“If it were me, I’d want to know. That’s all I’m saying.”
Lucy looks ready to keep arguing so I try to intervene. “Look, I already told you Beck talked to me about how some girls came on to him and he figured the producers would make it look like he was messing around with them. That was before the episodes even aired so he didn’t have to tell me anything.”
“Right, but weren’t you guys on a break then anyway?” Sydney asks. “So he didn’t make any promises to you during that time. Like, maybe once he realized you wanted him back he had to cover his tracks.”
Lucy growls beside me. “Sydney, really?”
“Yeah, Syd, what’s your problem?” Ellie asks.
“I just don’t think it’s right you guys saw all the episodes and aren’t telling her anything. She’s going to find out eventually, don’t you think it should be from her friends, or from watching it herself, instead of right before she drops into a half pipe or something?” Whoa. That hits close to home. Her implication is clear. I’m unstable and eventually I’ll lose my shit and hurt myself when the truth comes out. Because I won’t be able to handle it, whatever it is. Goosebumps break out on my skin even under the hot July sun. Is she right? Do I need to pull my head out of the sand?
Zora and the others are going back and forth, all seemingly looking out for my best interest, protecting me. There’s that faint buzzing as their voices start to sound muffled, and I recognize the feeling immediately. But this time, I refuse to let it bring me under. It’s time I start looking out for my interests too. My friends are well-intentioned, but at the end of the day, I need to decide how to protect myself.
“You know,” I say, bringing the bickering to a halt. “You’re right, Sydney. I should watch the other episodes. That way I’m prepared if someone throws it in my face later.”
All four girls stare at me in silence, and I can feel their surprise. No one knows what to say. Is it so out of character for me to confront this kind of thing head on? As I lie back on my towel, signaling I’m done with this conversation, I have my answer. Yes. I usually wait until it’s too late to ignore a problem before dealing with it. Well, it’s time to change that. It’s time to confront the hard stuff before it takes over and gets in my head. I might be shaking a little inside at what I’ll see on those episodes and how they might haunt me. But somehow, it feels like I just gave my anxiety a swift kick in the ass.
As I sense my friends exchanging looks and wondering what to do or say, I decide to let them in on one more thing I’ve been too scared to tell them.
“See, I want to get back to competing sometime. And if all my competitors and the spectators have seen the episodes and I haven’t, it will stress me out. Sydney’s right. If someone mentioned something about it right before I dropped in at a contest, it’d mess me up if I didn’t know what they were talking about. Better to know ahead of time.” I say all this while lying on my back, eyes closed. It’s weirdly empowering, sharing my hopes to compete again. It makes it real somehow.
Beck
“Jordan’s not coming?” It’s the first thing Mom asks when we walk through the door.
“No, sorry Mom. She decided she wants to watch all the episodes beforehand.”
Mom gives me a sympathetic smile and pats my cheek. “She’s a brave girl. Don’t worry, she’ll see right through the ploys. I know she trusts you. That’s never been an issue between you two.”
“I can’t decide what’s worse, you or Jordan watching those girls come on to me.”
Mom laughs. “Oh, please. I was more embarrassed for them than anything. I know my son. You were just trying to get rid of them while remaining a gentleman. I’m very proud of you actually.”
Taylor is behind me and I can hear him snickering. Griffin and Moses beat us back from Riptide and have already claimed their spots on the couches, along with Marco, Naomi and Summer.
I really wish Jordan was here too. This last episode will most likely center on skateboarding rather than all the drama. After all, it’s only me and Camila left at the house. No one was expecting Camila to be the women’s finalist, but that’s part of what’s made the show exciting. It wasn’t always predictable. I’m shown just how unpredictable when it flashes to a scene the night before the final competition.
I’m in the kitchen grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge, and Camila waves goodnight to me in her itty-bitty pajama shorts and barely-there top. It’s the last night before the final competition, and I remember thinking, this part at least is too easy. Unless something wholly unexpected happened to me out there the next day, the house would be mine. I hadn’t really let myself spend too much time daydreaming about what that might be like, knowing the house was too much to really want to live there forever. The skatepark though? A private park that rivals some of the coolest ones in the world? That was what had been getting me up every morning and through each day.
After all, if I’d lost early on and gotten kicked off the show, I would’ve been able to go visit Jordan sooner. But even knowing now what had been waiting for me when I’d finally gotten to see her, I don’t think I would’ve been able to purposefully lose. I don’t have it in me.
Anyway, the next scene doesn’t show us out there on our skateboards the next morning. No, it shows Camila sneaking out of her bedroom from the opposite wing of the house, wearing the same pajamas we saw her in a second ago. A moment later, she’s in the hallway on my side. There’s a framed painting of Riptide at sunset that I recognize all too well. It was next to my bedroom door for three months while we filmed, and it was bittersweet to see every day. The same place where I saw Jordan for the first time is also where she crashed and got the head injury that brought her so low.
Camila pauses by the door next to the painting, and I sit up straighter in my seat on the couch. She has this little smile of anticipation on her lips right before she puts her hand on the door handle. Then she opens the door and slides inside, as if she’s done it a million times. I hear someone watching beside me gasp.
Before I can wonder what is going on, a series of footage assaults me. Camila rubbing up against me as I reach for something in the pantry. Camila whispering in my ear as she passes me on the back porch. Camila dropping a note in my lap while I’m sitting at the kitchen counter eating lunch with some of the others on cast. There are several more of her passing me somewhere when I didn’t know we were being filmed, leaning close to tell me something privately or whisper so no one else can hear. The cameras must have been hidden with no audio, because it’s only music in the background, a song I’m now registering the lyrics to, about a secret love affair. With each encounter, Camila flashes that same smile of anticipation they showed before she went in my room.
It shows her going in my room one more time as one of the narrators, who rarely comes on, asks, “What will it be like for these two secret lovers to go head to head tomorrow? At least they can share the house no matter who comes out on top.”
I’m too stunned to say a word as the competition footage begins to roll. All of the footage they’ve shown of me up to this point, I knew there was a camera on me at the time of filming. Even the hot tub scenes, there wasn’t a person holding a camera around, but we all knew we were being filmed. The cameras weren’t well hidden. They told us that bedrooms and bathrooms were the only places off-limits, and I’d assumed there were a few throughout the house that I hadn’t spotted. It looks like they were holding off for the perfect moment to present the most enticing story to the viewers. They’d already shown one scene of Camila straddling me as I sat on a chair out back. They hadn’t shown how I’d stood up and she’d tumbled to the ground, which I actually thought would have been funny for viewers. Apparently, they had a different plan in mind and were planting the seeds for it with that scene. I had no idea this was coming, and I have to admit, they did a decent job making it look real.