This Is Not the Jess Show

by Anna Carey

  “I only have a learner’s permit,” I said. “You’re the one who knows how to drive.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “A 1995 Land Rover. We couldn’t afford one of these.”

  “Nuh-uh,” the woman yelled. “Game’s over. Get out. That vehicle’s worth more than your life.”

  She darted out from behind the desk, but I ran around the front of the vehicle and climbed inside. Nothing was the same as my dad’s Flynn Pest Control van, the only other car I’d ever practiced in. Those handful of times he took me to the parking lot behind Home Depot, there was always the ignition key, the two pedals, and the gearshift in the center. It was Kipps who found the door locks by hitting the wide screen on the dashboard.

  “Enough. Come on, get out,” the woman said, reaching us a second later. She pulled at the handle twice, then yelled for someone across the courtyard.

  “Where’s the gearshift?” I ran my fingers over the center console where it would’ve been. “How do I put it in drive?”

  Kipps scrolled through options on the dashboard screen, swiping this way and that with the tip of his finger. The two pedals were there, beneath my feet—gas and brake. But how was I supposed to use them? Wasn’t the car supposed to drive itself?

  “Hold on…” Kipps said. He pulled up a menu on the screen with a few different options, then pressed one marked D. “Try that. Hit the gas.”

  I pressed down hard on the pedal and the car went skidding out of the showroom. The charger ripped right out of the wall, creating a long rubber tail that clattered along behind us. We clipped the edge of the garage door on our way into the parking lot and the glass pane exploded into a thousand pieces.

  27

  We skidded out into the lot, the broken glass raining down around us. The NextGen Cloud flew off the curb and hit the ground hard. I swerved, trying to avoid a parked car, and slammed right into a brick wall.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.” Kipps was running on repeat, glancing at the rearview, then over my shoulder at the small crowd emerging from the courtyard. It wasn’t fine, though. The front bumper had made a loud, horrible crunch when it hit the wall, and now it was folded in on itself. Part of the headlight skidded across the ground.

  “How do I reverse?” I asked, but as soon as I said it I saw the R on the screen, right beside the D, and pressed it. When I put my foot on the gas again we spun back over the pavement, nearly knocking into a lamppost. I hit the D again, my finger shaking as I touched the screen. But then we were moving forward. We were pulling out onto the main road, speeding away.

  It was four lanes wide, with just enough room for someone to pass us. The car was impossibly light. I barely had to touch the wheel, guiding it through the boxy clip of stores and restaurants. The small suburban town was similar to Swickley, only every place was bustling and every parking lot was full. People clustered outside of bars or lined up at a Chinese take-out window, even though it was getting dark. The 7-Eleven was still open. There were cars in front of us and behind us, zooming past in both directions. A high-school baseball field was lit up, a single player racing around the bases, his gold jersey glittering under the spotlights.

  “I’m ready for the part where this thing drives itself,” I said, my palms slick against the wheel. “When’s that going to happen?”

  “You have to opt in, then set a destination,” Kipps said. “It’s too risky to be in the system, though. If the car is reported stolen, which it will be, they’ll know exactly where we are.”

  “Are they following us?” I couldn’t bear to check the rearview mirror.

  “I think we’re good,” Kipps finally said. I didn’t know where to go so I just kept racing forward, trying to get us as far away from the set as possible.

  “So this is the real world…” I slowed down for a red light. A dance studio was lit up, and a few young girls in tutus pliéed at the barre. “There are people everywhere. It’s, like, bursting with people.”

  “Yeah, the set’s kind of lonely…that’s the first thing I noticed when we moved inside permanently. It was bad enough before, but especially since the strike. And nothing’s open after eight, unless you count the diner and the movie theater…which is only open if you’re there.”

  The light turned green. Kipps pointed to a sign that said 495 WEST.

  “That’s the expressway, I remember. If we can just make it there, we have a shot.”

