This Is Not the Jess Show

by Anna Carey

  “Entertaining, yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  I got up and checked on the lyric book. It was still damp in places, but you could see the markings under the letters, even if they had faded a bit. I’d be able to go through it in the morning.

  I tried to push away the idea that the producers might take things further than they already had. We couldn’t know where the bottom was, how deep and dark it would go, what kind of extremes they might inflict on us. I told myself Kipps was exaggerating, that they were making a TV show—it was about entertainment, that’s all it was.

  But part of me kept pushing back. They were the ones who’d signed off on the Guignard’s Disease storyline. They thought it was fine, ideal even, for me to watch my sister die. For me to suffer through those three vicious years, spending anxiety-stricken weeks waiting for test results, or organizing and outfitting Sara’s room, trying to make it somewhere she didn’t hate spending all her time. It had been torture, death by a thousand paper cuts, and my parents hadn’t done a thing to stop them.

  “Just for the record…I didn’t want to lie to you. That wasn’t my choice,” Kipps said. “I was never supposed to be a lead. It didn’t start out that way.”

  “So what happened?”

  “My family and I were extras on the show, and a few years in I had the grave misfortune of being ‘discovered.’ ” Kipps made quote signs with his fingers. “One of the producers was all, I like this guy’s cheekbones. He polls well with the audience. Let’s prep him to be the love interest.”

  “That was ninth grade, huh?”

  We didn’t really talk back then, but even I’d realized Kipps had changed, that he was different somehow. In middle school he hung out with the video yearbook kids and was editor of the school newspaper. I always saw him in the computer lab playing Oregon Trail. Then he’d started hanging out exclusively with the athletes. Suddenly everyone was talking about how he was the fastest soccer player on the team, or spreading rumors about him and Julie Pinski hooking up in the woods behind the gym. Soon there were three guys trailing behind him wherever he went, as if he’d started his own boy band.

  “So you don’t play any sports?”

  “None.”

  “What do you talk about with those guys then? They’re all so…”

  “Dumb?” he said. “I’ve met poodles that are smarter than Ben Taylor. Outside the set he goes by Golden. Just one name: Golden. He hawks some kind of protein powder.”

  “He said my eyes were too far apart.”

  “That wasn’t acting. He really is a dick.”

  “What did you do in the set, then? If you didn’t play sports and you didn’t go to the Wolf Den and you didn’t talk to those guys you spent all your time with?”

  “My brother Reed and I play Dirt Road, this VR game.” He sat up straighter, gesturing with the beer can. “Oh, and there’s this fantasy series called the Voyage of Laggerbath. Nine books. I’ve read them all five times, no joke.”

  “The Voyage of Laggerbath,” I repeated. “One of the many other things I missed. At some point you’re going to have to catch me up on the last forty years.”

  I hadn’t meant it to come out the way it had. Self-deprecating and a little sad, like I was an animal who’d never seen the sun. But there were whole decades I knew nothing about. Television shows and movies, presidents and wars. My existence had been limited to a five-mile radius, to that small town and all the manufactured drama there. I’d never even been to New York City before, never seen the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, and we’d lived less than an hour away.

  “Everything feels so warped,” I said. “Like, I should be happy, right? That I’m away from my parents, from two people who not only lied to me about the show but about my sister dying. God knows how long they were going to keep it a secret. Maybe forever. It’s like they had no concept of what that would do to me, how it would send my life careening off in this whole other direction.” I turned the book to a damp page and held it closer to the flame. “But it’s not like this will be any easier. In almost every way, it’ll be a million times harder. We’re like…runaways.”

  “You’re saying you want to go back?” Kipps tilted his head to the side, studying me.

  There were things I missed already. Those mornings when my bedroom window was open just a crack, and I was warm underneath my comforter, Fuller curled up on the end of the bed. I missed the lasagna Lydia made, and how when she was cooking the whole house smelled like tomato sauce. My mom loved playing board games, in this way that really must’ve been impossible to fake, and she’d challenge me to Guess Who? long after I’d outgrown it. She was always doing things to try to fake me out, make me think she had someone she didn’t, like ask all the questions she didn’t want me to ask (Does he have a mustache? Is he a blond?). Even now, I missed the way she laughed. It didn’t happen often, but when she did she couldn’t stop, and she sometimes doubled forward, covering her mouth with her hand.

  How had it gone so far? How had we gotten to this place, where I was in a stranger’s house, in stolen clothes, drinking a beer with a boy I hardly knew? My parents had been making money off the show, lots of it. And part of me understood the need to document our life, to enter it into some formal record, as if that made it count in a way it couldn’t otherwise. But they had hired someone to play my sister. I kept turning that over—they hired a child actor to play my sister. They’d staged a car crash and a burglary, her illness and death. At what point had that life fumbled out of their control? Was there a moment when they could feel themselves slipping, saying yes to things they shouldn’t have? Did they regret it at all?

