like this. I wasn’t going to drown in some nasty golf course lake.

  Think, think, I repeated silently. Kipps said something but it was somewhere beyond me. It was a few seconds before I came up with anything.

  “We have to open the doors, just let the water come in,” I said. The hood was already submerged, and the vehicle was starting to tilt to one side. “Then get as far away from it as possible.”

  “Really?”

  “I saw it on Rescue 911.”

  “Cool, I guess. I trust William Shatner,” Kipps said.

  “On the count of three. One, two…”

  I never made it to three, I just nodded, and we pushed the doors open at the same time. The water was relentless, rushing into the Cloud and sinking it twice as fast as before. I kicked off the frame and swam as far out as I could. I’d completely cleared the car when I realized what I’d done.

  “Oh no…my purse,” I said. “I need it.”

  “You do not need your purse. Have you lost your mind?” Kipps yelled. He was on the other side of the vehicle, swimming toward shore. The water rushed over the roof. Then slowly, gracefully, it slipped below the surface.

  “It has the book—the code Sara left,” I said.

  I took a deep breath and dove under before he could argue with me, swimming fast toward the sinking Cloud. The water was a murky greenish color, and it wasn’t until I was only a few feet away that I was able to see the outline of the thing. The door was swept back and tilted up toward the sky. I had to wrench myself on top of it to get in.

  The purse wasn’t near the steering wheel like I thought it might be. I’d hoped it had floated up as the Cloud tipped on its side. Instead I had to go farther into the car, diving down into the well beneath the passenger seat and feeling for it there. I still couldn’t find it. My lungs were hurting now, and I could hear my pulse in my ears. I knew I wouldn’t be able to last much longer and still have enough air to get back to the surface. I felt around the back seats before pulling myself out.

  I was swimming away from the Cloud when I caught sight of it, drifting along the bottom of the lake. My chest felt like it might explode. Part of me wanted to get to the surface and take another breath, but what if the bag was gone by the time I came back? I dove several feet down, the pressure in my head growing. As I looped the strap around my arm, I could no longer see the surface. The sky had gone completely dark and it all looked the same—up, down, sand, stars. I wasn’t even sure where the car was anymore. I could feel panic taking over—that need for another breath.

  Then I felt Kipps’s hand on my arm. He tugged and we were both moving fast toward the surface, him kicking wildly as I floated behind him, clinging tight to his hand.

  29

  “That was bad. Really, really bad,” Kipps repeated. “We have to be more careful.”

  “What did you want me to do, leave it there?” I asked. “I still haven’t figured out the last pages. I don’t know what Sara was trying to tell me. There’s more to it, there has to be.”

  I pulled my hair into a ponytail, squeezing the water out through the ends. My baby-doll dress stuck to my legs. It didn’t matter how many times I twisted the hem or shook out my denim jacket, they were soaked. We stood in the middle of the golf course, trying to steel ourselves against the night air, but everything inside me was trembling. It must’ve been fifty degrees.

  “What now?” Kipps wrung out his fleece with both hands. The padding was more obvious now—there were lumps around the top of the jacket sleeves. Without it his arms were long and elegant, like a dancer’s.

  I looked up at the golf complex a hundred yards off. It was possible they had security cameras. Even if they didn’t, someone driving by could’ve seen the break in the bushes, the tire marks. It was impossible to know how much time we had.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  But where were we supposed to go? We had no money, there was no obvious place to go, and the woods around the golf course were dense. I trudged up the hill in front of us, moving away from the clubhouse and toward a cluster of trees. Kipps’s footsteps squished in the grass behind me. We have to be more careful, he’d said, but all I’d heard was you have to be more careful. You almost got me killed. It hadn’t been a choice, though, not really. If I left the book I never would’ve known what Sara needed to tell me, if she was outside the set, if there was any way to see her again. Kipps already had answers about who he was. I needed mine.

  When we got to the tree line I turned back, studying the lawn. In the moonlight the lake was a flat silver coin. The car was completely submerged. The only sign that it had sunk was a steady stream of bubbles breaking the surface. Two lines of grass were ripped up where I’d tried to brake.

  We started through the trees. We could barely see in the dark, the golf course was getting farther away with each step. My clothes were cold and stiff against my skin, and even though I crossed my arms inside my jacket I couldn’t hold on to any body heat. My fingers and toes were already numb.

  “This is beyond creepy,” Kipps said.

  “It has to be better than walking along a main road.”

  “We didn’t come all this way to freeze to death in the woods.”

  “We won’t. See? What do you think that is?”

  I already knew, I didn’t need him to answer. There were two lights about a hundred yards off. Porch lights. It took a few more minutes before we passed a wooden fence, and I saw some houses through the trees. Huge, stately brick things, with high fences and covered pools. One had white shingles and columns that framed a porch. Most of them had lights on inside, but when we passed one that was dark, I pointed to the back door and the shed beside the fence.