  We turned left off the main road and into a neighborhood, headed for the highway. It was a version of my life except somehow more vivid, more real. The trees seemed bigger, twisting over us in electric greens, and a boy scrambled up the branches into one. A guy in a Yankees hat mowed his lawn. A teenage girl played tug-of-war with a leggy brown puppy. I had the giddy, floating feeling of falling in love.

  I’d never needed things to be perfect. I still saw the missing shingles and the dented trashcans turned over near the curb, and I knew life outside the set would have its own problems. I didn’t know anyone here besides Kipps. I only had three dollars in my wallet, and even if I could get one of those device things, I had no idea how to use it.

  But racing forward, out over the potholes and broken concrete, my small town and my parents and that hospital felt far away, like it was a story I’d heard about someone else. I let the speedometer climb above thirty, which I’d never done in the Home Depot parking lot. The car responded to even the slightest weight on the pedal, every tilt of the wheel. I was in control.

  “You’re smiling,” Kipps finally said. I didn’t notice, but he was staring at the side of my face. “Don’t do that, you’re scaring me. We’re on the run. This is serious business, Jess Flynn. Keep your head in the game.”

  “My head is in the game.”

  “Good, because we can’t slip up.”

  “Why are you saying it like that, like I’m the one who’ll slip up? Maybe you’re the one who’s going to do something stupid. You ever think of that?”

  “It’s not out of the realm of possibility. I had to go to urgent care once after chugging a bottle of Crystal Pepsi.”

  “That’s repulsive. Why would you do that?”

  “My brother dared me.”

  I rolled my eyes, about to get into it with him, but as we approached the highway entrance I saw the bus. It was on a road perpendicular to ours. It sped into the intersection ahead, cutting us off. The logo on the side read LIKE-LIFE PRODUCTIONS in cheerful blue script.

  “Shit,” Kipps said, the same time I was thinking it. “The producers. That’s it—they’re not going to let us leave. They blocked off our exit.”

  “What is that, the shuttle bus?” I said, squinting at the tinted windows. There were people inside.

  “Yeah, it’s one of the ones that runs to and from the set. There’s at least one person from the security team on there. Sometimes more. They have to keep the fans away.”

  I thought about making a U-turn, but there were already cars behind us, and there was nowhere to go but back. Stores and strip malls penned us in on either side. There must’ve been three large apartment complexes between us and the on-ramp.

  The bus doors opened. Two men in dark shirts got out and stood to one side. They had holsters at their hips…Guns? Tasers? Everyone on the bus was watching, and a woman who looked suspiciously like Miss Olivera, Kristen’s field hockey coach, pressed her hand to the window. I kept my foot on the gas as we sped closer, but I’d have to brake eventually.

  “They’re calling my bluff. They don’t think I’d hit a bus full of people,” I said.

  “Yeah, because you wouldn’t. It’s over.”

  Kipps gripped the center console with one hand and had his other palm on the side of the door. He wanted me to slow down. I didn’t.

  “Jess?”

  “We can’t give up now.”

  “But there’s nowhere to go.”

 
I kept my hands exactly as they had been on the steering wheel. I kept the pressure exactly the same on the gas, even as we got closer to the bus. When we were so close I could see the security team’s stunned expressions, I swerved to the right, over a driveway and onto the vast lawn of an apartment complex. I crashed through some bushes and over a small hill before swerving back onto the road, the bus somewhere behind us.

  “You did it,” Kipps said, turning back. “I can’t believe you did it!”

  I yanked the wheel hard, to the right, and pulled onto the highway.

  28

  I’d never been on a highway before, but there was no point in me saying that out loud. Of course Kipps already knew I’d only driven in the Home Depot parking lot, just like he knew about the hamsters I had when I was seven, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and the time I cried in the gym storage closet because Ben Taylor said my eyes were too far apart.

  I still really hated Ben Taylor.

