Copyright © 2015 Melanie Harlow
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.
This is a work of fiction. References to real people, places, organizations, events, and products are intended to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real.
ISBN: 978-1517284640
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
~ Mary Oliver
I’m not an awful person, I swear I’m not, but you wouldn’t know that if you saw me on Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy).
Oh, you’ve never heard of it?
Good.
It’s a ridiculous reality show where thirty beautiful girls compete for the love of a hot cattle rancher. To show their devotion, they do super meaningful things like wear red cowboy boots with tiny denim shorts, squeal for him at the local rodeo, and, of course, take their turn on a mechanical bull. This last activity will later be edited into a hilarious #FAIL reel since none of the women ever lasts more than ten seconds, and some not even two.
(If you must know, seven. And it wasn’t pretty.)
“It’s back on!” My younger sister Natalie bolted from the bathroom to the couch, jostling my arm when she flopped down next to me.
I frowned. “Nat, making me watch myself on Save a Horse is possibly forgivable, depending on how they edit this last segment. Spilling my margarita while I watch it is not.” I’d hoped a tequila buzz would numb the shame of watching myself be an obnoxious twat on TV, but so far, it hadn’t happened.
In my defense, producers told me to be an obnoxious twat. As soon I got to Montana, they took me aside and said, “We like you, but we want you to be the crazy one people will love to hate, and we’ll make sure you stay on the show longer if you’re good at it.” After thinking it over for a minute, I agreed. After all, the whole reason I was doing the show was to get noticed. If I was just another nice girl who got cut after the first episode, where would that leave me?
Had I known that clever editing would make me look even worse than I’d acted—a feat I’d have sworn wasn’t possible—I might have given that decision more than sixty seconds.
“Oh, come on.” Always able to see a bright side, Natalie patted my head. “Every show needs someone to hate on, and that person is always the most memorable, right?”
Noisily I slurped up more margarita. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Yes! Can you name one nice person from a reality show? No,” she went on before I could answer. “That’s because nice people are not fun on TV.”
Sinking deeper into the couch, I watched myself trash someone’s outfit on the screen. “They’re not making me look fun. They’re making me look like a hideous bitch.” I picked up my phone and checked Twitter, even though I knew it would be painful. “Yep. Just like I thought. Hashtag skylarsucks is trending. Oh here’s a nice one: ‘Skylar Nixon is not even pretty. Her mouth looks like my asshole.’”
Natalie took my phone out of my hands and threw it down between us on the couch. “Screw that, people are stupid and just like to hear themselves talk. Listen, you did this show to get your name out there. And it worked! A month ago, you were just a beauty queen from Michigan. Last week, you were in US Magazine! I’d call that a success, wouldn’t you?”
“No. They took a picture of me pumping gas, and I looked fat.” I shut one eye and cringed watching myself sidle up to poor, hapless Cowboy Dex and flirt shamelessly. “Jesus, I’m even more horrible than I remember. I don’t think I can keep watching this train wreck.” Tossing back the rest of my drink, I got off the couch.
“You’re gonna miss the lasso ceremony!”
“Good.” I stomped over to the kitchen counter, which, unfortunately, was still in earshot of the television. For the last month I’d been living in a small, repurposed barn on my parents’ farm, and everything was in one long room, kitchen at one end, bedroom on the other. Actually, it wasn’t even really a bedroom, just a bed separated from the main area by thick ivory curtains that pooled on the floor. I’d added that touch myself. In fact, one of the reasons my parents let me move in to one of their new guest houses rent-free was to help my mother decorate them. Not that I had a degree in interior decorating—or anything at all. But I did like the challenge of taking a raw space and making it beautiful. I should have gone to college for design.
Or taxidermy.
Or underwater basket-weaving.
Or fucking anything that would have given me a real career to fall back on when the whole I’m Gonna Be a Star thing went tits up.
Heaving a sigh, I took my time in the kitchen, plunking a few more ice cubes into my glass and pouring generously from the oversized jug of margarita mix. But I returned to the couch in plenty of time to watch Cowboy Dex give out lassoes to the girls who’d roped his heart that week. Rolling my eyes so hard it hurt, I marveled that I’d managed to keep a straight face during this nonsense. No, even better than straight—my expression was sweet and grateful as Dex handed me that rope. Poor guy. He was cute, but dull as ditchwater. We actually had no chemistry whatsoever, but I’m sure the producers told him he had to keep me around for a while.
Oh, you didn’t know producers manipulate things on reality TV to get the conflicts and tension they want for ratings? They do. All the time.
Here are some other secrets I can tell you, although you didn’t hear them from me:
Those shows are cheap as hell. All the contestants “volunteer” their time, and the only things that are paid for are travel, lodging, meals, and drinks. For the two months I spent filming, I’ve got nothing to show but more credit card debt because of all the money I spent on clothes and shoes and hair and makeup.