  “What about that one? No one’s home, at least not right now. We could try the shed.”

  “The cameras, though…” It took me a minute to realize what he was pointing to. A plastic dome was perched on each house. “We have to find one that doesn’t have a security system. Not like that, at least.”

  It took us another ten minutes to find a house without cameras. Every window was completely dark, and the backyard had a covered pool with a guesthouse. We peered through the glass door. A couple with two young kids stared back at us from a framed photo on the wall. If I wasn’t freezing and hungry, I might’ve felt guiltier. But my shoes were soaked through. I had on one layer of wet clothes and I could feel it getting colder. We had to do this.

  “You ready?” Kipps asked. He tried the doorknob but it was locked.

  “Are you?” I turned back to the main house and checked the windows again, making sure no one was there.

  “I guess. I’ve never broken into someone’s home before.”

&nb
sp; “It’s technically a guesthouse, so maybe that’s better?”

  We both knew it wasn’t. He pressed his elbow against the glass square closest to the doorknob, then wrapped his other hand around his fist. He hit the glass pane twice before it broke. Then he reached his hand over and popped the lock. We slipped inside, shutting the door behind us.

  * * *

  I held the lyric book above the stove, just out of reach of the blue flame. I’d been drying it out for a half hour but its pages were still rippled and warped. I’d tried to save the photo strip, too, delicately pinching its corners as I moved it closer and closer to the heat. It had only kind of worked. Sara and I looked fuzzier than before, and I’d accidentally smudged my mouth off in the bottom picture.

  “It’s very possible this is going to save us,” I said. “This is the thing that’s going to tell us what to do next.”

  “An Alanis Morissette lyric book,” he said, staring at it.

  “That’s right. Technically it’s not just any lyric book, it’s Jagged Little Pill.”

  “Just wanted to be sure.”

  “You have any better ideas? I’m open.”

  Kipps felt around one of the top cabinets, but there was only a stack of paper plates. He moved on to a set of drawers. We’d found some pool towels and robes in the bathroom, where we’d hung our clothes to dry. The guesthouse had a tiny kitchen and a loft bed, but the fridge was empty, unless you counted the bottle of ketchup and loaf of moldy bread.

  “I still have uncles who live outside the set, an aunt, a bunch of cousins,” Kipps said as he checked behind some cutlery. “We could try to call them, but it’s a risk. The producers have probably paid them off already.”

  “Paid them off? Come on, you think they’d actually tell them where we are?”

  Kipps raised one eyebrow. “If it meant fifty grand? A hundred? Yeah, of course they would. People are desperate. My Uncle Roo hasn’t worked in five, six years. The trade wars started, then the economy tanked. The unemployment rate has skyrocketed. It’s pretty bleak out here.” When he got to a lower cabinet he smiled. “Yes!”

  He held up a bag of pretzels and a six-pack of Heineken. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He examined the top of the bag and scrunched his nose.

  “The expiration date was in 2035. Not ideal.”

  “Sounds fine for a girl from 1998.” I opened the bag and tried one. They really didn’t taste stale. “I’ll pass on the beer though. It doesn’t do anything for me.”

  Kipps stood and hugged the six-pack to his chest. “Well, I think you’ll feel differently about these. These are very, very special Jess. They have alcohol in them.”

  I tried to read his expression, not sure if he was joking.

  “You’re telling me I’ve never actually had alcohol? Every single drink I’ve had was fake?”

  “Correct.”

  I was going to say something about the wine coolers Amber always lifted from her basement fridge, but then I realized they were part of the set too. It was all part of the set, and they couldn’t give us alcohol with millions of people watching. It was weird to think the actors might’ve been pretending to be drunk when they weren’t. Or maybe they actually were drunk, and they’d just snuck in their own liquor supply. I’d spent so many parties surveying the room, wondering why I wasn’t laughing as loud as the rest of them. Why didn’t I ever feel like dancing on the couch or sliding down Jen Klein’s banister?

  “So Chris Arnold…?” I said out loud, not really talking to Kipps, to anyone.

  “Not a drinker—he’s just that good. Plays a wasted dude like nobody’s business.”

  Kipps cracked open a can and passed it to me. He opened one for himself and clinked it against mine. “To your first real drink. I’m sure it would be better cold, but us scavengers can’t be picky.”

  The first sip tasted like the nonalcoholic version, but when I swallowed it down it stung a little bit. I didn’t mind that it was room temperature. We were in robes, and with the stove going for the past half hour, the place suddenly felt cozy. Comfortable.

  “This isn’t your first drink?” I asked.