  “Sometimes I think I was just like a prop in my parents’ life. Another thing for them to sell. I want to be wrong about that, I do, but they need to show me. If they want me to come back, let them show me they understand what they did wrong. Let them prove they love me, that at least that much was real. I mean, they should be able to prove that, right?” It was probably naive, but the idea of going back inside the set and living by their rules, of having to listen to them and pretend they deserved my respect…

  “I guess that’s what I wanted to say before,” Kipps said, pushing the beer tab back and forth. “I’m sorry. You know, that I was part of it. It was wrong and I always knew that, I guess. I always knew.”

  I waved the book in the heat, flipped over another page and dried that too. I wasn’t sure how to respond. He should be sorry; he should feel awful.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” he tried.

  “I know I don’t.”

  “But if you wanted to give me a sense, or even a number, from one to ten, on how big of a douchebag you think I am…ten being the Biggest Douchebag in the World and one being Not a Douchebag at All, then I—”

  “Four.”

  “Four? Not bad.”

  He seemed momentarily pleased with himself.

  I set the book down and sat on the floor across from him, my legs folded to one side. I took a few more sips of beer. “What if you’re right, what if I’m just being optimistic. What if we can’t rely on Sara, or whatever her name is. What if we’ve got nothing besides the three dollars in my wallet and these bathrobes.”

  “We try to figure it out?” Kipps gestured with the can. “Think of it this way, if I have over four hundred days until I’m eighteen, and you have…?”

  “A hundred and sixty,” I said. “Something like that. Assuming my birthday is actually my birthday.”

  “We just have to make it that far. Then we come out and give our sides of the story. We can write books, do the whole talk-show circuit. I mean, whether we want it or not, we’re going to be recognizable for a long time after this. We might as well cash in and make it work for us. On our terms.”

  I groaned out loud, like he’d just punched me in the gut. The thought of being on camera again, after going
through so much to escape the set? I didn’t care if I was getting paid for it, or I was telling my side of the story…it was a hellish prospect.

  “I’m just saying,” he tried, “it’s an easy way for us to make money.”

  “Okay, say we do that, which I’m not actually agreeing to. Where do we go until then? We can’t stay in New York. The city is still too close to the set, even if there are a gazillion people there.”

  “They’re going to think you’re headed to Los Angeles. All that LA talk,” he said.

  “No, definitely not…”

  I didn’t want to be Jessica Flynn anymore, star of Stuck in the ’90s. The thought of being on stage at the Troubadour, in front of some massive audience, had lost all appeal. I could still feel people’s eyes on me, even when I was in the privacy of a bathroom, and I’d started turning the lights off every time I changed my clothes. It was going to take years before I trusted a mirror. I still checked them from all different angles, trying to see if they were even the slightest bit transparent.

  I didn’t want to go to some big city, where I’d fight through sidewalk crowds and be stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, or have to face dozens of commuters on the subway. I didn’t even really want to go to New York, but I knew it was the right choice.

  “There are hundreds of trains and buses leaving the city every day,” I said. “All we need is to make it onto one. Let’s go somewhere remote, somewhere where there aren’t a lot of people.”

  “Antarctica?” Kipps smiled.

  “There aren’t trains to Antarctica,” I said, and held up a finger. “But yes, you get the idea. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere remote. Somewhere where no one will look at me ever.”

  “I can’t promise I won’t look at you. That would be very, very hard.”

  When he said it, there was something else there. Then he smiled and I tried to ignore the heat in my cheeks, the sudden awareness that he thought I was pretty.

  “I’m serious, Kipps. I don’t want to go somewhere where people will recognize us, or come up to me in the street and start trying to talk to me. I know 99 percent of the world wants to be famous, but it sucks. It isn’t actually fun. Let’s find a cheap place in northern California, somewhere by the beach. Maybe New Mexico or Vermont. We’ll just find somewhere and wait out the time however we can.”

  “Together.”

  Kipps stretched his hand out for me to take. It hadn’t been obvious before that, that we’d stay together, no matter what. But we only had each other now. We both knew we’d never make it alone.

  I pressed my palm to his, and his fingers clasped mine. He squeezed. The light was streaming in from the glass door, and for the first time I noticed the way his nose angled down to the left, just the slightest bit, this perfect imperfection. He’d rinsed off in the shower and his hair was still damp. A few curls fell over to the side of his forehead, framing his face.

  “What?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at me.

  “Nothing.”

  He squeezed my hand again and held it there. I tried to fix my expression into something normal, something that betrayed nothing, but I knew he’d already seen it. I couldn’t stop myself even if I’d wanted to.

  He’d seen my googly love eyes.

  30

  We sat on the floor, our backs against the couch. Kipps was fiddling with a sleek white remote control, jabbing at a button on the top and then shaking it, trying to get the battery to work. We wanted to check the news to make sure no one had found the NextGen Cloud in the lake.

  “I’ve never used one of these things,” he said.

  “Let me try.”

  “It’s not intuitive.”

  “Uh, I think I’ll be able to figure it out,” I said, reaching for the remote. “Don’t say it like that. It’s not intuitive.” I mimicked his voice.