Speaking of drinks, contestants can have, and are encouraged to have, as much alcohol as they want at the ranch, because a bunch of tipsy women are always more fun to watch than a bunch of sober ones. The showrunners made it a point to ask about favorite drinks during the interview process, and always kept the bars stocked.
Which leads me to my final point. Producers are the masterminds of the show—the contestants are more like puppets. The show might not be scripted, but if you’re not saying the things they want you to say, if you’re not having the conversations they want you to have, they’ll stop the cameras and tell you, “Talk about this.” And they edit so shrewdly, snipping out what they don’t want or stringing together words said on completely different occasions to create a sentence never uttered by anyone—there’s even a name for it: frankenbiting.
Like that—right there. “I never said that,” I said, lowering myself onto the couch and wincing when I heard myself remarking snidely, “People from small towns are all small-minded and stupid.”
Natalie sucked air through her teeth. “Wow. That was pretty harsh. You didn’t say it?”
“No! You can totally tell it’s edited—see the way it cut away from my interview to a voiceover? My voice doesn’t even sound the same! Those fucking producers were so slimy.”
The shot went back to me during the interview, and God, I hated my face. And my stupid girly voice. And who told me that color yellow looked good with my skin tone? “I’m actually from a small town,” I was saying. “I grew up on a farm in Northern Michigan, but I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
Wait a minute. Had I sa
id that? I bit my lip. I honestly couldn’t remember. And seeing as I’d recently moved back to said small town in Northern Michigan, it was particularly embarrassing.
And then it got worse.
“It’s nothing but a bunch of drunks, rednecks and religious gun nuts,” I heard my voice saying as footage of some unfamiliar, old-timey main street flashed on the screen, complete with a farmer riding a tractor through town. “I’d never go back.”
“What?” Furious, I got to my feet. “I know I never said that! That footage wasn’t even taken here!”
“Can they do that?” Natalie wondered, finally sounding a little outraged on my behalf. “I mean, just take any words you say and mix and match like that? Seems wrong.”
“Of course it’s wrong, but yes, they can,” I said bitterly. “They can do anything they want because it’s their show.” As I poured margarita down my throat, my cell phone dinged. I grabbed it off the couch and looked at the screen.
A text from our oldest sister, Jillian. She was a doctor and usually too busy for television, but lucky me, she must have found time tonight.
What the hell was that???
But before I could reply, another text came in, this one from my mother.
I thought you said last week was the worst. The thing with the mechanical bull.
My head started to pound. I opened my mother’s message and wrote back, I thought it was! I told you not to watch this show, Mom. They manipulate things. I never said that stuff. But I knew she wouldn’t get it. No matter how often or how well I explained the way editing worked, she still didn’t understand. My phone vibrated in my hand. “Oh, Jesus. Now she’s calling me,” I complained.
“Who?”
“Mom. She’s watching the show, even though I told her not to. Do I have to answer this?”
My sister shrugged. “No. But you live on her property. She can probably see in the windows.”
I ducked, then sank onto the couch again. Generally, I didn’t ignore my mother, but right now I really didn’t feel like defending myself or lecturing her again on the how-and-why of editing for ratings. I tapped ignore and tossed my phone on the table. “Can we please stop watching this now?” Picking up the remote, I turned the television off without waiting for her answer.
“It’s not that bad, Sky.” Natalie got off the couch and went to the kitchen to refill her glass.
“Yes it is, and you know it. I just insulted everyone we know here.”
“Maybe no one is watching,” she said, ever the optimist.
“I seriously hope not.” I hugged my legs into my body, tucking my knees under my chin. Glancing out the big picture window, I saw darkness falling over the hilly orchard where I’d grown up. Memories flooded my mind…running through rows of fragrant blossoming cherry trees in the spring, picking the fruit in the summer, rustling through crunchy brown leaves in the fall, throwing snowballs at my sisters in the winter. Maybe I hadn’t appreciated it enough when I was younger, but I loved it here. For all its glitz, New York had never felt like home to me. I’d even liked Montana better than Manhattan.
Natalie returned to the couch and leaned back against the opposite end, stretching her legs out toward me. “All right, silver lining. You did exactly what you set out to do—draw attention to yourself. You’ve always been good at that.”
Had she intended to be snide? Natalie wasn’t the cryptic remark type, and neither was I. If we had something to say to one another, we said it.
I eyeballed her. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”
“Don’t get prickly.” She nudged me with one bare foot. “I’m just saying that you know how to work a room. You obviously charmed the producers into wanting you to stay on.”
“But not so much that they thought I’d win the cowboy’s heart on my own,” I pointed out.
She shrugged. “You said yourself you guys had no chemistry.”
“We didn’t. But why me?” I whined. “Why couldn’t they’ve asked someone else to play the villain?”
“Because they didn’t trust anyone else to play it right. They needed someone to act devious and manipulative but who was also beautiful and appealing enough for it to be realistic that he’d keep you on so long. I think it was a compliment!”
I held up one hand. “Please. Everyone there was beautiful. And haven’t you heard? My mouth looks like someone’s asshole.”