  “I’d sneak one every now and then from my parents’ supply. At some point they stopped saying anything about it.”

  “It tastes just as bad as the nonalcoholic kind,” I said. “Except it’s kind of worth it?”

  Three sips in and I already felt the warmth spreading out in my chest. I left the book open beside the stove and sat on the couch, pulling my knees up beneath me. The cushions were so soft it was like sitting in a cloud. I leaned back and my whole body sunk into them.

  “About what you said before, how it’s bleak…” I pointed out the window at the front house, with its manicured lawn and stone facade. “It doesn’t look so bleak. Everything here seems really…nice.”

  “This is a bubble.” Kipps passed me the pretzels, then took a long swig of his beer. He’d curled up on the floor across from me, his back against the wall. “Most people aren’t living like this. It’s hard to make decent money, even if you have a job at a big company. That’s why working inside the set is such a draw. All of a sudden, you get health insurance and a pension, a salary, and all these other benefits. They put my family up in a three-thousand-square-foot house with a hot tub and a wine fridge. I didn’t even know wine fridges were, like, a thing.”

  “But they weren’t paying the extras well,” I said. “Otherwise, why would they strike?”

  “It’s all relative,” Kipps said. “The audience doesn’t have sympathy for them because those jobs are so hard to get, and they can’t understand why anyone would jeopardize having steady work. But I see it, I know. The extras don’t have the full benefits that a guest star does, and then they have to commute into the set on top of that, and some of them are working twelve, fourteen-hour days, six days a week. It takes a lot just to populate the town. There’s a rumor that everyone who was part of the strike is done, fired. Chrysalis Remington—the creator of the show—she apparently said she’ll never let them come back.”

  “So, what? She was just going to replace half the school and hope I didn’t notice?” The beer went down easy, and my cheeks felt warm to the touch. The tension in my back released. It wasn’t so bad, this whole drinking thing.

  “In fairness,” Kipps laughed, “you didn’t notice when they replaced the actress who plays Kristen’s stepmom.”

  “Wait…what?”

  Tess Stavros owned the diner where Kristen worked. It had supposedly been in her family for over thirty years. I remembered the exact moment she looked different, how we’d come in one night and she was behind the counter wearing these thick black glasses. Her hair was down even though she usually pulled it back, the hairnet visible when she was standing directly beneath the overhead lights.

  “Kristen told me she’d just lost some weight. And she needed the glasses for reading.” I tried to laugh, but I could already feel the heaviness of that particular betrayal, how easy Kristen had rambled off an explanation. She was too good a liar. “This is beyond messed up.”

  “Welcome to the world in color,” he said, taking another sip of beer. “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  I looked out the window, checking the backyard. The main house was still dark. We only had one light on above the stove, but I got up and pulled the curtain shut so it was less obvious we were there.

  “You know what I always wondered about?” I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. “That guitar teacher I had. Harry?”

  “His real name was Arthur Von Appen,” Kipps said.

  “So you knew him?”

  “The whole world knew who Arthur was.”

  “Because he tried to tell me. That time we were alone the den,” I said. “I never saw him after that.”

  “No one saw him,” Kipps explained. “It was like he vanished off the face of
the earth—because he did. They were sending a message.”

  “You think they killed him?” I asked. “They make TV shows. They’re not the mafia.”

  Kipps held up his hands. “Let’s just say…I don’t think they didn’t kill him.”

  “Come on, Kipps. You can’t seriously believe that.”

  “Stuck in the ’90s is their highest rated show. There are viewers all over the world. It’s our last gasp of global influence,” he said, pulling the robe tighter around his shoulders. “They’re not going to let anyone jeopardize those advertising dollars. People who threaten the show are at risk. It’s that simple. Like-Life Productions uses ex-military for their security team.”

  The mention of the security team made me uneasy. I could still picture the two men standing in front of the bus, and the authority with which they moved, as if they deserved to be there more than anyone else. It was possible that one choice—taking guitar lessons—had pulled Arthur into my orbit, and trying to help me had cost him his life. I wished I could somehow undo it, that I could somehow go back.

  “You think they’d…what? They’d kill us?”

  The question floated there between us. Kipps let out a long staggering breath.

  “Kipps?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the truth.”

  “No, they can’t,” I said, but I had a sick, unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach. “They need us. I’m not some random neighbor. You aren’t a substitute teacher or one of those fake doctors. Isn’t your family getting their own spin-off show?”

  “They can do whatever they want.” He was usually so light with everything he said, but this was different. Now his tone was flat and even. It unnerved me. “I don’t know how far they’d take it. Nothing surprises me anymore. Besides, you know they’re going to draw this all out. I can’t even imagine what the ratings have been like this week. That shot of us dodging the bus?”