The Theory of Second Best (Cake #2)

by J. Bengtsson

  The interview took about ten minutes. Apparently my life was so boring I couldn’t even get my fifteen minutes of fame. I was peppered with questions about the show and the recruiting process, and I happily answered. Slowly I was adjusting to the camera and feeling more comfortable in front of it. At least, until I was hit by a query I hadn’t expected. This was supposed to be a lighthearted fluff piece, not an exposé. Yet the reporter began describing my mother’s death as if were the most natural thing she could speak of. My stomach clenched in grief, as it always did when someone mentioned her.

  “Do you think losing your mother in such a tragic way has conditioned you to seek out adventures in your own life?”

  I wanted to laugh in her face. If anything, her loss had driven me inward and created a more cautious person. What I was doing – competing on Marooned – had nothing to do with my mother and everything to do with myself. I’d spent too many years living the life that was supposed to be hers. No more. From now on, my future was mine to make.

  3

  Kyle: Family Matters

  Walking up the ramp at LAX, I could hear them before I could see them.

  “There he is,” Mom sighed in relief.

  “Where?” Dad asked in his signature clueless tone.

  “Over there!”

  “Where? I can’t see him.”

  “Oh, my god, Scott,” Mom’s irritated voice echoed. “He’s literally right there!”

  Dad kept searching the crowd until I magically appeared before him.

  “Oh, there you are,” he beamed.

  Mom rolled her eyes.

  A smile spread across my face. Those two! “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

  “Kyle!” Mom came in for a hug. “Ahh. Look at you! You’re taking the scruff to a whole new level, aren’t you?”

  “Nice to see you too,” I grinned.

  She pulled on my sorry excuse for a goatee. “What’s this thing called?”

  “I call it Jim.”

  Mom laughed. “Well, will ‘Jim’ be joining us for Mitch’s wedding?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

  “Maybe you should start now, since it typically takes you a while to make big decisions,” Mom teased.

  “Are we really having this discussion?”

  “I just want you to look nice for your brother’s wedding. That’s all.”

  “No one’s going to care if I have whiskers, Mom.”

  “Yeah, Michelle,” Dad grinned. “They’d first have to get past his ugly mug.”

  I playfully gaped at my parents as if I was offended. “Wow, such heartfelt greetings. Really, guys, you outdid yourselves this time.”

  Dad swallowed me up in a hug. “I missed you, kid. How’s your brother?”

  “Doing good. He says hi.”

  “I called him today, and he totally brushed me off,” Mom complained.

  “I can’t imagine why.” I made a face.

  “Did he really have a TV appearance today, or was he lying to get me off the phone?”

  As far as I knew, Jake didn’t have anything going on, but I wasn’t about to throw my brother under the bus. “Oh, yeah, he did, actually.”

  “You’re such a bad liar, Kyle.”

  I laughed. I really was. “Honestly, I have no idea what his schedule is. I stopped looking when it no longer directly impacted me.”

  “Well, once he gets to Arizona, he won’t be able to evade me,” Mom jested, using her best crazy stalker-lady voice.

  “You keep talking like that and I’ll help him hide,” Dad countered.

  “Yeah, yeah. Come on, Kyle, let’s get you home. I need to fatten you up before you get on that show.”

  “I heard it’s better to go into the competition already starving, so you don’t crash and burn the first day out there.”

  “Listen to yourself, Scott. You want to send our son off half-starved onto an unforgiving, deserted island?”

  “Well, when you put it that way…” he grinned.

  “I think he’s trying to kill me, Mom,” I pouted, sidling up to my protector.

  “No, Kyle, I just know you,” Dad said. “And you’re definitely the type of person who would blow his chance at a million dollars for a spoonful of peanut butter.”

  I spent the following two weeks meeting with producers and medical staff and getting briefed on the rules. Because I’d been away on tour, I had some catching up to do in order to be ready to go with the rest of the contestants in three weeks. The producers gave me a little leeway, no doubt because of my connection to Jake.

