Eight Weeks to Mr. Right

by Archer, Amy

  I blinked back tears. All I could do was shake my head. Even if the lump in my throat hadn’t been big enough to prevent me from speaking, I had no idea what to say. I had no defense. I could tell he was hurting, and I wanted so badly to make everything better, to make him smile at me, to make him lift his eyebrow at me to let me know none of it mattered. But I could tell just how betrayed he felt.

  But I felt betrayed too. The show had betrayed me. The producers had made me think they were on my side, that they would present me to the world the way I presented myself, just edited down to an easy-to-consume, half-hour version. Instead, they had demonized me, made me the villain where I should’ve been only me. My feelings for Andrew had been honest at the time, and I’d only been doing and saying what I felt. I just hadn’t known that so much of it would make it into the show.

  And now, on the most humiliating night of my life, I needed Ben more than ever. I needed him to stand beside me, to know that even if I’d done things back then that I wouldn’t do now, that in my essence, my core, I was still the same person. I needed him to forgive me, even if the viewers didn’t. And to love me.

  “Maybe people think you’re acting fake and manipulative on the show because you are those things,” he said. “You try to take the easy way out. You don’t want to earn a job at La Joie. You want to sneak in the back door by sleeping with the CEO.”

  The force of his words hit me in the gut, and I collapsed onto the couch, deflated. My eyes stung, and then the tears began spilling.

  “I can’t do this, January,” he said, his voice quieter now, but firm. “I can’t be with you. You’re not the person I thought you were.”

  I felt myself crumple inside. I’d never needed him more than in this moment, and he was abandoning me.

  “And you’re still afraid,” I said, choking on my tears. “You’re giving up that easily? Inside you’re still that sixteen-year-old boy who wants to leave me before I can leave you.” I knew the accusation would hurt him, but I said it anyway. It was true. And I was so hurt right now — by Ben’s words, by the producers’ betrayal, by watching Andrew dump me all over again — that I didn’t even care. Nothing mattered anymore. Everything was falling apart, and anything I did to try to salvage it only made things worse.

  Ben opened his mouth as though to respond, but instead grabbed his wallet and headed for the door. “I have to go,” he said. “I can’t do this right now.”

  “At least stay and talk to me,” I begged. “I know that was hard to watch, but we need to talk about this.”

  He just shook his head and continued on his path.

  As the door shut behind him, I yelled, “That’s right, go! Just walk away.” I collapsed in a sobbing heap on the couch, and whispered to the empty room, “You’re more like your father than you think.”

  WEEK 7

  In the days after my final episode aired, I did my best to wade through the pile of Internet hatred that was flowing in to me. It seemed like an endless supply, and it exhausted me just to think about it.

  Most of my Twitter messages could be divided into three categories: those calling me a slut, those calling me a manipulative liar, and those voicing their support. This last category were much sparser than the others, but I was so grateful for the occasional vote of confidence, the fact that even a few people didn’t think I was the scum of the earth.

  I’d moved back into my parents’ house for a few days, wanting to give Ben the space he needed in his own apartment to think things through, even though it killed me not to be near him when I needed him most. I tried texting him a few times, letting him know I was thinking about him and missed him, but I hadn’t heard back.

  I did my best to respond to the comments, but I often couldn’t see through my tears. There were moments when I wasn’t sure whether I was crying about the constant barrage of strangers telling me what a shitty person I was, or whether I was crying because I missed Ben. Probably both at once.

  It was so hard trying to get through the hatred without him. I missed him like crazy, and every night that I went to bed without his comforting arms around me, I lay there beneath the covers wide awake, my mind churning and wondering what new slaps in the face Twitter was serving up to me at that moment.

  Why had I ever wanted to go on a reality TV show? What a stupid idea that had been. I couldn’t believe now that it had ever seemed like a good idea, that it had ever seemed like a way to get my foot in the door with La Joie. Now it threatened everything in my life. I wondered whether I’d ever be able to get a job in the perfume industry, much less with Andrew’s company.

  With every negative comment I received, I tried to imagine how Ben would’ve coached me to respond to it. And every time, I wished he were there with me to help me in person, to guide me through it, to tell me it would be okay and that I wasn’t a horrible person just because a stranger online who didn’t even know me was telling me I was.

  And what was he thinking? I couldn’t stand the thought that he might now think I was a horrible person too. And, almost worse, I knew he must be hurting also, and I wanted to be there to comfort him, to make it all better. I hated the fact that I had caused his pain.

  I didn’t leave my bedroom much during those days. My crying jags were unpredictable, and the last thing I wanted was to go out in public and start to cry — or worse, to be recognized and then start to cry. I didn’t even want my parents to see me cry, or to know how bad things were.

  The days crawled by. Once I made the mistake of googling my name and found that countless websites were weighing in on me. Some said the same things as Twitter users, though usually more eloquently: that I was manipulating Andrew, that I didn’t really love him, that sleeping with him and telling him I was falling in love with him was a low-life ploy. Others said I was a casualty of the carefully edited reality of reality TV. Still others said they felt sorry for me, or even pitied me, and others yet said I’d brought it on myself by going on the show.

