Saturday
It had been an incredibly long time since Audrey had tried to actually spend the night sharing a single bed with another adult, so when she and Jennifer were awoken by a hammering on the trailer door she was feeling like a badly braided loaf.
Jennifer slid out from under the covers, wrapped herself in Audrey’s quilt, and went to see what was up. Or rather, to hear what was up by shouting to whoever was outside from the comfort of her supervillain chair.
“What is it?”
“Alanis isn’t coming on set,” replied Colin Thrimp’s trembling voice. “I don’t know why but she’s refusing to come out of her room and they’ll be needing her in makeup soon, and if she throws off the schedule—”
Jennifer was already dressing, as was Audrey. Although Audrey was managing to do it without also saying fuck repeatedly under her breath like it was the opening scene of Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Once they were both presentable, Jennifer yanked the door open and Colin came stumbling in like a surprised Labrador.
“I’ve tried everything,” he explained, “but she seems quite inconsolable.”
Jennifer looked over at Audrey. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Well, go on. Get out there and hold her hand and tell her everything is going to be fine.”
That put Audrey in a bit of a spot because she hadn’t not been going to do that, but she didn’t really want to be taking instructions from somebody she was sleeping with. “Can I remind you I’m not an employee?”
Jennifer made a strangled noise of frustration. “I’m so sorry. Audrey, my dear friend, will you please as a personal favour and out of the goodness of your heart get the fuck up and sort this fucking mess the fuck out?”
Adjusting the line of her dress to something slightly more face-the-world-worthy, Audrey smiled. “Glad to.”
With Colin Thrimp scampering in her wake, Audrey made her way down to the Lodge and, from there, up to Alanis’s room.
And it was only when she was knocking on the door that it struck her she wasn’t actually the best person on set to be doing this, since Meera had kids of her own, Doris had kids and grandkids, and Joshua was way closer to Alanis’s age.
On the other hand, all three of those people were still in the middle of a high-stakes baking competition.
“Go away,” said Alanis. “I’ve already said I don’t want to talk to you.”
“I’m not Colin,” Audrey told the door. “I’m, um, me.”
“Audrey?”
“Yes.”
“You know”—Alanis made a sniffling noise from inside—“for someone who’s not on the show anymore, you’re on the show a lot.”
“Yeah, it’s a long story. Can I come in?”
For a moment, there was no reply. But eventually Alanis opened the door, looking as miserable as Audrey had ever seen her, even worse than she’d been after a bad week’s baking. Then she went and perched on the edge of the bed, still in her self-consciously retro nightdress, her eyes tearstained.
“Want to talk about it?” asked Audrey. Which wasn’t a great opener, especially since she had no idea what it was.
Alanis just shook her head. And Audrey—still not completely certain what to say—sat down beside her. Maybe if she was lucky, this would be one of those situations where silence was stronger than words.
It wasn’t.
After a few minutes in which the only sounds were intermittent sniffing from Alanis and the muffled tapping of Colin Thrimp pacing outside, Alanis leaned her head against Audrey’s shoulder and started full-on crying again.
“Is it all getting a bit much?” Audrey tried, getting an unwelcome insight into how her own parents must have felt when twenty-years-ago-Audrey would come home from school sad about friends, a girl, or homework and totally unable to communicate about it.
She felt Alanis’s head shake, but there was otherwise no answer.
“Whatever it is,” she tried again—hoping a more open approach might work better—“it’ll be okay.”
Alanis’s breathing deepened and, after a couple of moments steeling herself, she finally said, “You can’t possibly know that. You don’t even know what it is.”
“I mean, you could tell me. If you wanted.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“And you don’t have to. But…actually.” Audrey paused. “I don’t really have a good but. You don’t have to.”
“Don’t shame your butt,” said Alanis, with an echo of her usual spirit. “You’ve got a great butt.”
“Aren’t you a bit young for dad jokes?”
Somehow Audrey sensed she was getting a look, even though they weren’t looking at each other. “No. Millennials don’t own irony.”
It was the first time Audrey had heard someone use the world millennials to describe an older generation, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. “I’m sorry. I stand corrected. Sit corrected.”
“Oh, Audrey,” replied Alanis, with indulgent teenage pity. “And…it’s Joshua.”
Sudden shifts in topic were something Audrey was very much used to.
Unfortunately, the topic to which they’d shifted meant her immediate instinct was to say, Fuck, what did that hipster piece of shit do?
Except that would have been unhelpful on many levels.
Especially if the hipster piece of shit had, in fact, done something.
“What happened with Joshua?” she asked carefully.
