This Is Not the Jess Show

by Anna Carey

  “Move it or lose it,” Kipps called out. “Come on, hurry.”

  I shook out my hands, trying to calm my nerves, but it didn’t help. I ran to catch him and we moved as fast as we could, walking along the back of the strip mall where no one could see us. We peered around the corner and into the parking lot. There were only a few sleek, egg-shaped cars, nothing like the huge clunky ones I’d seen inside the set. The pizza place had a line at the counter. The bank next to it was closed.

  “This is…New York? Where are we?”

  “Yeah, technically Long Island. The set was just a town where they bought out every single resident, and they built a wall around the perimeter. They made it look really vintage.”

  “Vintage?”

  A sleek white car nearly ran us over as we crossed the lot. The pizza delivery guy in the front seat was sleeping. He only blinked open his eyes once the car was in park. He got out and walked right toward us, but his head was down as he poked at a screen in his hand.

  “That guy…” I asked. “He was sleeping. How was he sleeping?”

  “The car is a newer model. Self-driving.”

  A few more sped past, and we pressed against the side of the building so no one would see us. There was a supermarket and a couple of car dealerships down the street. One said SILVERLIGHT 2400 in neon script. We passed a burger place called Charlie’s that smelled like bacon grease. All the customers were facing the back of the restaurant, watching a giant screen above the counter.

  Kipps stopped at a side window and waved for me to come closer. A dozen or so people were scattered throughout the restaurant, their backs to us, heads bent as they watched something in their laps. Most of them had earpieces, and occasionally they’d adjust them, only half paying attention to the giant screen on the wall. The restaurant was playing a live feed from inside the set. There were shots of the cul-de-sac, which was now filled with people. My parents were there, plus the bicyclists who’d chased us and a bunch of people barking orders into their headsets. A caption scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  The phrases BRING HER BACK and THE END moved past on an endless loop, followed by the words VOTE NOW and a timer that ticked down from thirty seconds. The audience leaned 88 percent BRING HER BACK, with only 5 percent for THE END. The rest were undecided. Two commentators started unpacking the results, gesturing animatedly, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  “People vote? Why?” I asked. “That’s beyond twisted.”

  “The producers started doing it about five years ago,” Kipps said. “They think it helps the audience feel more invested.”

  “Well, who cares if they want me back?” I said. “It’s done. They can accept it or not, but it’s over. I’m not going back there. They think I’m just going to, what? Play along? Pretend the last two days never happened?”

  Kipps rested his forehead against the window. His breath left a small half-moon on the glass.

  “Kipps?”

  “We don’t want to go back, so we won’t go back.”

  “But…?”

  “It doesn’t seem like they’re just going to accept it,” Kipps said.

  “So what? They drag me back, kicking and screaming?”

  “They’d probably try to make it part of the show. You rebelling against your family, confronting them. You feeling trapped, betrayed, struggling with life inside the set. You reuniting with Sara after realizing she was just playing your sister, that you were never actually related. It’s just more entertainment. Hours of it.”

  “Well, they have to find us first.”

  “We have to be smarter than them.” He was still watching the screen as he spoke. “I’m telling you, eighteen—that’s the magic number. Count down the days. Once we turn eighteen, we’re free; they can’t legally keep us inside the set against our will. We won’t need a guardian’s permission to leave.”

  “Let’s go, come on,” I said, tugging Kipps’s arm as I started across the parking lot. I felt a sudden jolt in my stomach and I swore I could run forever. My gaze scanned the different side streets, but there was no obvious exit.

  “No—look.” He didn’t move.

  When I went back to the window, they’d just posted another question for the audience to vote on. USE ANY FORCE NECESSARY or DON’T HARM HER, EVEN IF SHE GETS AWAY. VOTE NOW.

  Again the timer ticked down.

  Neither of us spoke. We just watched the seconds slip away, until the results flashed on the screen: 47% USE ANY FORCE NECESSARY, 41% DON’T HARM HER, and 12% UNDECIDED.