  Kipps must’ve known about all of it: the time my mom bought my first tampons, and then my dad mentioned it and I screamed for an hour, because why on earth would she share that with him? Kipps knew I had loved, or at least thought I’d loved, Tyler. He’d probably seen that footage of us from Jen’s party. Every time I thought of something to say I realized it had probably already been told to him, that he knew things he couldn’t unknow, even if I wanted him to. I was overcome with that horrible, sinking feeling I’d had when my diary went missing in eighth grade. It had fallen behind my bed but for that hour I was so sick I’d nearly thrown up. I kept imagining walking into homeroom and everyone laughing at me, or Chris Arnold reciting passages to our math class.

  My secrets and hopes and quirks had been out there for over a decade, for everyone to consume whenever they’d wanted, as cheap and filling as popcorn. They’d made hats and tote bags and lava lamps, monetizing every part of it, but I’d left the set with nothing. My mom had this huge home décor empire and my dad had written books and I’d never even gotten an allowance. I was supposed to work at the Swickley YMCA this year, for the second summer in a row, making five fifteen an hour.

  “Could you maybe slow down?” Kipps gripped the handle above the door. “You’re not a great driver. No offense.”

  “Should’ve taken the wheel when you had the chance.”

  I checked the rearview, then the side mirrors, which felt like a responsible thing to do. The other vehicles on the highway gave us a wide berth. Every now and then the car made this beeping sound when I drifted over the dotted white line.

  Kipps double-checked that his seatbelt was buckled. It was the third time he’d done that in the last twenty minutes. “I don’t want to risk the self-driving setting. It’s not worth it. Seriously, we’ll be lucky if there isn’t a tracking device in this thing.”

  “You think they’re tracking us?”

  I could barely get the words out.

  “Maybe, maybe not. It’s hard to know. Some of the newer models had tracking devices, but then there was this whole uproar over privacy, and so they made it opt-in. But it’s possible the showroom models have it switched on. Let’s just take it as far as we can.”

  “This is nerve-wracking.”

  “Which part? Being chased by security people who want to drag us back into a set where we’re filmed twenty-four seven and have, oh, zero freedom?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Maybe we should get off and take local roads. They’re going to catch up with us on the highway. We’ll just keep heading west toward the city.”

  “New York City?”

  “Yeah. I’ve only been twice, when I was a kid, but there are ten million people there. I just think it would be easier to lose them. In these smaller towns we’re too exposed.”

  That sounded right, but I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. We passed a sign for Lakeville Road. I hadn’t figured out how to use the turn signals, so I just pulled into the right lane. The driver behind me leaned on their horn.

  “See my bag?” I said, pointing to it on the floor by his feet. “Check the book in there. Sara made marks by the different letters. I didn’t get a chance to decode it all. There was more.”

  I went down the ramp too fast and had to slam on the brakes. Thankfully there was no one was behind us.

  “I can’t read in a car. It makes me sick.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Do you want to see the sandwich I had for lunch?” Kipps raised his eyebrows, his forehead moving like it was made of rubber. Somehow, in the past half hour, he’d morphed into a completely different person than Patrick Kramer. His voice was different. His mannerisms were more exaggerated. He was even a little…he was weird.

  “Were you just, like, acting the whole time?” I said. “Every time we talked. You were playing Patrick Kramer? What, did they give you a whole pamphlet on me before we met? Something to give you a competitive advantage? She loves scary movies, raspberry cheesecake, summer weekends at Maple Cove, blah blah.”

  He let out a long, shuddering sigh. “Whoa. That’s pretty narcissistic.”

  I tried to keep my expression neutral, but my neck felt itchy and hot. I don’t know how much time passed before he finally laughed.

  “Jess, I’m kidding,” he said. “I’ve watched the show since I was eight. My family was obsessed with it, especially after the fifth season, when your parents got in that car crash and Lydia took temporary guardianship over you? Everyone was tuning in every week, freaking out about what would happen next.”

