Chapter 3 #2
I blink, taken aback by the woman’s neat, tidy aura.
This isn’t the Blake Perry I grew up watching.
That Blake spent fifteen seasons delighting in stirring up drama between contestants and feeding on the ensuing chaos—the best kind of reality show host to watch.
Maybe I shouldn’t have expected her television persona to be her real personality.
Blake checks her watch. “Oh—we need to get you both to wardrobe and makeup. One of the techs will point you in the right direction.”
Before leaving, Blake turns back and winks. “Hey, don’t tell the other contestants, but you two are the ones I’m most excited about.”
I’m given no time to bask in the realization that Blake Perry knows who I am before a frazzled-looking assistant whisks both me and Seyoon into a canopy tent pitched near the entrance. There, a stylist asks to see what clothes I’ve brought, then frowns at each plain white T-shirt I pull out.
“You can keep the hoodies and shorts, but white washes you out. Here, take these,” the stylist says, handing me a stack of T-shirts colored emerald green, earthy brown, and dark purple.
As soon as I finish changing into a hoodie that’s not soaked with sweat, a different crew member flits by, blotting my face and pressing powder beneath my eyes.
Once they’re done, yet another tech steps into their place and clips a mic to the collar of my shirt, like an assembly line of workers.
“Keep this on you at all times,” they explain, slipping the transmitter pack into my pants pocket and weaving the thin wire connecting it under my shirt. “You can only turn it off when filming hours are over, or when you’re in the bathroom. Just click that little switch on the mic here.”
Right when I think they’ll finally free us, one of the techs blocks the entrance, his palm out. “Your phones, please.”
“We can’t keep them?” I ask.
The tech just wags his fingers, raising a single brow.
Suppressing a sigh, I fish it out and hand it over, already mourning the loss.
Seyoon is lingering, looking at something on her phone, her thumbs hovering over the screen.
I catch a glimpse without meaning to. She has a message thread open to somebody named Amelia.
She chews on her bottom lip before shutting it off and handing it to the man.
Finally, they shoo us out with instructions to stay close.
Seyoon floats toward the center of camp and, to my surprise, beckons for me to come.
With nowhere else to go, I follow. The whole campsite is swarming with people, some carrying microphones, others lugging around cameras, and even more scurrying around with clipboards and looking like they’re about to cry.
I rub my chest to soothe the uncomfortable squeezing around my lungs and carefully weave my giant suitcase through the crowd.
We take a seat on one of the logs around the empty bonfire pit. Seyoon drops her bag on the ground and massages her hands. They’re torn and bloodied.
She notices me looking. “I guess I took that fall harder than I thought.”
Guilt stabs me straight in the stomach. “You should see the medic, that looks seri—” I start to say, but she’s already wiping the blood off on her leggings. She looks up at me with wide, deer-in-headlight eyes.
“Whoops,” she chuckles.
Unhygienic. “I brought a first-aid kit with me. Here.”
I unzip the orange suitcase that got me into this mess in the first place and rummage around until I find the travel kit.
I throw one leg over the log, straddling it to face her, then put out my hand—an offer.
Seyoon glances at it, then at me. Her hesitation makes my body go cold.
Does she think this is weird? Wait, is it weird?
I’m being weird, aren’t I? I’m no good at social cues.
I should put my hand down, pretend I was just stretching or something.
But then she presents me with both her palms, and my nervous system stops trying to eat itself.
“Thanks,” she says with a shy grin. There’s a gap between her front teeth that suits her.
I get to work picking out the dirt and splinters from her palm, all while paying a normal amount of attention to how much smaller her hands are than mine.
At some point, a camera operator and sound technician creep up behind us, filming our interaction like they’re wildlife photographers.
Or vultures, circling, waiting for a potential meal to present itself.
Sweat beads on my forehead. Fuck. That’s going to be hard to get used to.
Seyoon either doesn’t notice or isn’t bothered.
She hisses when I swipe her hands with an alcohol wipe.
“Sorry,” I say. I blow on her palms to help.
“It’s okay.”
I glance up. Her voice is rougher than I would have expected from such a delicate face.
Well, delicate in the roundness of her pink cheeks and smiling mouth.