She kicked me. “Stop it. You have that something extra—you light up a room, you always have.” She slumped like a hunchback and contorted her pretty features. “The rest of us just linger in the shadows, waiting to feed on your scraps.”
I rolled my eyes. Natalie was perfectly lovely, and she knew it. She just had no desire to play it up. While I adored cosmetics, she usually went bare-faced. I was a hair-product and hot roller junkie; she let her natural waves air dry. I could easily—and happily—blow a paycheck on a pair of Louboutins; she saved every penny she could and always had.
And that’s why she owns her own business at age twenty-five and you’re still scrambling to get by at twenty-seven. You might be the big sister, but she’s got a shop, a boyfriend, and a condo. What do you have?
I propped my elbow on the back of the couch and tipped my head into my hand. “God, Nat. I really fucked this up. It didn’t lead to Scorsese knocking at my door, and I probably just alienated everyone we know.”
“Quit being such a drama queen. They’ll forgive you once you flash that Cherry Queen smile at them.”
“Ha. Maybe I should dig out my crown and start wearing it around town. Remind them they liked me once upon a time.”
“Does that mean you’re staying here for good?”
Picking up my drink, I took a slow sip. “I guess so, although I promised Mom I’d be out of this guest house by the end of the month. That gives me about three weeks to figure out where to live, or else move in with them.” I grimaced into the glass. “I’m such a loser. Moving in with my parents at twenty-seven.”
“You’re not, Sky. But if you still want to be an actress, why not go back to New York and try again? A lot of people don’t break out right away.”
How many times had I heard that over the last few years?
I swirled the ice around in the glass. Could I take the New York audition scene again? All the rejection was so disheartening. Then there was living in the city itself. New York had such frantic energy, at every time of day during every day of the week. Once upon a time I couldn’t wait to be a part of that. Of course, I’d romanticized it entirely—the life I’d imagined included actually getting the jobs I auditioned for, and being able to pay my rent with plenty left over for shoes, blowouts, and trendy nightclubs, where I’d clink glasses with elite theater people who called each other darling and invited me to summer with them in the Hamptons.
Needless to say, that’s not how it went.
I spent four full years in New York, and the last year I paid my rent solely by bartending, lying to my parents, my sisters, and anybody else who asked about going out on auditions.
How pathetic is that? I mean, plenty of people lie on their resumes about their successes, but there I was lying about my failures, making up jobs I didn’t get.
That beer commercial? They went younger.
That legal drama? Turns out they wanted a brunette.
That web series about vampire nannies? Never heard back.
So after spending my entire childhood dreaming of being an actress and being voted Most Likely to See Her Name in Lights, turns out I wasn’t cut out for it. Or maybe I just wasn’t good enough.
Either way, it was really depressing.
I was debating calling it quits when the opportunity to do Save a Horse came up, and since I hated the thought of coming back a failure, I figured I’d give it one last-ditch effort to find success.
In hindsight, I probably should have just crawled out of the ditch and held up the white flag. Or better yet, told someone to shoot.
“I don’t know, Nat. I…did
n’t really love living in New York.” Admitting how homesick I’d been seemed like another failure.
“Well, what about going back on the cruise ships?”
I made a face. “Nah. Two years was enough for me—I only did it for the experience. And the money.”
“Then stay here,” she said firmly. “Your roots are here. Your family is here. You’ve got a new job you like, and you can easily find a place to live.”
“I do like my job.” I looked over her head out the window again. “And I did miss it here,” I admitted. “But won’t everyone think I’m a big fat failure?”
“Fuck everyone!” Natalie said in a rare outburst. “What do you care what people think of you anyway?”
I shrugged, wishing I didn’t care. But I did. So much it hurt. My ten year high school reunion was three weeks away, and as it stood now, I’d walk in there with a pretty dull story—Failed Actress with No Plan B.
I wanted to be able to say I’d achieved something in the last ten years. But the problem was, I hadn’t. I had no career, no husband or children, no home of my own. Everybody else there would have pictures of their beautiful families to show and stories of their successes to tell. And what did I have?
Seven seconds on the mechanical bull.
And some really nice shoes.
The next day, I showed up for work at Chateau Rivard praying no one at the winery had seen the previous night’s show.
“Morning, John,” I called to the tasting room manager.
“Morning, Skylar.” He was inspecting wine glasses behind the long, curved wooden tasting counter. In his fifties, he was thin on top and thick through the middle and way, way too serious about wine, but I liked him well enough. He’d taught me a lot in the last month.
“Just give me a sec and I’ll help you.” I went to the employees’ room in the back and stowed my purse and keys in a locker before joining him again. “Hey, I wanted to ask you about doing some videos this month. I had an idea for a series of tasting clips, just short ones for our website and the YouTube channel, that would teach people about tasting different kinds of wines but not be snooty or overly preachy, you know? Just something fun and approachable, and we could highlight our riesling for summer.”
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