The Million Dollar Race

by Matthew Ross Smith

  “So what’s the next step?” Dad asks. “What’s the move?”

  “Hold on,” Franny says. “Give me two minutes. I’ll be right back.”

  29

  He comes back holding three things: 1) the GoPro camera he got for his birthday last year, 2) a cheap plastic crown that we used as a prop when we made movies, and 3) a roll of duct tape.

  “I don’t like this,” I say. “I don’t know what this is, but I already don’t like it.”

  “Okay,” he says, unloading the stuff on the kitchen table. “So here’s what I’ve been thinking about. What is Grantsylvania?”

  “An Internet country,” I say.

  “Right. But really, at its heart, it’s you, right? An online version of you. We could make some videos, tell your story… that’s what I was originally thinking.”

  “But…?”

  “But the more I think about it, there are zillions of videos like that. People will lose interest. Unless… what if we really went for it? What if visiting Grantsylvania was like crossing the border into your actual life? What if people could look out through your eyes and see what you see? Wouldn’t that be the coolest reality TV show of all time?”

  Dad’s chewing on his lip. “I don’t know, son. We could make this country anything. And you want it to be a… what? A videocracy?”

  “Yes! Exactly! This country has one natural resource—Grant. We dig it up and pump it out worldwide, twenty-four seven!”

  “How is that even possible?” I say.

  Franny duct-tapes the GoPro camera to the plastic crown. “This is all you need. It’s wireless. The race is in, what, three days? You wear it nonstop until then. We just keep broadcasting around the clock. People can step into your life whenever they want, like tourists.”

  “Remind me again what this has to do with me getting into the race?” I say.

  Franny pinches the bridge of his nose like he’s got a brain freeze. “Can’t you see? It’s all connected. We bring our audience right to Babblemoney’s doorstep. You’ve seen how she acts on camera. If she knows hundreds of thousands of people are watching, we’ll have her cornered. It’s the perfect trap!”

  “Easy for you to say when I have to wear that stupid thing,” I say. “What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

  “We can have commercials. Think about it! This shower is sponsored by Dove Body Wash. This pee is sponsored by Vitaminwater.”

  “Absolutely not,” Mom says. “No commercials.”

  “Fine,” Franny says. “Then we play elevator music or something. It’s not a big deal. But we can do this. We can start right now! It’ll be huge!”

  “This is Grant’s project,” Mom says. “The country’s got his name in it. It’s his life.” She turns to me, her eyes saying Anything you decide is fine.

  Man, this is tough. Saying yes will mean doubling down on my trust of Franny. Not only that, but also exposing my weirdo family to the whole world, on purpose.

  But it also might give me a real shot at getting back in the race. Which is all that matters, right? I close my eyes like I’m making a wish against my will.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s do it. Put that stupid thing on my head.”

  30

  Mom buys plane tickets, and the next morning we all head to the airport. I’ve got the plastic crown on and am broadcasting live. What I see, the world sees.

  I have to take the camera off at airport security, then again on the plane. But during our layover, I strap on the GoPro and run laps around the airport to keep up with my training. The camera bobs on my head as I run.

  “Can I just take this thing off?” I say to Franny while I’m doing box jumps on the airport seats. “Is anyone even watching?”

  He checks the analytics. “Right now? Ninety thousand people.”

  “For real?”

  “I swear.”

  “Why? Is this entertaining?”

  He shrugs. “Everybody wonders what it’d be like to be somebody else. It’s human nature.”

  While I run another lap around the concourse, my eye is drawn to the newsstand. I stop and look, chest heaving. It’s Jay, flexing on the cover of a magazine.

  Above him it says THE NEXT USAIN BOLT? I feel that high-speed collision of feelings inside me again. This time it’s pride and jealousy. It makes me dizzy, but I just keep running, fighting through it.

  * * *

  When we finally get to California, we all squeeze into the tiny electric car Dad rented. He grips the steering wheel with both hands and takes a deep, yogalike breath. He hasn’t driven in years. The car inches forward, then jerks to a stop.

  “Try using just one foot at a time,” Mom says. “It’s not a bike. You don’t pedal it.”

  “I don’t see why I should have to drive like everyone else,” Dad says.

  Beside me in the back seat, Franny slaps his knee, cracking up. “Classic.”

  He’s watching our show live on his phone.

  The car inches forward again, jerks to a stop. The plastic crown digs into my head. Dad flicks on the windshield wipers instead of the flashers.

  “This is silly,” Mom says. “I’m calling an Uber.”

  The Uber driver’s confused when he pulls up. I guess he doesn’t get too many calls from people who are already in a car.

  Leaning out the driver’s-side window, Dad says, “Karl?”

  “Yes, sir. You call an U—”

  “Karl Behoffer? From the commune? Back in ’08?”

  The driver squints like he’s searching for Dad’s younger face beneath his current face. “Ah! Whoa! Dave Falloon! Great to see you, man! How you been?”

  “Not bad, not bad. You?”

  “Great! I thought you all moved back east?”

  “We did. Our son’s competing in that youth race up the road.”

  “The Babblemoney thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool, man. Heard that’s gonna be wild. Whole property’s been sealed off for weeks.”