  I had first been approached to do the show by a talent scout after one of my brother’s Los Angeles concerts. The guy pretended not to know who I was, saying only that he thought my edgy look would play well with audiences. I wasn’t fooled for a second. Of course he knew. I didn’t stand out in a crowd. Really, there was very little that distinguished me from any other twenty-something guy on the street. Hell, the only interesting thing about me wasn’t me at all... it was Jake.

  But dignity had never been high on my list of must-haves. It made no difference to me how I got the gig; it only mattered that I got it. And I jumped at the offer. It’s not like I had much else to do. I mean, technically I was ‘working,’ but it wasn’t like the tour couldn’t go on without me. I was hardly an integral part of the team. The only one who would miss me was Jake… and even he probably wouldn’t miss me all that much.

  “So I gotta know – whose bright idea was it to rent a car and drive to Arizona for the wedding?” I asked, while shoving a piece of bread in my mouth. Mom had been doing an excellent job of fattening me up. I tore into my plate of steak and potatoes as I awaited the answer.

  “Yeah, that’s what I want to know too,” my older brother, Keith, pitched in.

  “I thought it would be fun,” Mom answered, shrugging.

  “You thought it would be fun?”

  “Yes, Kyle, like old times.”

  I gaped at my mother. “Clearly you don’t remember old times.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Um… the motorhome trip?”

  Keith laughed. “Oh, god, not the motorhome trip.”

  “What? I haven’t heard this one,” Keith’s girlfriend, Sam, perked up as she asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Mom said, dismissively waving her hand in front of her. “Kyle’s just being dramatic.”

  “Dramatic? Mom, come on. Dad took the whole side of the house off!”

  “It wasn’t the whole side of the house,” Dad said, in an attempt to downplay the story. “It was just some paneling… and the water spigot.”

  “Okay, what?” Sam laughed.

  “Dad borrowed a neighbor’s old motorhome one summer, and we went on a road trip,” Keith explained. “But before we even left on the trip, the neighbor was showing Dad how to fill the water tank. So they took a hose, attached it to the spigot in the front of the house, and then forgot about it. Anyway, a few minutes later, the neighbor left, and Dad invited us all in to go on a test run.”

  “Oh no,” Sam gasped. “He didn’t take out the hose?”

  “Not only did he forget to take the hose out, but he drove off and the spigot and part of the house was trailing behind us for a couple of blocks before someone flagged us down. When we got back to the house, there was water shooting straight up into the air like a geyser.”

  “Yeah, that was pretty bad,” Mom conceded.

  “The whole trip was like that. The right blinker didn’t work, so at night Dad would make one of us sit in the front seat holding Grace’s blinking princess wand out the window when he wanted to change lanes,” I recalled.

  “Or when the air conditioning stopped working. It was 108 degrees outside, and we were beyond miserable. We complained so much that Dad got pissed, pulled into a 7-11, and bought us all ice blocks,” Keith added.

  A confused looking Sam asked, “What did you do with the ice blocks?”

  �
��I don’t know. We played with them, I guess, stayed cool. Was it you or Jake that got their tongue stuck to the block?”

  “Jake,” Mom laughed. “I had to pour water over it to unstick him.”

  “Oh, man. See how fun those trips were?” Dad smiled, reminiscing. Poor guy. He was already in his fifties. What else did he have to look forward to in life?

  “No, they weren’t fun at all,” I teased, although, in reality, I found our family travels pretty hysterical. “It’s only funny now because we’re not currently living through it. That’s why I don’t understand the whole road trip to Arizona thing. Why can’t we just fly?”

  “Because I have gifts for your brother’s wedding that I don’t want to put in luggage. You will survive, Kyle.”

  “Geez, you’re so whiny,” said Dad. “All that luxury has spoiled you, boy.”

  “I know,” Keith agreed. “He’s such a pansy-ass.”