  “They can’t actually mean that,” I tried, but it sounded pathetic, even to me. “They just want to make it seem more dramatic, probably. Do those votes really matter?”

  Kipps was silent. He wiped the foggy half-moon off the glass and turned away.

  “Yeah, they matter,” he finally said. “They really matter.”

  26

  “We need to find a bus stop like the one by the fence,” I said. “We need to get as far away from the set as possible.”

  “That was a shuttle stop for people who work inside,” Kipps said. “Actors, crew, the extras—at least before the strike. I don’t know if they even have public buses here. We need an Uber.”

  “What?”

  “When I lived outside the set you used to be able to get a ride off your device, but the producers confiscated mine last year. Uber—it would pick you up and take you wherever you wanted to go.”

  “How do we get it then…this Uber thing?”

  “We can’t if we don’t have a device.”

  “What the hell is a device? Why are you talking in code?”

  The minutes were ticking away, and I could feel my anxiety rising. The producers knew we’d left the set and they were coming to bring us back. We only had so much time before they found us here, and Kipps was using all these random words I’d never heard before. Where exactly were we?

  “What about those car dealerships next door? Maybe that’s something,” I said.

  “So…what? We just steal one?” But Kipps was already walking in that direction, crossing into the supermarket parking lot. It wasn’t like we had any other leads.

  “We ask to take it for a test drive.” I said.

  “You, Jess Flynn, ask to take it for a test drive,” he said. “Walk me through that.”

  “Chime in at any time with a better idea. Really, any time. Like now…or now…or—”

  “I’m thinking!” Kipps snapped, but he said it way too loud. A couple loading groceries into their trunk turned and stared at us. Kipps brought his hand to his hair, shielding his face, and they squinted against the setting sun, as if they weren’t quite sure what they were seeing. I grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the supermarket’s entrance. The last thing we needed was someone recognizing us.

  It was unlike any store I’d seen before, with every item behind a towering wall of glass. A woman with a pixie cut parked her cart in a recess in the glass wall. She punched some numbers into the keypad beside it and a mechanical arm behind the shelves sprang to life. It grabbed a box of cereal, bringing it to the end of the row and then straight down, where it deposited it gently into the cart. She kept typing away, and the arm darted up and over the different shelves, plucking out bags of pretzels and boxes of cookies.

  A dad was there with two kids—one tucked in the shopping cart and the other trailing behind him, mesmerized by the robot. Everyone was alone in their own separate world, typing on a screen posted on the front of the cart, or on a portable one they carried with them. I kept thinking they’d turn, they’d see us, but most people had their heads down as they passed. I brushed shoulders with someone watching the feed from the set, and she didn’t even give me a second glance.

  “How do we get one of those?” I whispered to Kipps. I pointed to the tiny screen the dad had in his hand. He kept j
abbing it with his finger. “Can we buy it here?”

  “Negative,” he said.

  “Those were the devices you were talking about.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not that simple,” he said. “There are accounts associated with them. It’s a whole thing.”

  I checked over my shoulder to make sure the couple hadn’t followed us inside. Then we went straight to the back of the store, as far away from the parking lot as possible. We turned down another aisle and I saw a familiar face. My mom was staring back at me from the cover of a book.

  RETRO DESIGN was scrawled across the top in neon letters. She was standing in our living room. There were two other books beside it, a memoir titled Living in the ’90s and one that said 10 Steps to Building Your Brand. The shelves were stacked with plates, dish towels, curtains, and wallpaper in bright pink, turquoise, and purple patterns, all with a Helene Hart stamp on the label. This whole time my mom actually had been working, just not at the house around the block. There were Helene Hart spatulas, lemon zesters, “mom jeans,” and hair ties.

  Next to my mom’s home goods line was a section called STUCK IN THE ’90s. You could buy my face on a tee shirt, on a hat, on knee-high socks.