  He pulled the remote away and we wrestled for it, my arm stretching out behind him, our faces inches apart. After the second beer I felt bolder, and I didn’t pull away when we fell to the side and rolled over the carpet, our bodies smushed together. I held the remote high in the air and pressed the button in the center. When that didn’t work I tried another button on the side.

  A hole in the wall opened and a small black lens appeared. In an instant, it projected an image on the smooth, flat wall across from us.

  “Ah-ha!! And you said it couldn’t be done!” I threw my arms in the air and did a little dance.

  “You are a genius,” he said, bowing. “And I am nothing.”

  “That’s right.”

  I took the last swig of my beer and stared up at the screen. The center button on the remote spun counterclockwise, and when I pressed it with my thumb a guide popped up on the wall. There were hundreds of channels. Every time I turned the button, dozens more appeared.

  “Whoa,” I said, scrolling down. “There were four channels inside the set. Four.”

  “You only had four channels on your specific TV,” he said. “But we got all of them. They were trying to control what you saw.”

  There had been a news channel I never watched, a sports channel that ran different football and baseball games on repeat, and then the SWB, which played all our favorite shows. Party of Five and 90210 and the TGIF lineup, which we’d watched religiously when we were younger. The fourth channel played movies all day long, some classics and then newer stuff like Ghost or Clueless. One day they played The Poseidon Adventure from 1972 on repeat for twelve hours straight, and Sara and I watched it three times in a row.

  “Ooh, there,” Kipps said, and pointed to something at the bottom of the list. The title said Stuck in the ’90s: The Aftermath.

  “I don’t want to see anymore Stuck in the ’90s coverage,” I said. “I’ve had enough.”

  “It’s not coverage, it’s one of those post-show things where they have some of the actors on,” Kipps said. “We should just see who they’re interviewing. It would be good to know what they’re saying.”

  I scrolled down and clicked into it, and suddenly my parents and Sara and Lydia were all there. Sara wore an iridescent blue blouse and hoop earrings. Her dark hair was styled in big barrel curls that spilled down in front of her shoulders.

  “Oh my God,” I said, sitting up on my knees. “Sara looks so good. She looks healthy.”

  I hadn’t seen her like that in years. She was still a little thinner than she was before she’d gotten diagnosed, but her cheeks had color to them. She was wearing real clothes, not the flannel pajamas she’d spent every day in. She was sitting up straight with her legs crossed. She looked so grown up.

  The host must’ve been sixty-five or seventy, his hair gray at the temples. When he spoke, you could see deep dimples in both of his cheeks. He looked suspiciously familiar, though I couldn’t figure out why.

  “Let me ask you, you’ve come under fire for your choices these past three years concerning Sara,” he said. “And we know there was a rift between you and Charli over Sara leaving the show. What do you have to say to those critics?”

  “Charli Dean,” Kipps explained. “That’s Lydia’s real name.”

  My mom glanced down at her hands. She twisted her bracelet back and forth before she finally spoke. “I’m used to the critics. People say I’m a bitch, I’m cruel. I’m a bad mother. I’ve heard it all. But we made the choices—and let me remind you it’s a we—it’s me and Carter.”

  “It is a we,” my dad echoed. “They always come at her, but we make decisions together. I’m not as laid-back as I play on the show. People should know that by now.”

  “It’s all internalized misogyny,” my mom said, “this rage that is solely directed at mothers, but that’s another discussion. What people don’t fully understand is that this choice we made over seventeen years ago, to bring Jess into the show—we’re still feeling the weight of that choice. And Carter and I agreed it would be better
if we waited until she was older to disclose the nature of the show. Every year it got harder. You tell yourself, maybe we’ll just wait one more year, maybe when she’s sixteen. Maybe now’s the time to do it, but it’s a hard call.”

  “It never felt like the right moment,” the host said.

  “No, it didn’t,” my dad jumped in. “We agreed with Chrysalis, the creator, that eighteen was a good time. When she turned eighteen. That way she could decide what she wanted her life to look like after, if she wanted to leave the show and go to college or continue on in some capacity.”

  “Or because every year that went by that I didn’t know, you were all profiting. The status quo was good. You were all making money,” I said.

  Kipps pumped his fist in the air in solidarity. “Truth.”

  “And the feud with Charli?” the host asked.

  “Charli and I have had our disagreements,” my mom said, nodding.

  “Yes, we have,” Charli agreed. “And we will continue to have those disagreements.”

  “Why’s that?” the host asked. “That sounds intense.”

  Charli straightened up in her seat. Her bright blond hair was pulled back, and she was wearing a neon-pink shift dress she never would’ve worn inside the set. Her gray eyes were lined with lash extensions.

  “I think Sara and I,” she started, “we ultimately realized it was our time to leave the show. That this was right. It’s just…at a certain point our hearts were not in it.”

  “What do you mean?” the host asked.

  “We just started to look forward more to the end of the show than the day-to-day, if that makes sense.”

  “And I think for me,” Sara said, as the name SARA FLORES appeared on the screen below her, “my role has been so limited there isn’t a lot to miss. I’ll hate not seeing Jess, of course. We really were sisters. That part you can’t fake.”