  “Yeah, riveting…” I rolled my eyes.

  It had happened in the spring, on the night before Easter, and we’d found our unfinished baskets scattered on the floor of our parent’s walk-in closet. They must’ve been building to the finale. Every year there was another catastrophe, another drama, and that one had been small, more manageable, in comparison to the tornado or Sara’s diagnosis.

  “But yeah, they still made me research you after they decided I’d be the love interest. Except it wasn’t a pamphlet, it was an email with like five thousand attachments and an interactive slideshow and all this crap. I read through your psychological profile and all your likes and dislikes, and then they made me take a test at the end.”

  I turned left onto a main road. The sky had darkened, slipping into a hazy pinkish blue, and there weren’t as many cars out. I just kept driving west, like Kipps said, trying to imagine what my psychological profile would even consist of. What did they have slides of, my favorite foods? The music I listened to?

  “You couldn’t say no?” I asked.

  “My parents aren’t really into hearing no anymore.” Kipps was quiet for a minute, then he rested his forehead on the window. I thought he might say something else, but instead he changed the subject. “What is that, a mall? What town are we in?”

  I noticed the building he was talking about, a towering complex with stores on the first floor. The upper levels looked like apartments. We caught glimpses of a man in a tank top cooking dinner and a family huddled in front of a giant screen. ALL TIME MARKET read a sign on the bottom floor. It had the same logo as the supermarket we’d passed through less than an hour before.

  “I have no idea…”

  “We’d never even been to Long Island before we moved onto the set,” Kipps said. “I lived in Pennsylvania my whole life. There has to be a map somewhere…” He jabbed at the dashboard screen, then dragged his finger right, but he couldn’t figure out where to find it.

  “We’ve been going west, for sure,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Doesn’t the sun rise in the east and set in the west? Or is that a lie too?”

  I pointed to the horizon line, which had the last remnants of the sunset, a few streaks of sherbet pink and orange. I’d pulled down the front visor to block the glare.

  “I think that’s true,” Kipps said.
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br />   “I mean, if you’re right, we just keep heading this way until we hit the city.”

  We passed a sprawling golf course. The greens were completely dark, the parking lot empty. I pulled into the right lane to let someone pass when something sounded on the dashboard—a low, steady beep. But the screen was still saying we were in DRIVE. Everything looked exactly the same as it had a few seconds before.

  “What is that?” Kipps asked, when it didn’t stop after a minute or so. He swiped through the dashboard, eventually stopping at a panel with a red, blinking image of a battery. 5% LEFT.

  “Please do not tell me the battery is running out,” I said.

  “Well, it is, but don’t worry,” he said. “It says something about a replacement battery. It’s probably in the back.”

  He climbed over the center console and into the cramped backseat, his scrawny butt bumping me in the shoulder as he went. Despite being tall, he was narrower than most guys our age, and he moved completely differently now that he wasn’t on camera. His limbs seemed floppier, wild almost, compared to the rigid, buttoned-up guy I’d talked to at Jen Klein’s party.

  He fiddled with a panel in the backseat. When he finally opened it, a silver battery was inside, with two cords coming out of the top. I watched in the rearview mirror as he examined it.

  “Is that the spare?”

  “Um…bad news. I don’t think there is a spare.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means we’re going to have to ditch this thing.”

  The beeping was incessant. I hit the button on the screen, where it said 3% LEFT, but nothing stopped it.

  “And what are we going to do with it?” I said. “We can’t just leave it on the side of the road. Whoever finds it is going to know we’re here, in…” I scanned the shoulder and spotted a sign that read LAKESIDE GOLF CLUB, EST. 2002. “…Lakeside.”

  Kipps was still in the backseat, and he went from window to window, surveying our surroundings. I’d barely moved my hands the whole time I’d been driving. The car was slowing down, from forty miles an hour to thirty-five, and falling still. It didn’t matter how hard I pressed on the gas pedal. Nothing helped.