  “What? No, no, please no…” I said, pressing my palm against the glass. They’d chosen my seventh-grade class picture for some of the merch, which was particularly mean. Seventh grade was the year I’d attempted to shave my bangs instead of growing them out, and I’d walked around with a full inch of peach fuzz on my forehead for all of September. Of course (of course!) it was right in time for photos. I’d hunted down every copy in my house and destroyed it, but they’d found one. They’d even put it on a mug.

  But it didn’t stop there. They’d found a way to monetize all of it.

  Want Amber’s Kipling backpack? Need a compilation of all the covers I’d performed in the last five years, including the song from the Swickley High talent show? A workout video from my dad, Carter Boon? Swickley High Varsity Baseball cards? Posters of Kipps shirtless? Kipps pouting at the camera? How about a SAVE SARA tee shirt?

  They made stuffed animals that looked like Fuller. A block of Baby-Sitters Club books that opened in the back and had Ring Pops, Nerds, and Fun Dip inside. It was like someone had walked through my bedroom and mass-produced everything in it—the lava lamp, the comforter with tiny lavender flowers, the corkboard with daisy pushpins, the string of white Christmas lights. They even had bottles of GAP Dream perfume.

  “Stuck in the ’90s,” I read out loud. “That’s the name of the show?”

  The cars, this store, everything I’d seen outside was all a little off.

  “Kipps, what year is it?”

  He gritted his teeth, like someone had just wired his jaw shut. “Errr…”

  “Tell me.”

  He looked away. “2037.”

  “2037?” I repeated. “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not. I swear, I’m not. I didn’t really want to be the one to say it but…” He gestured at the wall of merchandise. “I guess it’s kind of obvious we’re not in the ’90s, huh?”

  “Who else was going to say it? You think we’re going to run into some therapist who’s going to sit me down and, like, gently break the news to me?” I asked.

  Kipps pressed his lips into a straight line.

  “So, Bill Clinton? He’s not the president?”

  “No, he’s dead,” Kipps said.

  “Alanis Morissette? Puff Daddy?”

  Kipps cringed. “I don’t know? I think they might be alive still? People don’t really listen to Alanis Morissette anymore, no offense. Not when Izzy Pike is making music.”

  “That means…” I tried to do the math in my head. “Ew. How old is Scott Wolf? Like…70?”

  I couldn’t shake the visual. Scott Wolf, my Scott Wolf. Old. Wrinkled. GRAY.

  “Who is Scott Wolf?” Kipps said.

  “Bailey from Party of Five?”

  It was useless. I kept imagining him with saggy jowls and stooped shoulders. Scott Wolf with a grandpa pancake butt and white hair. “Gross. That is truly repulsive.”

  I looked up at the screen hanging from the ceiling. Different advertisements scrolled past. “So not only were they lying to me about the set, but I’m not even in the right decade.”

  I kept thinking about that Jamiroquai video, “Virtual Insanity,” where the floor shifted beneath his feet. Furniture slid to the right and then the left and he was pulled down a padded hallway with cockroaches climbing up the walls. Everything kept changing on me, and I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t have the moves. I was in a pile in the corner, a couch crushing me against the wall, cockroaches tangled in my hair.

  “If it makes you feel better, Stuck gets the highest ratings of any Like-Life show. That’s why they have all this merch.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Whoa.” Kipps leaned in, examining his poster. “They airbrushed my abs.”

  I couldn’t help it, I cracked a smile. He definitely looked more chiseled in the photo than he did in real life.

  “I thought being ripped was, like, your thing.”

  “Ummm…” He stared at the ceiling. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? Everyone talks about how you’re, like, this superstar athlete. That you’re captain of the varsity soccer team and blah, blah, blah.”

  “Feel this,” he said, and he clapped himself on the shoulder. I brought my hand up beside his and pressed down. There were at least two inches of padding inside his black and red fleece jacket. I laughed as I felt down his arm, where the padding extended, creating a fake bicep. “They tried to get me to work out but I refused. Out of principle. I mean, it’s not fun. And I’ve never liked to sweat. Gross. So then they tried to get me to drink these protein shakes.” He bit down on his tongue, like he was choking. “I used to pour them down the sink.”

