This Is Not the Jess Show

by Anna Carey

  “I think we all felt that,” the host said.

  “My mom and I are really excited about what’s next. As you know, Mario, this is our last public appearance.” She glanced into the camera. “I think we could both use some time to ourselves. Out of the public eye.”

  It was the way Sara said it that made me feel like it was just for us, some kind of clue.

  The host let them sit there, hoping the silence might force them to say something more revealing. After a minute he turned back to my mom and dad. It was only then, looking at his profile, that I realized who he was. Mario Lopez—A. C. Slater from Saved by the Bell. He’d become a talk show host.

  “You know I have to ask, now that Jess has left—fled the show…do you regret anything?” Mario Lopez asked. “If you could change anything, would you?”

  “We have every reason to believe this is temporary,” my dad said. “They’re already narrowing down her location.”

  “And if it’s not?” he went on.

  “It is, we know it is,” my mom insisted.

  “You’ve both been so open about the difficult childhoods you had,” Mario went on. “Helene, you’ve talked about how abusive your parents were. Carter, your mother died when you were young and your father left when you were three. You bounced around between different family members. One of your goals with this show was to give Jess the childhood you never had. Seeing the 1990s through a different lens, as you would have wanted it to be. Do you think you succeeded?”

  “I do,” my mom said. She turned to my dad. “I really do. I think most of Jess’s childhood was idyllic.”

  “I agree. And we’re excited to make more memories together,” my dad said.

  There was an awkward look between Sara and Charli. They would not be included in those memories, that much was clear. Something had happened between the four of them, but I couldn’t tell what, exactly. It seemed like they truly hated each other.

  Mario Lopez said something about the producers looking for us, but he didn’t give any specific details, and no one said anything about the lake or the NextGen Cloud we’d crashed. Then the show cut to a local news story about a fire in a scooter factory. It was just eleven o’clock.

  “Well, that was thoroughly depressing,” I said. “God, all that stuff about my parents’ childhoods…”

  I closed my eyes, trying to push down my feelings. It didn’t excuse any of it, of course it didn’t, but I hated the idea of my dad moving around every few months, or my mom being in an abusive home. They’d always told me my grandparents were dead. When they did talk about their childhoods it was only the brief mention of Grants Pass, Oregon, where my mom grew up, or some story about how my dad’s dad had sold vacuums.

  “I’m sorry,” Kipps repeated.

  I shook my head. “It’s not your fault.”

  I hit the remote and the lens disappeared into the wall. The room was dark except for the light streaming in through the door. I looked at the loft bed. My head hurt from thinking so much. I just wanted sleep.

  “I need to shut my eyes. This day…it’s too much.”

  “I can take the couch. You go, sleep.”

  Kipps collected the beer cans from off the floor and tossed them in the trash. He fixed the sofa so the pillows were straight, and I could tell he was just a little bit drunk, his movements different than they normally were. I didn’t think I’d say it until I did.

  “There’s enough room for both of us, I think. But if you’re going to be a prude about it we could sleep head to toe, like the grandparents in Willy Wonka.”

  What the hell was wrong with me? Couldn’t I say something cool, even if it was only this one time?

  Kipps just smiled. “I am not being Grandpa Joe, I’ll tell you that much. Maybe the other grandpa. The one everyone forgets about.”

  I turned off the stove and fanned the lyric book out so the rest of it could dry. Kipps was right behind me as we climbed the ladder to the loft, and when I got to the queen-size bed I tossed him one of the two pillows. He lay down with his head by my feet, and he stayed on top of the blankets, snuggling the long terry-cloth robe around him. We both stared up at the ceiling.

  “Goodnight,” he finally said.

  “Let me know if you need some blankets.”

  “I think I’m good.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to him breathing. The loft ceiling was so low that my whole head filled with the sound. A minute passed, then ten, but I felt more awake than I’d been all day. Every time he shifted on the bed I opened my eyes a crack, trying to check if he was sleeping.

  His eyes were still closed. He’d turned over onto his side, curling in on himself. It was weird, being this close to him, when just a week ago he was someone I was trying to avoid. I stared at his face, how his cheek smushed against the pillow. Suddenly he felt as unfamiliar as the room we were sleeping in. Did I know him? Could I really trust him? After Tyler, part of me wanted to swear off boys entirely.

  “Jess…I can’t sleep.”

  He didn’t open his eyes.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  He stuck out his elbow, propping his head in his hand so he faced me. “I guess I’m not used to sleeping in bed with girls.”

  “You make it sound so scandalous,” I said. He looked down, embarrassed. “But yeah, I guess I’m not used to sleeping in bed with boys.”

  “It’s weird, right?” He seemed genuinely thrilled to acknowledge it.

  “I mean, I just watched my parents on a talk show, telling A. C. Slater why they lied to me for my entire life…so…”

  “Yeah, it’s all relative.” He pulled his robe up around his neck, and we were both silent for a minute. “What are you thinking?”

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was wondering…if I could actually trust you. It doesn’t feel like I can trust anyone anymore.”

  Kipps stuck out his bottom lip and nodded, like he was considering it. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Kipps!” I nudged his leg. “The answer is: YES.”