“I—” Alanis was still very much mid-sniffle. “I asked him if he wanted to…” She didn’t specify exactly what she’d asked him if he’d wanted, which meant Audrey’s imagination went to a whole lot of different places. “And he said I was too young.”
The sheer relief almost made Audrey burst out laughing. She didn’t, because that would have been an unbelievably awful response to have to an upset teenager. But now the moment had passed, she was realising quite how prepared for the worst she’d been.
“Okay,” she offered, trying to strike a balance between reassuring and minimising. “Well, that’s—”
“I’m sixteen,” Alanis went on. “I’m old enough to make my own decisions.”
They were already on sensitive ground and it was only getting sensitiver. “You are,” Audrey agreed, because there was no point disagreeing. “But so is he. And I guess maybe he didn’t want to think you’d look back in a few years’ time and decide he was a prick?”
Alanis looked up, wide-eyed. “That’s what he said.”
“Is it?” Audrey was genuinely surprised. Joshua didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would have a sense of his own prickishness.
“Pretty much. He said, ‘I don’t want to be something you look back and regret,’ but basically.”
That seemed more like him.
Alanis was crying again. “I’m just so humiliated. I humiliated myself.”
Having, not too recently, removed her own underwear in public to score a point in an argument with a scary woman, Audrey wasn’t quite sure she was the best person to be giving advice on humiliation.
Or perhaps she was absolutely the best person.
“That’s not how it seems to me,” she said.
“How it seems to me is that you put yourself out there, even though you knew you might not succeed. And it didn’t work out because not everything does, but that’s okay. ”
With an ability to leap around different reasons to feel bad about herself that Audrey found deeply familiar, Alanis segued. “I just really thought he liked me.”
“I think he really does. I just also think he…”
“Doesn’t want to be something I’ll regret?”
Audrey nodded.
“Well, I hate it.”
Privately, Audrey hated it a whole lot less than the alternative. But she didn’t say that because at the end of the day Alanis was entitled to her agency. So she just said, “Yeah, but you might hate it less tomorrow.”
“That’s tomorrow. Today I have to be on TV with him.”
“Which will suck. But you’ll get through it.”
Alanis made a small want-to-believe-it noise. “Promise?”
“Promise,” replied Audrey, trying to project confidence and certainty and, she thought, mostly succeeding.
“Not gonna lie, it doesn’t feel like I’ll get through it.”
Here, Audrey was on firmer ground. “It never does. Like if I’d actually not got through all the things I felt I’d never get through, I’d…”
With an instinct for kindness that Audrey couldn’t help admiring, Alanis waited until it was clear that no, Audrey really had run that sentence off a cliff. “You’d be…not through any of them?”
“Yes,” Audrey finished with a grateful nod.
“Thank you for your wisdom.”
“Anytime.”
For about half a second, Alanis looked at least partially reassured. Then she glanced up at Audrey with visible concern. “Shit, do I look really cry-face?”
“A bit,” Audrey conceded, “but they can do a lot with makeup.”
They both got up and stood facing each other, which meant Audrey was left trying to be all sage and comforting at somebody who stood about an inch taller than her.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re going to”—Audrey excavated her reserves of synonyms for do well—“rock this or nail this or kick arse or eat and leave no crumbs or whatever means you’ve got this.”
Alanis was looking at her with faint concern. “Are you having a stroke?”
“No, I’m being encouraging.”
“Okay.” She patted Audrey’s shoulder reassuringly. “I’m encouraged. But please stop.”
* * *
For the rest of the day, Audrey sat in Jennifer’s trailer, watching whichever camera feed was following Alanis.
Although it was hard to tell without sound, she seemed, as far as Audrey could tell, fine.
It made her retrospectively resentful of her teenage self who had been significantly less fine about almost everything.
The blind bake for this episode was brownies and, unusually for the doing-simple-things-well season, it actually was about doing simple things well.
There were no tricks or hidden gimmicks, but there was a whole lot of talk about texture and evenness of bake and crumb density.
What with it being the week before the semifinal, everybody left in the competition categorically belonged in the competition, and so the judging for that week was achingly close, with Joshua just taking it, Meera coming an unexpected bottom, and the rest clustered in the middle for a variety of highly technical reasons.
“Well, that seems to have shaken out okay,” Jennifer told her when they’d done. “You could barely tell she started the day with a tantrum.”
“It wasn’t a tantrum, Jennifer. She was really hurt.”
When she turned her chair to face Audrey, Jennifer was smiling a more sardonic, less malicious smile than she usually gave. “Yes, yes, people have feelings, children should be protected, I’m terrible. Now how about you take the win and kiss me?”
And on this occasion at least, Audrey was happy to follow instructions.