  Maybe they were all right. Maybe none of them were. I didn’t know anymore. But I knew one thing with a burning certainty: I missed Ben. I checked my phone constantly to see if he’d texted back, or called, but always nothing.

  On Sunday, four days after the show aired, I took a deep breath and checked Twitter again, feeling the now-familiar feeling of dread in my stomach, so strong I thought I might vomit. Over the past few days, the hate hadn’t died down nearly as much as I’d expected, though I kept telling myself it would. I hadn’t been outdoors since I’d come to my parents’ house after Ben had left on Wednesday night, after the episode, and I’d been sleeping and eating erratically, getting antsy and nervous every time I’d avoided Twitter for a couple of hours, knowing that the hate was only building up in my absence.

  This time when I checked, there were the same old messages I’d come to expect, which still stung: “Y do u think ur so much better then others?”; “Don’t you know the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, not his dick?”; “January is EVIL”; “and “Sayonara, whore!”

  But this time there was also a tweet from someone with no profile info, the default egg as a profile photo, and only two tweets to his name: one from over a year ago, saying, “God damn spaghetti is good #spaghetti,” and one to me: “You deserve to die.”

  I disabled Twitter notifications. I vowed that I wouldn’t go on the site again until this was all completely, once and for all, over. No more googling, no Facebook, no Internet at all. I was done with it. Why was I wasting my time on this nonsense, anyway?

  I remembered what Ben had said: You’re so concerned with what strangers online think of you.

  Why did I care so much what these people thought? What did it matter? They were doing nothing but hurting me, making me feel worse about myself when I was already at the lowest point in my life. For that matter, why did all these people care so much about a reality show? What made them want to lash out at me when we’d never even meet? For them, I wasn’t a real person. I was an abstract
ion, a character, a distraction from their own lives. And I was giving them so much power over how I felt and what I thought about myself.

  No more. I would avoid all of it. I wanted nothing, absolutely nothing else to do with Eight Weeks to Mr. Right. I still had that live episode to face, but until then I could control what entered my head and what stayed out.

  It was time to move forward. This show had been holding me in the past for months now, and I was ready to look to the future. If working for La Joie was no longer an option, I would find somewhere else to work.

  I opened up a new window on my computer and searched “perfume development jobs Los Angeles.”

  Over the next few days I spruced up my resume, wrote some cover letters, and applied for nine different jobs. I didn’t have a way with words like Ben did, and I wished I could’ve run the applications by him before sending them off, but he clearly didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. I would just have to get used to it. Somehow.

  On Wednesday evening, Sophie came by for dinner. I’d been having dinner with my parents each night, the one time of the day I emerged from my bedroom and faced at least this small corner of the world, and they’d been surprisingly good about not asking questions about Ben or about the show, but it had been hard to face them. Knowing what they’d seen.

  After we ate, she guided me outside to the back deck, and I reluctantly followed.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked, looking concerned.

  I shook my head, not sure what to say. “I’m not.”

  We stared out at the pre-dusk sky and watched the first fireflies of the evening flitting around the yard. For several minutes, neither of us spoke.

  “Look, January,” she finally said, “I don’t know why you’re staying with Mom and Dad right now. I don’t know what happened between you and Ben. But you two seemed really good together.”

  I swallowed. “It’s not up to me,” I said, feeling the emotions well up inside me all over again. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “I hope you can find a way to make things right.”

  I sighed and pulled out my phone. The last pre-taped episode would just be starting. Tonight, the nation would find out whether Andrew Audrave wanted to marry Abby or Isabella. Or neither.

  I’d been wondering which of them had won for the past four months, and now I just didn’t care. I sat there with Sophie as the minutes ticked past, and felt a kind of peace come over me. It was freeing: I just didn’t care anymore. I didn’t wonder what was going on in the episode at that moment. I didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter anymore.

  “Oh, by the way,” Sophie said eventually, breaking the silence, “I have Ben’s jacket.”

  “His jacket?” I repeated, confused.

  “He left it in my car when we went wine tasting.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know if I’ll see him again.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, January,” she said. “Even if you don’t manage to work things out, you’ll still see him at some point. Don’t you still have things at his place?”

  I swallowed hard. “No. I didn’t have much to begin with. I took it all with me.”

  She looked away.

  “It’s okay,” I said, feeling guilty then for my pity party. “I’ll take the jacket. You’re right. Surely I’ll see him at some point.” Secretly, though, I wasn’t sure whether that was true.

  “I’ll go get it.”

  Sophie left me alone in the backyard while she went to the garage to get the jacket from her car. While she was gone, I stared out at my parents’ backyard. I loved their house. I loved their back deck, the flowers they’d planted, the way everything grew in San Francisco, year after year, in a way it didn’t in New York. There it just froze in the winter and died.

  There was a big part of me that didn’t want to move to L.A. But I had to move on, live where I was most likely to make the connections I needed, get my dream job, work in perfume. This brief but strange interlude in my life was coming to a close, whether I liked it or not.