  “I mean: YES!” He smiled. “But you can wait and see.”

  “I just don’t understand how it went that far, you know?” I said, tracing a seam along the pillow. “How did my parents agree to it all?”

  “This might be hard to hear, but the show isn’t all bad,” he said. He waited, but when I didn’t respond he kept going. “When I was eight, my dad lost his job. He was drinking a lot. My brother and I started watching it for the first time. You and Sara had just found Fuller behind the bowling alley.”

  “They’d stuck him in that cardboard box.”

  “Yeah…and you’d take him into your backyard and play with him for hours. You’d dress him up in doll clothes and pretend to serve him tea, and he’d jump in that pile of dried leaves and roll around, and you’d laugh and laugh. Anyway, we loved watching the show. It made us feel normal for that hour. Like things might be okay.”

  He smiled, and in that moment I noticed everything about him, like I was looking through a camera lens that had suddenly come into focus. There was a tiny mole just below his right cheekbone, and his eyes narrowed so much when he was smiling I could barely see what color they were.

  “I know how evil the show is, I do,” he went on. “And even when my family was making all these choices inside the set, and I knew they were wrong, I felt the tiniest bit conflicted about everything. Because people love the show, and they love it because it makes them happy—if only for an hour every day. Outside the set, it’s all some people have.”

  “And you think my parents knew that? That that was part of why they kept going?”

  Kipps shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  He fell back so he was staring up at the ceiling again. He tightened the robe around him.

  “I guess, just�
�thank you,” he finally said. “For that.”

  I adjusted the pillow so I could see him better. He stretched out his hand toward me and I took it, letting our fingers fold into each other. His eyes closed first, and I watched him for a long time, how his chest rose and fell with each breath. Kipps was careful with what he said to me. He didn’t just talk to talk, and I knew that was a good thing, even if everything else felt unsure. We’d gotten this far, hadn’t we?

  We were still holding hands when I finally gave in to sleep.

  31

  For that first minute before I opened my eyes, I was back in my bed in Swickley, the comforter pulled up around my neck. I could almost feel Fuller at the end of the bed, tucked to the left of my feet. My alarm clock on the nightstand beside my head. For that one minute, I was able to forget.

  It was the sound of the train horn that finally jolted me out of it. Somewhere, just a short distance away, it blared once, then twice, cutting the still silence of the morning.

  “Pssst.” When I opened my eyes, Kipps’s hand was on my shoulder. “We have to get up. We should get out of here.”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Six.”

  I groaned, and Kipps started laughing at me. He was still in his terry-cloth robe. There were creases across his forehead.

  “Do you hear that?” I pointed into the air. “There’s a train. Somewhere close.”

  Kipps leaned forward, straining to listen. It was like the train was purposefully quiet. Kipps just shrugged.

  “Come on,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder again.

  He climbed down the ladder first, and I was right behind him. I went into the bathroom and checked my clothes. The denim jacket was still a little damp, but my baby-doll dress and tee shirt were completely dry. The tee shirt had gone from white to this murky light green, though. I closed the door and started getting dressed, knowing there was nothing I could do about it now.

  “Okay. Important question,” I called to Kipps through the door. I could hear him just outside, erasing all traces of us. The sink ran for a second, then stopped.

  “Hit me.”

  “If it’s 2037,” I finally said, pulling the tee shirt on, “how’d you know how to live in 1998? If it’s so different inside the set.”

  “There’s all this training,” he said. “Before you’re even allowed in the set you have to learn all this stuff. Pop culture, movies, music. TV shows. The type of clothes everyone wore, the hairstyles. I got really into movie quotes. I thought that would be my thing. ‘YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!’ ‘Hasta la vista, baby…’ That way if I didn’t have anything else to say, or no one thought I was funny, I could use those lines. It only kind of worked.”

  I stepped out of the bathroom, but the morning air gave me a chill. All the warmth from the stove was gone.

  “Did you ever hear someone say ‘Talk to the hand’?” Kipps put his palm between us, blocking me out. “Or ‘Talk to the hand ’cause the face ain’t listening’? I really wanted to use that one, and I managed to do it a bunch as an extra, but then as soon as I got the guest-star part, they told me to stop. Told me it was too much, that Patrick Kramer would never say that.”

  “I’ve heard it, yeah,” I said. “Jen Klein used to say it sometimes, and a bunch of the kids in my lunch period last year.”

  He disappeared into the bathroom to change. I heard the clinking of his belt buckle, his feet on the tile floor as he hopped into his jeans.

  “I might try to start using it, if that’s okay.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “Well, I can’t right now. It would be out of context. Maybe even a little rude.”

  He came out of the bathroom in his fleece, only it was turned inside out so only the lining was showing, making it look like it was all black. His hair stuck up in the back. He was really cute…and funny. If only the producers had let him be more him, less Patrick Kramer.

  “I’m going to check if there’s anything in the storage up there, under the bed,” he said. “We could use some extra clothes. You especially.”

  He pointed to my baby-doll dress, and the weird greenish tee shirt underneath. The hem of the skirt was caked with mud.

  “I know, I know. I look like butt.”

