Reality Gold

by Tiffany Brooks

  “How many numbers do we have to enter?” AJ demanded.

  Maddie leaned over to count. “Six.”

  “Talk to me, talk to me,” AJ muttered. I was glad he seemed to know what he was doing, because I had no idea. There were strings of every color and knots of every type. I understood why the Sol team hadn’t solved it yet.

  Suddenly the concern vanished from AJ’s face and his shoulders relaxed. “Got it,” he said. “Look at the pink strings. The first three have groupings of knots on the top, and then a few inches of space, and then another grouping of knots underneath. The fourth pink string is totally different. See this knot? It’s a reverse knot. I think we’re supposed to count the top three numbers, then reverse and use the bottom knots.”

  I still had no idea what he was talking about, but neither did anyone else.

  “What are you waiting for, a medal?” Maren asked. “Just count!”

  “Okay, okay. Here we go,” he said. “Try five five two.”

  Sean punched them in.

  “Now six four one.”

  The keypad made a long, loud beep. For a second nothing happened, but then the top of the chest creaked open as if an internal latch had been released.

  AJ reached in and pulled out a gold cup, carved with symbols.

  Joaquin announced our victory. “Congratulations to Team Huaca for winning the first challenge.”

  Annika started screaming. Rachel and Maddie grabbed each other’s shoulders and jumped up and down. Oscar and AJ bumped chests, a move that sent both of them sprawling to the ground. The rest of us stood around, exhausted but grinning.

  I’d done it: I’d survived the first challenge! I might be able to do this thing after all.

  9

  “Play it up, guys,” Deb advised us. “Whatever you’re feeling, come on, let it out!”

  She was walking around, needling the losers and jacking up the winners. AJ, in particular, didn’t seem to need help in that department.

  “Suck it, Sol!” He hadn’t stopped jeering since we’d won.

  But me, let it out? No way. Instead, I went camo, high-­fiving my teammates. Deb waited for the reactions to peter out before announcing it was time to finish the confessionals.

  “I’ll take Huaca to one of the booths. Riley, come with me. Phil, how about you take Sol?”

  “Oh, yeah! Let the humiliation dissection begin,” AJ yelled.

  “Don’t get too cocky. You’ll be doing it soon enough,” Rohan called back. The Sol players were definitely sulking.

  “I don’t think so, homey.” AJ began to parade back and forth on the sand in some kind of idiotic duckwalk.

  I followed Deb down the beach. Phil and another camera crew took Alex in the opposite direction.

  We ended up down on the beach in a small, fully designed set, totally manufactured to look like a natural beach scene. Deb directed me to a sideways-lying palm tree, lined up parallel to the waterline so that the ocean was directly behind me. Deb sat on a stump straight across. Once again I was surprised by how many people it took to create the effortless scenes that showed up on-screen. You’d never know it was me, a producer, a camera guy, and a bunch of ginormous lights.

  Deb waved at the lights. “You’d be surprised how many shadows there are when we don’t light everything. Seems strange when we’re on a sunny beach, I know, but that’s television for you. In a couple more hours when those clouds pull in we’ll have to light it up even more.”

  She was holding two bottles of water that she’d pulled from somewhere. One was for me.

  “Cheers,” she said, tapping the heel of her own bottle to mine. I drank half and poured the rest on my neck.

  “It got hot out there, didn’t it? You can take a minute if you want. We’re just going to sit here for a little while, chatting about things. It’s casual. We’ll talk about how you are feeling, your impression of the other players so far, that sort of thing.”

  “So both of us will be filmed? Are you going to be in the show, too?”

  “No. Harry’s going to film both of us talking—that’s Harry, behind the camera—but when I do the final edits back in LA I’ll only be using pieces of your answers. It’ll end up looking totally natural, as if you’re sharing your thoughts with the audience. You’ve seen it done tons of times on other reality shows without even realizing this is how it’s filmed. So how are you doing? Nice win today. You guys really came from behind.”

  “I know, I really thought we were going to lose.”

  “Anyone a weak link out there?”

  I shook my head. Annika, maybe, but I wasn’t going to sell her or anyone else out. Not on camera, anyway.

  “What’s it like to be back here, on the island?”

  “Pretty strange, actually. The base camp looks totally different.” I paused. “No one is going to hear our conversation, right? I don’t want any of the other players to know I’ve been here before, especially not now. Some of them will be all over me if they think I have any idea where to find the gold.”

  “It could be a nice change for you, though, having a ton of instant friends.”

  “They’d be fake friends. Those are worse than no friends, trust me.”

  “Ah, yes. I forgot you know a thing or two about the dangers of false friendships.”

  Deb knew my backstory, which probably meant the entire crew did, too. I wasn’t worried about them having that information, but I was concerned they’d share it with my competitors. This was the first time I’d entered a new situation untagged by the scandal, and I wanted the chance to let these new relationships unfold on my own terms, slowly, without any of that baggage tainting the process.

  “Well, I’ll put your mind at ease, then. No one here will know what we talk about in these confessionals until the show airs, and by then—”

  “Everyone will know who I am,” I finished.