Her eyes, on the other hand, are intense as they roam over me.
I usually hate being looked at. I feel people’s gazes like fingers digging into my skin.
But the sensation isn’t totally unpleasant when it’s from her.
Wait, she’s watching me expectantly. Did she ask something?
“What?” I say like an idiot.
“I said, was it one of your parents who was on the show, or a different relative?” she repeats. “Given we’re all nepo babies here.”
I snort as I uncap the jar of petroleum jelly. “I don’t know if there’s much nepotism to be taken advantage of if you’re related to someone who lost. It was my dad, though. He was on the fifteenth season.”
“No way! My mom was in the same season. Jungeun Kim?”
My fingers freeze midway through unwrapping a roll of bandage. “That’s your mom?”
“Why do you sound so surprised?”
I should probably not answer that, right? I barely know this girl, and I don’t know her mom at all besides what I’ve seen of her on TV, but just from first impressions… “It’s nothing.”
“Come on,” Seyoon urges. “Now I’m curious. Tell me.”
She’s not going to let it drop. I squirm. “Well, your mom was…”
Oh God, the camera operator has found a friend.
There’s two of them now, positioned behind me and Seyoon respectively.
It’s hard to focus on the right thing to say when I’m reminding myself not to look into the camera, and trying to recall how I saw them clean a wound on Aliver, and thinking about how long my silence has dragged on and—Jesus, just speak.
“Kind of forgettable?”
That was bad. Very bad. I shut myself up.
A singular eyebrow raises on Seyoon’s face. “Forgettable? She got third place.”
“Wait, that’s not what I meant.” The camera pulls in.
I accidentally glance at it and stutter over my own tongue.
“It’s just that, you know, you’re really talkative and have this big personality, and in comparison your mom seemed kind of quiet, so I didn’t see the connection right away. But I’m sure she’s great too and—”
“A big personality?” Seyoon repeats, incredulous.
I don’t mean it as a bad thing. I wish I was half as sure of myself as she is. But what I think doesn’t usually correlate with what everyone else around me is thinking. I open my mouth to hopefully salvage this interaction before I offend her and her mom more, but Seyoon beats me to it.
“So that’s why you kept ignoring me back there,” she says bitterly. “Sorry I was too much for you.”
My stomach flops. I wasn’t ignoring her attempts at conversation; I was just failing spectacularly to form a response. “I—”
“Clearly you don’t want to be friends, that’s fine, but don’t make my confidence sound like a bad thing. It makes you seem insecure.”
Her words pierce the weak point in my chest. The sting of irritation she sparked in me earlier ignites into a flare now. She was goading me back then.
“Confidence?” I repeat, my voice quiet but steady. “Confidence is one thing. But cockiness is declaring you’re going to beat someone five minutes into meeting them.”
Redness colors her face and she blinks, as if just now realizing what she’d said earlier. She stands, ripping her hands from my grip. I stand too. In my periphery, I notice the cameras move in closer, but the roiling anger in my gut is too overwhelming for me to care right now.
“I’m not going to apologize for believing in myself,” she says.
“And you’re probably not going to apologize for the arrogance either, right?”
“Okay, jackass. You’re a hypocrite, you know that? Calling me arrogant when you were the one sticking your nose up at everything I said, like you’re too good to talk to me. If what I said bothered you, why didn’t you speak up?”
Speak up. I’ve heard that my whole life, since I was a little kid who was too shy to talk to the grocery clerks, let alone the other kids at school. I bite my tongue until I taste iron.
At some point, one—or maybe both—of us must have taken a step forward, because the roll of bandage is on the ground and there’s only a few inches of space between our faces.
She’s taller than average, but still shorter than me, coming up to my nose.
She makes up for the distance by craning her neck up, giving me a good look at her lips pulled in a sneer.
She has a perfect cupid’s bow. I can smell her shampoo from this close too: sweet, like honeycomb. Focus.
“Because unlike you, I act before I speak,” I grit out. “Which is why I’ll gloat after I beat you, not beforehand.”
“I’d love to see you try.”
Two hands clap our shoulders and pull us apart.
“Ooh, a little friendly rivalry?” says an unfortunately familiar voice. “At least wait until I get here so I can make some witty commentary.”