  “Whatever,” I huffed. “But the car better have air conditioning and a working blinker.”

  “I think we can manage that.”

  The following day, as I climbed into the SUV with my siblings, I considered my father’s less than flattering assessment of my spoiled, surly behavior. I had noticed a change in myself lately as well, although I’d been reluctant to acknowledge it. Blaming it all on Jake and his seesawing behavioral swings was the easy way out, but now I was wondering if some of my jaded attitude was actually wearing off on him. Jake had always counted on my upbeat personality to lift him up. Maybe this time away from each other would be good for both of us.

  After an argument amongst the five of us over who got to sit where, Keith and Emma pulled rank, choosing the best two seats for themselves. My choice was no legroom in the far back, sitting next to Keith who got the coveted spot closest to the power outlet, or plenty of legroom in the middle seats but having to squeeze in three to a row with my sisters. In the end I picked the middle row since Grace didn’t take up much space. I watched in amusement as she crawled right into the crappiest seat without even the slightest protest, as if she’d learned long ago to accept her lot in life as the lowest McKallister on the totem pole.

  As I buckled in, I again silently bemoaned the current travel arrangements. I’d become accustomed to a certain standard of travel, and this definitely wasn’t it. As Jake’s platonic free-loading plus one, I was used to being waited on and catered to right alongside him. If he stayed in nice hotels or flew first class, so did I. We didn’t even discuss it. Jake just always bought two of everything, one for him and one for me. Realization dawned on me. Holy crap. I was a kept woman. No, worse – I was a skin tag, stuck to my brother like a fleshy little growth! Suddenly this road trip seemed like an exceedingly good idea. I mean, I needed to man up, and quickly. In only a week’s time I was going to be wiping my ass with palm fronds.

  As it turned out, the trip wasn’t as bad as expected. In fact, the first two hours were spent joking around, and I was feeling pretty good about my new found self-awareness. If I could survive a car ride in exceedingly close quarters with my siblings so effortlessly, certainly I could endure over a month without deodorant and toothpaste.

  However, four hours in, mind-numbing boredom turned my mood sour. As a way to pass the time, I started rating my siblings’ grating behaviors. Grace, the youngest at fifteen years old, was on her phone most of the time. Her fingers flew over the keyboard at lightening speed, and aside from the many times she turned the camera for a selfie or a Snapchat, Grace only occasionally looked up from the screen. Clearly she was the least irritating of the bunch, and on a scale from one to annoying, she rested nicely at a one.

  My oldest sister had her earplugs in and slept the majority of the trip. A nurse, Emma had just come off a night shift before making the thirty-minute drive from her house in the valley to ours. I actually hadn’t seen her since returning home from Europe. Neither one of us could be bothered to make the trip, nor were we particularly enthusiastic to see one another whenever our paths did cross.

  Since Emma was zonked out most of the time, she really should have scored low on my informal behavioral graph. However, because she sporadically awakened from her hibernation to growl menacingly at the rest of us, I had no choice but to add points to her overall total.

  Keith was chugging right along, being his normal jovial self, and would have scored low on my sibling resentment chart had he not brought the sunflower seeds into play. The suck-crunch-spit combo was bad enough, but once stray bits of slimy seeds that hadn’t made it into the narrow spout of the water bottle started landing on the back of my neck, I lost it. Keith had definitely tipped the scale, and not in his favor.

  But, as it turned out, the youngest McKallister boy had us all beat. Evidently, sixteen-year-old Quinn was going for gold. On his Spotify app, my little brother had successfully discovered the world’s most annoying song: I Like to Move It, sung by the Chipmunks. Not only did we get to hear the song in its original glory but we also got to hear Quinn’s unbelievably grating rodent version.

  I had to admit, it was funny the first time. But not so much after the third. By the sixth time, I was looking for blood. Regrettably, with Quinn sitting in the back row furthest from me, I was too far away to do any real damage.

  “Oh, my god,” I yelled. “Would somebody please hit him?!”

