What was she talking about with the freaks? Were they mocking him? Plotting? Did she talk him out of trying to find the other group as part of a larger play? They all know he’s the biggest threat. He’s going to win. No matter what they do, he’s going to win.
He looks at the track. He could climb it, no problem. He’s in the best shape of his life. When he was fourteen, chubby, depressed, mocked at school and ignored at home, he had discovered obstacle-course competitions. He loved watching them, but more than that, he loved the interviews. All these people who had sad lives like him, who had been unloved and lost, had turned that in on themselves and crafted perfect machines of bodies. Machines that could do incredible things. Machines that functioned so well they couldn’t be sad or hurt or lonely anymore.
He tried getting on the show seven seasons in a row, and never made it past the walk-on line. What did that say, then, that he had spent so many years doing exactly what they did, exactly what they told him to, overcoming everything in his life, practicing his backstory in front of the mirror so that he would come across as not a bad guy, not a bad guy at all, and they had never let him on?
He flexed reflexively. He’d made it into this competition, and he’ll win. And after?
A reunion with his mother. She’ll be so proud of him, so sorry for all the years she wasted not being proud of him.
A reunion with that girlfriend, who’ll finally know he’s worth putting in a frame. A gift of socks for her bitch friend.
A reunion with that fucking competition, a celebrity guest spot, or maybe he’ll turn them down. He’ll be busy with his own gym, a dedicated group of worshippers coming to his church of the body, begging him to show them the path forward, to save them from themselves the same way he saved himself. They’ll all look to him, and he won’t give up on them, won’t get tired of them, won’t abandon them.
Ava’s not part of that future.
“Doesn’t seem stable,” he says. “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”
Ava releases some of the tension in her shoulders, and as she turns, he can see her smile. See her relief at this evidence of how much he cares. He remembers how she stood back and let Iraq Barbie hit him. Imagines what she must have been saying to that pack of freaks later, imagines the way they were laughing at him.
“Come on,” he says, slinging an arm around her shoulder. “I have an idea.”
* * *
—
Ava’s relieved.
Jaden wanted to try to find the others to sabotage them. And actually, Ava is pretty sure she knows exactly where they are. The second morning of the competition, she had seen Brandon go into the weird love tunnel building. Few other places to hide that many people in one spot. She’d bet money that’s where they are. In a way, she is betting money—$50,000 worth—but betting against herself by not betraying them. Still. She regrets ever giving Jaden the idea of getting other people out.
Besides, the others offered to let her come, offered to let her into the group even after she chose someone else, and so she steered Jaden away from them.
But now that she’s back in the creepy, boring park, she thinks Jaden must be right. The destruction at the camp was staged. She doesn’t think it was another contestant, though. She thinks it was the game itself.
That’s why she hasn’t seen any cameras. It’s not a traditional reality show. It’s a horror reality show.
She watched something sort of like this, once. They took a bunch of college students to a house, told them about the grisly murders that had happened there, explained past hauntings, then led them to the most haunted spot in the woods and had them report on what they felt. Almost all of them felt something—intense cold, an inexplicable presence, overwhelming fear.
Only after everyone had shared their experiences did the filmmakers explain that the house had been built only ten years prior and there was no history of violence or hauntings or really anything, at all, there.
Most laughed it off, sheepish. A few still insisted that something must have happened that no one knew about, because they felt what they felt and wouldn’t deny it. It was meant to make a point about how we trick ourselves into feeling things, but really, it made a point about how we trick other people into feeling things.
Ava is pissed. It’s fucking rude that they were brought here under false pretenses. Lied to. Misled. Maybe the early contestants were in on it. Setting up things for the others to find, like the lost jewelry. Hell, with her conveniently horrifying backstory, maybe Mack is a plant. She could be an actress.
Ava stumbles, Jaden’s arm around her catching her. If Mack’s a plant, and Jaden’s the one who told the story about her, then he’s in on it, too. That would be super unethical, right? To get into a physical relationship with her—what little they had managed on a cot in the middle of other people, but still—when he was an actor and she wasn’t in on it? Surely that wasn’t legal. Had she signed something in the NDA that made it okay?
No. No way. Besides, how good would an actress have to be to be Mack? Ava has a sense for bullshit—she’s worked enough service jobs to be able to bullshit with a smile in the most aggravating situations—and nothing about Mack seems fake or like a performance.
It doesn’t make sense.
But none of this makes sense, and the idea of the whole game being a mean-spirited deviation from what they were told is more comforting than the idea that there really was something violent that went down at the camp.
Maybe Jaden’s right. Maybe Ava and creepy LeGrand set it up to freak them out. She could see Ava being that ruthless, that clever. Almost admires her for it.
Or maybe Mack really did do it, either to win, or because she’s so completely twisted from what happened to her that she wants to break everyone around her. Again, doesn’t seem like Mack. But Ava doesn’t really know Mack, does she? She doesn’t really know any of them. Except Jaden, and she doesn’t know him, just his type.
Still, he’s being nice this morning, and she can sense an impending ending, but she’ll take this calm before the storm. Maybe tonight they’ll part ways. She’ll break it off with him. But in a friendly way, so he doesn’t retaliate. I don’t want to hold you back. Or, I don’t want you to feel like you have to worry about me. You should focus on winning for yourself. Those are both good options. Implying that it’s obvious he’ll win, and she’s happy about it. Bullshitting with a smile.
She wonders what the other Ava and Brandon and Mack and LeGrand are doing right now. If they’re freaking themselves out even more, or if they’re having fun at her expense. She hopes not. She’d rather they be scared than laughing at her. She doesn’t know that’s the biggest thing she has in common with Jaden.
A slight but telltale gush between Ava’s legs rips her back into the present. She swears softly.
“What?” Jaden snaps.