  Dad’s smiling with his elbow out the car window. “So you’re driving Uber now? What happened to the commune?”

  “Eh, was time to move on. Times change, ya know?”

  Karl’s got a long gray beard and a ponytail. His faded tie-dye shirt is at least twice as old as I am. A happy-looking skeleton is dancing atop the swirling colors. It says GRATEFUL DEAD in psychedelic letters.

  I wonder what it means. I’ll google it later.

  31

  Our motel room has two queen beds. One of them is slanted down and to the left. The curtains are laminated. The NO SMOKING sign has a cigarette burn on it.

  “Niiiiiiiice,” Dad says, poking his head in the bathroom. “It’s an en suite!”

  I walk around the room to give our viewers a virtual tour. Weird as it sounds, I’m kind of getting used to the camera. I know that tens of thousands of people are staring at me right now, but from afar the stares are kind of watered down. Or maybe it’s the fact that they’re not looking at me, they’re looking through me. So in that way I’m sort of an avatar, a vessel for everyone who wants to be on this quest.

  G: hey bro. just landed in cali

  G: u here yet?

  J: bro!

  J: flight was delayed

  J: take off in a few

  G: u wanna meet up

  G: where u guys staying

  J: babblemoney has these “luxury villas” on her property

  J: for the athletes

  J: they look pretty sweet

  G: nice

  J: bro…

  J: do me a favor

  J: look down

  G: huh

  J: look down at ur phone

  J: ah!

  J: that’s crazy

  J: i just sent u a text

  J: then i watched u get it

  G: ur watching me?

  G: right now?

  J: dude

  J: everyone is watching

  Dad orders pizza and salad for dinner. We keep the motel
door propped open to air out the stale cigarette smell. “What’s the plan tomorrow?” Mom asks, pulling off a slice. “I mean, more specifically?”

  “We have to turn up the heat,” Franny says, fresh out of the steamy bathroom, twirling a Q-tip in his ear. “Make it so Babblemoney can’t turn us away, or risk being publicly shamed. I’ve got an idea.”

  “Is that something we’re comfortable with?” Dad says. “Public shaming?”

  “I think if it’s a corporation it’s okay,” Mom says.

  “But corporations are people,” Dad says.

  They both laugh for some reason.

  Me and Franny roll our eyes.

  All playing our roles.

  * * *

  Later, after Mom and Dad have both fallen asleep, I watch SportsCenter on mute while Franny patters on his laptop. I can’t imagine that anyone would possibly want to watch me watching TV, but the analytics say we still have eighty-seven thousand viewers. Because our audience is global, I guess different countries tune in at different times.

  Franny turns his computer screen away from me like he’s keeping a secret.

  “What are you doing?” I say.

  “Research.”

  “On what?”

  “Did you know that the Babblemoney Company’s weakest performing demographic is youth sales? Age eleven to thirteen?”

  “How the heck do you know that?”

  “It’s all public data. You turn over a few rocks, you never know what might come crawling out.”

  That reminds me. I search the bookmarks on my phone, looking for the product review that was talking about the Babblemoney factory in Vietnam. The kid who said his uncle was having health problems.

  But it’s gone.

  Like it’s been erased.

  “Huh,” I say. “That’s weird.”

  “What?” Franny says.

  Something feels off here—the way you can sense an apple is rotten inside just by holding it, feeling the weight of it.

  But is it worth it? To keep digging when I might not like what I find? Do I want to be stirring up trouble right when I’m about to make my move? No. Better to just stay focused on the race. That’s what I’m here to do. No distractions.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  The GoPro is uncomfortable, but I roll over, and, after a while, I drift into a shallow, uneasy sleep.

  It’s the first bit of privacy I’ve had all day.

  32

  Next morning I still have thirty-nine thousand viewers. Even though I’ve been sleeping for the past eight hours. “Creepy,” I say out loud. And then—narrating my thoughts for the audience—I say, “I’m going out for a quick run.”

  It’s super foggy outside, and I don’t know where I am, so I just jog up the road a mile or so and turn around. “I’m turning around,” I say.

  When I get back, Dad’s sitting on the edge of the motel pool. At first I think he’s meditating, but from the way he’s slouched, hands under his thighs… maybe not.

  The thing about the pool is—there’s no water in it. He’s scissoring his bare feet in a concrete hole. I don’t know if he’s pretending there’s water, or if he’s just so lost in his own thoughts he doesn’t even notice.

  “Hey,” I say.

  His eyes flick up to the camera on my head, but he doesn’t acknowledge it. “Hey.” On the lip of the pool, the words “no diving” have faded to O IVIN.

  I sit beside him. Without water, the pool ladders look ridiculous, like they’re clinging to the edge of a cliff.

  “Would’ve been your grandfather’s sixtieth birthday today,” he says.

  “Really? Grandpa Falloon?”

  “Yeah. I was thinking how much he would’ve loved to be here. To see you race. He was a star football player. A wide receiver. I ever tell you that? He broke the school record for catches his senior year. He could fly.”

  “So maybe I get it from him,” I say.