  Without missing a beat, Keith reached out and smacked Quinn.

  “Ow!” he screamed, punching back.

  “Quinn, if you sing even one more note of that song, I’m dropping you off at the next rest stop!” Dad threatened.

  “Keith hit me! Don’t you even care?”

  “Actually, I do. Thank you, Keith.”

  “You’re welcome, Dad.”

  I laughed. Over the years our dad had morphed from concerned, doting father to just one of the guys. It was as if seven kids broke the ‘dad’ right out of him.

  “Way to be supportive of my singing abilities,” Quinn grumbled to whoever would listen, which happened to be no one. “You wouldn’t treat Jake that way.”

  “Jake doesn’t sing like a goddamn chipmunk!”

  After arriving at the hotel in Arizona, Keith and I decided to make a clandestine beer run. Wandering the aisles of a local grocery store, Keith was acquiring quite a stockpile. Liquor aside, he was throwing chips, candy, and baked goods into the mix.

  I flashed him a quizzical look. “You’re not planning on getting crossfaded tonight, are you?”

  “No, why?”

  “I mean, the amount of liquor and munchies you’ve got here makes me think you might have a secret stash somewhere too.”

  Keith laughed. “You’re shitting me, right? Do you know what Mom would do to me if she found out I brought doobies to Mitch’s wedding?”

  The thought did actually make me cringe. Mom would definitely not appreciate a stoned Keith. None of us would, really. Keith had a sketchy past when it came to drugs. A few months after Jake’s miraculous escape, Keith had decided to add his two cents to the tragedy by going off the deep end himself… and weed was the least of his problems. Two stints in rehab followed before he finally got himself back under control. He’d been clean for about four years now, and when I say clean, I mean it in the most liberal of terms. I guess you could say Keith was ‘California clean,’ in the sense that he, along with a fair portion of the population in this left-leaning state, didn’t actually consider pot to be a real drug. Although Keith could occasionally be found toking up or drinking heavily at times, he made a concerted effort to keep that behavior away from our parents, who were not as liberal in their beliefs when it came to Keith’s unhealthy pastimes. So when Keith claimed that Mom would not appreciate such conduct, it was no joke. In fact, I suspected if he got caught with weed at Mitch’s wedding, we’d probably be planning his funeral soon thereafter.

  “Sam’s been on a health kick lately, and she won’t allow any crap in the house. I haven’t had sugar in a month.”

  “So you plan to eat all this by tomo
rrow night before she gets here?”

  “Yep.”

  My eyebrows arched in response.

  “What?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised that I cared.

  “Dude, grow some balls. I’d never let a chick tell me what I can and can’t eat.”

  “Uh huh, just you wait.”

  “For what? To be castrated by my girlfriend? No, thanks.”

  “No – to love someone enough to want to change for them.”

  “You’re not changing!” I exclaimed in a high-pitched voice. “You’re literally hiding five pounds of junk food from her.”

  “Exactly. I love her enough to eat this away from her and never let her know.”

  At the checkout, Keith pulled a trashy magazine off the rack with Jake’s picture on the cover. He shook his head. “What’s this bullshit?”

  “More of the same, I’m sure.”

  I watched Keith flip through the magazine until he came to the article featuring Jake. I studied his face for a reaction. First came the clenched jaw, then the furrowed brows and flaring nostrils. When would he learn? Keith had been gripping the sides of the magazine tightly before he slapped it shut and replaced it on the rack.

  “Why’d you look in the first place?” I shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I guess I was hoping it might be a positive article for a change.”

  I shook my head. I’d learned a long time ago not to take the bait. Nothing that was written about Jake was true, so why bother stooping to their level and reading the lies? “Yeah, it’s not gonna happen.”

  “Does he see this crap?”

  “He can’t not see it.”

  “How does he react to it?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t say.”

  Keith gave me a curious look. “Ever?”

  “You know Jake. He doesn’t exactly share his feelings.”