  “So you’ve never played soccer? How is that possible?”

  “Stunt double.”

  I’d almost forgotten where we were, but then I noticed a girl staring at us from the other end of the aisle. She was our age and wore acid-washed jeans with a neon-yellow sweatshirt. She smiled at me like we were friends.

  Kipps noticed her the same moment I did, and we both turned and started weaving toward the exit. I tried to tell myself it was a good sign she hadn’t said anything, that it might still be okay, but my hands had gone cold. We needed to get out of here.

  The automatic doors opened into a courtyard with a clothing store and a sushi restaurant with outdoor tables. A group of guys laughed as they picked at a plate of sashimi. The side of the brick building had four different screens projected onto it, but our set was the only one I recognized. They were still running the live feed from the cul-de-sac.

  We crossed the courtyard to one of the car dealerships. The only thing that saved us was people’s phones, their “devices” I guessed, which held most of their attention. Everyone was looking down, checking something on their screens, or turning them to show someone else.

  The car place had three garage doors made of glass, and one on the side was open, revealing a row of colorful vehicles. They were all egg shaped, and the seams disappeared, so you could hardly see where the door handles were. A pink-haired woman in the back of the store talked loudly into a headset while simultaneously typing at her desk.

  “We can adjust that, sure, let me just run the numbers again…” She clicked her tongue against her teeth as she typed.

  “What’s the move?” Kipps asked, as we circled a glossy black car in front of the others. I traced the spot where the door met the carriage, finding what looked like a handle. When I pushed it in, the door opened, and the vehicle started beeping.

  “Would you mind holding for a second?” The pink-haired woman was watching us from across the showroom, but we kept our backs toward her, pretending we were
fascinated by the car. “Can I help you with something?”

  “We wanted to test-drive the new SL522…” Kipps just read the letters and numbers off the front of the hood. In an even stranger move, he made his voice two octaves lower than it normally was, but he sounded more like a cartoon cowboy than a grown man. I glanced sideways at him, trying to get the message across: Be cool. Play it down.

  I could feel her staring at us still, clocking my plaid baby-doll dress and Doc Marten boots. Kipps’s North Face fleece and Sambas. Kipps gestured to a cord stuck into the side of the vehicle and a row of lights on the dashboard. It’s on, he mouthed. Then he said something about it charging.

  “You know, I’m going to have to get back to you on that,”the woman said, returning to her conversation. I heard her chair roll out from under her as she stood. “We don’t call it an SL522. It’s a NextGen Cloud. Nothing like a Land Rover, that’s for sure…Patrick.”

  Patrick. We were statues, that word alone enough to cement us in place. She recognized us. She knew exactly who we were. When I glanced back she was typing away on the screen in her hand.

  “Yeah, you’re not going to believe who’s here…” she said, laughing. She touched her earpiece with two fingers. “Jessica Flynn and Patrick Kramer.”

  Whoever she was talking to responded, and I could only imagine the snarky comment, because the woman threw her head back and laughed even louder this time. I glanced over my shoulder at the crowd in the courtyard. One of the giant screens now had JESSICA FLYNN FLEES STUCK IN THE ’90S SET scrolling across the bottom of it as a reporter interviewed a Swickley Alarms guy. My chest felt tight. Kipps was still staring at the pink-haired woman, like he couldn’t believe what had just happened.

  “Yeah, post it. Sure,” she said.

  “Let’s just go,” I whispered, nodding to the car. It was right there, and we didn’t have a chance without it. Now that people knew where we were, we’d be completely trapped if we didn’t leave now.

  Kipps didn’t respond, just jumped into the passenger side door and pulled on his seatbelt. I stared at him, waiting for him to realize what he’d done, but he sat there, his hands in his lap.