  Deb lifted her shoulders in agreement. “Yup. Nothing I can do about that. Do you think anyone has recognized you?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” If someone had tied me to my online fame, so far they were keeping it to themselves.

  “Great,” Deb said. “This’ll be a good practice round for when you start your new school in September. Get your feet wet socializing with kids your own age again. Homeschooling couldn’t have been that much fun.”

  “The problem with being homeschooled wasn’t the school part, it was the home part,” I said wryly.

  Deb nodded knowingly. “Things still rough with your parents?”

  I paused, flustered. “I’m sorry, can we turn that camera off for a minute? I don’t understand why we need to talk about all of this personal stuff. My parents and school issues don’t have anything to do with the show. Is it really necessary to get into all of that?”

  It didn’t seem as if Deb even considered asking Harry to put his camera down, which was annoying but not completely unexpected. Deb was a little like Joaquin in that way—charismatic, but also a little pushy.

  “What we’re doing here is collecting information to give the audience a little color,” Deb explained. “Who you are, what brought you here, where you hope to go from here, that sort of thing. We’ll end up using only a fraction of what we film, so we try to cover a range of topics so we’ll have plenty of material to work with during the edits.”

  I must have looked skeptical, because she motioned for Harry to lower his camera.

  “Listen,” Deb said. “You’re here because you want the audience to connect with you, and these interviews are how that’ll happen. When an audience watches someone on TV, they only root for the people they feel like they know. Really, really know—their struggles and their joys, everything. And I know you don’t think so, but your problems are actually very similar to what everyone struggles with. It’s just that your issues are writ large and have unfolded in a very p
ublic way. We’re all looking for the same thing, though. Every single one of us. Love, acceptance, connection. We want to feel like we matter. So that’s why I need all this background, to give the audience enough of you so they can relate. Understand? It’s to your advantage, trust me.”

  Trust. There was that word again. I didn’t fully trust her, but I saw her point.

  Deb signaled Harry again and he picked his camera back up. I’d been so transfixed that I’d missed my chance to see his face in full; usually it was nearly covered by that giant lens.

  I took a sip of water. “That was quite a speech. Do you give that to everyone?”

  “Only the ones who don’t like sharing.”

  “Okay, okay.” I put my water bottle down and got ready to talk. “Message received, and to answer your question, yes, things are still rough with my parents. My father, especially.”

  “You went behind his back to join the cast, isn’t that correct?” Deb encouraged.

  I nodded. “After you came to him for funding for the show, I decided I wanted to try out. My parents thought it was a bad idea, but I went for it anyway, and since I was eighteen . . .” I shrugged. “I’m a legal adult. In the end it was my decision to make.”

  “What was their reasoning? Why didn’t they want you to do the show?”

  This was hard to talk about. Their opposition had taken me by surprise. I thought they’d be pleased I was taking initiative with something for once.

  “Television? A reality show?” My mother had actually cried when I’d told her I was going to do it.

  “You’ve been hiding in your room for months because you said the whole world knows who you are. Now you want to reopen the wound by putting yourself out in front of an audience again. Why would you want to do that?” she asked, over and over, desperate to change my mind. To be fair, she was probably tired of driving me around the city to all my various therapy appointments and didn’t want to deal with my mental health deteriorating even further if the show sent me off the rails again.

  My mother always came back to the same point. “You’re inviting people to judge you,” she’d insisted. “All this notoriety ruined your life, and now you’re inviting it right back in.”

  Yes, I was. Inviting people to judge me was actually the entire point of doing this show. Doing this show was me saying, You want to take a piece of me, world? Here you go. But this time, you can only have what I give you.

  My father’s objection was more straightforward. “This isn’t going to be a solution to your problem, Riley,” he’d said. “This is simply more of the same behavior that got you into trouble. You’re not willing to do the hard, everyday work to get back on your feet. Instead, you’re doing what you always do—embracing a grand gesture and looking for a clean sweep to fix everything at once. You’re essentially doubling down, and if history is any guide, you’re about to make things much worse for yourself.”

  After that he stopped interfering. That was his word: interfere. But I saw it for what it was because I’d seen him do the same thing to Miles. He’d stopped caring.

  I shared most of those details with Deb—and with the world, via the camera—but it wasn’t something I was happy about. Thinking too much about the strain on my relationship with my father was a little like staring straight into the sun—painful, and too intense to handle head-on for long.

  Deb had been nodding encouragingly while I spoke. “That’s great,” she said. “Really good stuff. Exactly what I need.”

  I liked the sound of that, but I hoped what she needed aligned with what I needed. Deb looked up sharply. Oh, no. Had I said that out loud?

  “Riley, this is a television show,” Deb said. A fair amount of her earlier friendliness had disappeared; she turned a little frosty. “It requires a certain amount of tension. That there will be hurdles to overcome should be implied. How each of you handles those hurdles—or tricks, as you call them—is part of what provides that tension.”

  “What does that mean? You’re manipulating us?”