  It’s tempting to imagine yourself like a genetic pie chart—60 percent Mom’s side, 40 percent Dad’s—though I know the math is way more complicated.

  Dad plucks a frill off his self-cut jean shorts. He rubs it into a ball and flicks it into the empty pool. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “What was he like?” I ask.

  “He was… quiet. He was always so tired after work. We’d sit down to dinner, and the house would just be totally silent. Mom had been dead a long time. It was just the two of us. Honestly, that’s what I remember most—the sound of our forks scraping on our plates.”

  “He was a painter, right?”

  “Yeah. This guy, Mr. Sheffield, he had a big painting company in town. Your grandfather started working summers in high school, same job his whole life.”

  I think of those cars inching along in morning traffic. “That was what he wanted to do? That was his dream?”

  “I don’t think his generation thought of work that way.”

  “He didn’t go to college?”

  “No. Well, actually—he did for a few weeks. But football didn’t work out and he left. After he died, I found his old class schedule in the attic. He’d kept it—I don’t know why. Maybe like he would go back someday. He always loved to read. He would leave me the Daily News before school, opened to the football standings, trying to get me interested, but I don’t know—it just never stuck. I guess maybe it skips a generation.”

  A car pulls into the motel parking lot, headlights cutting through the fog.

  “You know the last thing I ever said to him?” Dad says, crossing his ankles in the empty pool. “Before your Mom and I moved to California? One word. I said, ‘Fine.’”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said”—Dad’s lip quivers—“ ‘Then don’t ever come back here again.’ ”

  Thinking about Grandpa Falloon, I realize why Dad comes to all my track meets even though he doesn’t like sports. Why we have to say what we’re feeling before we eat dinner. He can’t fix what happened with his dad, but he can pay it forward to me.

  I think it’s probably like that in every family, this relay race where the parent keeps dropping the baton, and the kid keeps picking it up, racing like mad to make up for lost ground, but then he drops it when he’s giving it to his kid, because he’s overcompensating, and so on, forever and ever.

  We sit side by side, legs dangling in the empty pool.

  Finally I say, “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything. I’ve kind of been in a funk for a while. I guess I’ve been taking it out on you guys.”

  “It’s okay, son. That’s how this story always goes.” He stands and offers me his hand. “Now come on. Let’s go win that million bucks.”

  33

  Okay,” Franny says, pacing in the motel room. He’s drawn an incredibly detailed map of the Babblemoney estate on our pizza box from last night. “The plan is to stage a protest outside gate A—here.”

  “Protest?” I say.

  “Trust me,” he says. “If there’s one thing the Internet can’t get enough of, it’s kids protesting stuff. This thing is gonna blow up.”

  We Uber over and begin marching in circles outside Babblemoney’s castlelike walls (“NO NATIONS LEFT BEHIND! NO NATIONS LEFT BEHIND!”). Franny e-mail blasts our now two-hundred-thousand-plus citizens—for those who aren’t already watching—and the viewers start rising quickly.

  My brother was born for this. The fake outrage oozes out of him so naturally. “My brother deserves to be here,” he says. “Our nation demands to be recognized.… If you’re out there watching, Babblemoney, I want you to look closely!”

  He holds up my birth certificate printed on official Republic of Grantsylvania letterhead. “We’ve got the paperwork!”

  There’s a harsh buzzing sound, and the gate scrapes open behind us. I turn, half expecting trumpets to blare and horses to thunder out. But it’s just an electric golf cart. It’s one of those long ones with a flashing yellow light that can hold lik
e ten people. The driver is wearing sunglasses and a coiled earpiece. “Grant Falloon?” he says.

  I cross my arms. “Yeah?”

  “We’re gonna need you to shut down this protest.”

  “No can do,” I say.

  “Ms. Babblemoney would like to have a word with you.”

  “Oh would she now?”

  “Yes. Please come with me.”

  “That’s my son you’re talking to,” Dad says with an edge in his voice I’ve never heard before. “He’s not going anywhere without me. Without all of us.”

  We all link arms and stand together in front of the gate.

  The guard sighs. “They told me you people were—” He notices the camera on my head and stops himself from whatever he was going to say.

  * * *

  We climb into the extra-long golf cart. You can tell Babblemoney is super rich, because after almost ten minutes of driving—on her property the whole time—we’re still not there. In the distance we see cranes and hear beeping trucks.

  The guard leads us into what looks like the world’s largest Foot Locker. It’s a sneaker museum, all the Babblemoney sneaker models displayed on the walls. There must be five thousand of them, all the way up to the ceiling on both sides.

  On the far wall is a massive oil painting of Ms. Babblemoney in her red tracksuit and pearls. Beside that is a world map showing all 917 of their outlet stores, each marked with the dollar-sign B. The old woman is waiting on her red scooter.

  “Greetings,” I say as formally as I can, adjusting my camera crown to center her in the shot. “We come from the sovereign Republic of Grantsylvania.”

  Mom unfurls our wrinkled flag—the two triangles upside down that look like Dracula fangs.

  Babblemoney looks like she wants to spit but can’t because her mouth is too dry. “Can’t say I’m happy to see you lot again,” she says.