  “Never.” He smiled that smile, and I couldn’t help it, I smiled back. Then he climbed the ladder to the loft.

  I held the lyric book up to the light. There wasn’t much else to decode. Just a few last pages. It took me twice as long as it normally would because the marks were much lighter than before. The paper had taken on a different texture as it dried, and it wasn’t easy to see each one—I had to hold it at just the right angle.

  IM ALREDY OUT

  CALL WHN SAFE

  WLL COME FR U

  Then there was a phone number in the front pages of the book, split in twos.

  32 35 55 94 23

  I immediately opened every cabinet and drawer, checking them again for a phone, but there wasn’t one. At some point the pen had fallen out of my bag so I just repeated the numbers in my head until they were a part of me. We’d call Sara once we were safe. Even if we couldn’t contact anyone else, we had one ally. She’d gotten us this far. Maybe she could take us a little further.

  When Kipps came back down the ladder, he was wearing a baseball hat that said MICHELOB. A gray sweatshirt was slung over his shoulder, and he tossed it to me as soon as he got down.

  “I found some things. You have that.”

  I pulled it on and immediately warmed up. I didn’t even care that it was three sizes too big, with a peeling yellow logo on the front.

  “Sara gave me a number to reach her at. We can try it when we get to the city. We have to at least try it, right?”

  “Yeah, if she can help. How do you want to get there?”

  I heard it again, far off at first. The train horn blared once, then twice. If we were talking or not listening for it, we would’ve missed it. Then it was gone.

  “There’s a station nearby. Come on. Let’s go.”

  32

  Someone was at the door again. This time it was a loud, authoritative knock. I gave Kipps a wide-eyed nod. This was his cue.

  “One minute,” he said in a choked voice. “I’m sorry, I’m just…”

  Then he made a loud, hacking sound, like he was vomiting into the toilet. He kept going for another minute, moaning and doing this weird gurgling thing with the back of his throat. Eventually I waved my hands, signaling for him to stop. We wanted people to think he was hungover, not dying of Ebola.

  “Good acting,” I whispered. “It’s like you’ve been practicing for years.”

  He curtseyed, then the train jerked forward and he fell into the wall. I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. We’d found a backpack and a canvas boat hat in the guesthouse closet, and we’d stolen those too. It was just enough that I felt guilty, but not enough that I felt safe. Kipps still looked like Kipps, and when I caught my reflection in the scratched-up mirror on the bathroom wall, I still looked like me. The hat helped, but it only covered the top half of my face.

  The train braked, and I had to hold on to the bar beside the sink. The station had only been a ten-minute walk from the house. When we got to the platform we knew it would be too risky to sit with the other passengers. Besides, each seat had a device to scan your ticket and these weird bumper things that prevented you from sitting down until you did. We’d spent a half hour crammed inside the bathroom, which reeked of Lysol and urine. Kipps pretended to puke every time someone came by.

  We waited for the automated voice. People plodded past outside the door, rolling suitcases in their wake. This is the train to New York, the voice said. The next and last stop is Octavia Station.

  “Octavia Station? That’s the final stop?” Even though I’d never been to New York, I’d heard abo
ut Grand Central. Penn Station. The Statue of Liberty. I’d never heard that name, not once.

  “There’s this billionaire, Olivia Octavia. She came in and built this whole complex in the center of the city. It was all over the news. It has transportation, dining, apartments. Everything.”

  Kipps checked his baseball cap in the mirror, then curled the brim down so it hid more of his face. I tucked my hair up under the canvas hat, just to see if it helped, but I still looked a bit odd. The men’s sweatshirt came halfway down my thigh.

  “We just need to get to a phone,” I said. “There must be pay phones on every corner. We find one, call Sara, and see what she says.”

  Kipps shook his head. “No dice.”

  “No dice? What do you mean, no dice?”

  “Pay phones aren’t a thing. Like, I’ve kind of heard of them, the same way I’ve heard of typewriters or VCRs but—”

  “VCRs aren’t a thing? Since when?”

  “Since Netflix. And Hulu and BeeBop. That Blockbuster in Swickley, they just built it as part of the set, to make it more authentic. No one actually rents videos anymore.”

  “Okay, whatever,” I said, annoyed. “I’ve been living in 2037 for one day. I can’t be expected to know everything.”

  The train braked and we steeled ourselves against it. We waited until it came to a complete stop before opening the bathroom door a crack. Men and women in business suits filed past.

  “Our best bet is borrowing someone’s device,” he said. “But, sidenote: I’m going to need some food.”

  “I know. I’m starving. I’ve been thinking about that triple-decker club sandwich they had at the Cresthollow Diner. With those french fries…”

  “I always got the onion rings. That place was legit, for a fake set restaurant.”

  When Amber and I visited Kristen there, she always made a big show of the dessert menu. For some reason they’d made plastic versions of every slice of pie and cake they had, and they were all on a giant silver tray. I could picture it so clearly, Kristen showing it to different tables, trying to entice them to try something, or letting the younger kids poke at the fake food. It was still so vivid. My mouth started watering thinking about their raspberry cheesecake. Kipps and I had split the last of the pretzels this morning, but it hadn’t been enough.