  I saw now how naive my plan had been. How had I not realized how much control the producers had over how I was portrayed? They didn’t care about me putting my best face forward. They didn’t care about my goals, about my desire to show Andrew how perfect I was for La Joie. And my idea that if I acted professional on the show he’d want to hire me? It seemed insane that I’d ever thought that would work, that if I acted one way on a reality TV show everyone would think I would be perfect in the completely different context of a lab. What had I been thinking?

  They only cared about crafting an exciting story for their audience. And they’d needed a villain. I had walked right into it.

  And I only had myself to blame.

  “Here it is,” Sophie said, stepping back outside and handing me a light jacket that I recognized from the first time I’d seen Ben again, all those weeks ago in the bar.

  I sighed. “Thanks,” I said, wondering whether I’d ever have a chance to give it to him.

  I had made him sit through all those episodes, made him watch me fall in love with another man — or whatever it was that I’d felt for Andrew. I couldn’t believe how cruel I’d been. It was all my fault.

  I managed to avoid all mention of Mr. Right for almost a week. I spent my time gardening with my mother, reading fiction, and checking to see if any new perfume jobs had been posted since I’d last checked an hour before.

  But on Tuesday evening, I could avoid the show no longer. The next day was the live taping, and I had to be in L.A. for it.

  I dreaded seeing all the other women from the show again, and more than that I dreaded seeing Andrew. This would be the first time we’d been in the same room since he’d broken up with me, only hours after sleeping with me and my declaration of love.

  I packed the smaller of my two suitcases, bringing as little as possible, not even enough to bother checking a bag. Had I ever packed this light before? At the last moment, before zipping it up, I caught sight of Ben’s jacket and tossed it into my suitcase. I certainly wouldn’t be seeing him before I got back from Los Angeles, and I wanted some small part of him there with me. I knew it was silly, but after watching every episode but the most recent with him, I needed it. My dad dropped me off at the airport with well wishes, but I felt like I was heading into a war zone.

  Twenty-four hours, I told myself over and over. Twenty-four hours from now, it will finally be all over. Everything can go back to normal.

  Except without Ben. I’d sent him one last text before going to the airport, but still I hadn’t heard anything back from him. It had been six days, and I’d lost hope that he would respond. It still hurt so much to think about him, but I tried to put him out of my mind to mentally prepare for the task ahead of me.

  I’d get in at nine o’clock and head straight to my hotel, where the producers had given me a heads-up I’d be sharing a room with one of the other women from the show. I hoped it wasn’t Brandi or Isabella, though there was a 50/50 chance Isabella wouldn’t be there at all. Whoever had won, Isabella or Abby, would be staying the night with Andrew, now that the proposal episode had aired and their relationship could be public.

  Then the next day, we’d agreed to give interviews to a few reporters — again, as part of the contract we’d signed before any of this had even started. At the time, I’d had no idea how much any of this would blow up for me. Hell, back when I’d signed that contract, Eight Weeks to Mr. Right wasn’t even a show yet, just a concept, and now it seemed to be all the gossip sites could talk about.

  Then, at five o’clock, the live episode would begin. It would only actually be live for viewers in Eastern or Central time, who would watch at the normal time slot of eight Eastern or seven Central, and would be shown on a delay on the West Coast. I’d booked a plane back to San Francisco immediately after the half-hour taping, which would give me the excuse that I had to leave for the airport right away, no time for any more interviews. As it was, I’d cut
it very close, not wanting to wait two hours for the next flight. Hopefully I’d be back soon, interviewing for new jobs, but this trip I wanted to keep as short as possible.

  I’d worn a hat to the airport and tried to do my makeup a little different than usual, but waiting for my plane to board I noticed a few people staring at me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, but as soon as I noticed someone trying to take a photo of me, I hopped up.

  Over in the nearest shop, I grabbed a bottle of water and took it to the register. As the bored cashier rung me up, I glanced down and saw a flashy, bright magazine with a photo of Andrew, Isabella, and Abby on the cover, the headline screaming, “SHOCKING CONCLUSION TO MR. RIGHT.”

  I rolled my eyes. Everything had to be “shocking” for these magazines. Things couldn’t just happen; the editors had to create drama and scandal where there was really just the expected flow of reality TV dating. One person gets dumped, the other gets proposed to. It was only shocking for the woman who was expecting to be in the other’s shoes.

  Back in the terminal, my plane was boarding. I found my seat and was grateful, for once in my life, to have been assigned a seat next to an old man, who was already dozing.

  I was proud of myself for staying away from the Internet for the past week and a half, for not bothering to find out who had won. I knew I would have to face it the next day, but for now I was enjoying my little bubble of peace that I’d created by forcibly blocking everything else out.

  When I emerged from the baggage claim, a chauffeur was waiting to take me to the hotel. I’d always wanted to have someone waiting for me with a sign with my name on it — or in this case, the name Roland, which I’d been advised was my fake name for the day — but now I got no pleasure from it. I was too nervous about what was coming next.