  Deb cocked her head. “Manipulate sounds so . . . nefarious. Maneuver is slightly more accurate, but even describing it that way puts a negative spin on it. Look at it like this: you’re here to tell your story and I’m here to help you do that. You had to know that your particular history made you an attractive cast member. You’ve got something to prove. That’s not a bad thing—it’s exactly what drew me to you, but don’t paint yourself out to be so innocent here. You’re here to show the world your good side. That means you’re getting something out of this experience, too. Remember that.”

  Was that a threat? I didn’t get to ask, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  “Harry, that’s a wrap.” Deb picked up her clipboard and made a note on the top sheet with her red pen, effectively ending the confessional.

  10

  When all the confessionals were finished, we went right to what Joaquin called the Apu Council.

  There were lots of torches and an altar, some logs arranged as seats around a fire pit. There were a few large stone statues at the entrance, which AJ instantly bemoaned as more Aztec than Incan.

  “There are literally thousands of books written about the Inca. Would it have killed them to consult one or two? I can’t tell whether they willfully ignored the distinction, or just preferred the flash of the Aztecs.”

  In general, that seemed to be a consistent theme. The show had gotten some things right, but then was oddly indifferent toward others. Like personal safety. I didn’t want to be babysat, but thus far the crew had launched half of us out a helicopter and hadn’t so much as lowered a camera when the Sol boys launched their water attack. And for all the talk of hunting for treasure, I hadn’t heard a single word yet about the six people who had died doing exactly that. Accidents, some of them—a wrong turn in a cave here, a fall down a cliff there—but that was the point. The terrain here wasn’t exactly a turf playground.

  Deb wanted us to file into the Council very seriously, and when some of us—Cody and Murch—didn’t display the appropriate level of gravity she had us go out and do it again. And again.

  We were waiting to do our fourth entrance when Phil’s walkie suddenly exploded with static, sending out a high-pitched whine beneath all the noise. I jumped. It sounded like a scream, and with the jungle so dark it was eerie.

  “Damn these walkies,” he swore. “They keep malfunctioning, and the weather hasn’t even gotten bad yet.”

  I knew for a fact that Deb had raised a ton of money for this show, so why were so many things breaking and not working?

  He left, presumably to get his instructions in person. I noticed Porter and Willa were nearby, looking at me and nudging each other playfully. God. Porter was a jerk, but that didn’t mean I loved how into Willa he was.

  Suddenly she pushed Porter toward me. “Go on, tell her you’re sorry.”

  “Okay, okay! Jeez.” Porter came over and stood in front of me, much like he’d done this morning. I took a step back.

  “You aren’t going to carry me into the Council are you? Because I can walk, thank you very much.”

  He shook his head. He almost looked sheepish, but that was probably because he knew Willa was watching. Actually, so were the other girls on his team.

  “The girls told me I should apologize. That I probably caused an unforgivable injury to your hair, or something like that, and it wasn’t cool. Anyway, I’m sorry I threw you in. I thought it would be funny.”

  “The hair wasn’t a big deal,” I told him. I remembered Taylor on the helicopter, begging for a hair tie. Did every girl on Sol obsess about her hair? “The throwing in, though, that’s another story. But it’s nice of you to apologize to the enemy.”

  And it was nice, but it would have been better if he’d apologized on his own. Was he a puppet, or what? If anything, it made me think worse of him and slightly better of Willa for
pulling his string, even if it did smack of a power play at my expense. I knew it was wishful thinking, but I wanted to believe he allowed himself to be pushed in my direction because he felt something for me.

  Phil came back and held up his walkie. “All good now. Get in two lines, and remember: be serious. No joking. No smiles.”

  We must have done it right because Deb didn’t call for a redo. We sat on the logs divided by team. Everyone on the Sol side, even Willa and Porter, was silent. I scanned them, wondering who would get voted out. I hadn’t heard anyone complaining that a specific person had messed up, the way Annika had on our team. A mess-up like that would have to make that person an obvious target, unless it was Willa. There was no way the guys on that team were going to vote Willa out. I didn’t think any of the girls would, either. Of course, speculating was beside the point. She’d found the Sol medallion, so she was safe no matter what.

  Joaquin greeted us. He had a wide smile that connected all the parts of his face—it showed his perfect white teeth, crinkled up the corners of his eyes, lifted his forehead, and deepened the dimples in his cheeks. “Our first Apu Council. Big night, isn’t it?”

  Lots of murmured assents.

  Joaquin flashed that smile again. “You may have noticed that we have a fire pit here similar to the one at camp. Fire was sacred to the Incan people, because of its ability to hold the light, like the sun, like gold. You may have also seen some pyramid symbols. They were carved on the gold cup you won today, Huaca. That’s because the Inca power system was in the shape of a pyramid. A leader on top, a king, and underneath him, a high priest.”

  He paused. Behind him, a burst of heat lightning lit up the stage. Joaquin kept cool, which must be why they paid him the big bucks, but all the players jumped.

  “Since no Huaca player found the medallion, we’d like to invite the Huaca players as a team to choose a High Priest for the night. Someone who led you through the challenge today.”

  “Right now?” Maren asked.