After that blindside breakup in which you are left for a woman named Geanie Mallone—a woman who happens to share your exact name—you are sipping another poorly made appletini from your own kitchen and scrolling the Internet for air fryers. All the late-night shopping channels and social-media promoted ads have you thinking about the possibility of crispy croutons and Brussels sprouts, healthy but luxurious meals for one. You find a fryer with a discounted price and candy-coated color to match your pseudo 1950s-style kitchen and place it in the cart, but before you can enter the credit card number or catch the dribble of liquid sliding down the side of your glass into the space between your forefinger and thumb, a sponsored ad pops up on the screen. The text reads “So You Think You Can Live?” over an array of swaying palms trees and weather-beaten rocks with crabs scuttling over them—sand for what you can tell is miles. “Apply to be a cast member and find out,” the text flashes. A new TV streaming service will be debuting a gameshow competition, reminiscent of another show you used to watch with your ex-boyfriend (fuck him) on Wednesday nights. The two of you cuddled on your hand-me-down sofa with a bowl of popcorn finely dusted with cheese powder from a gourmet grocery store and watched the contestants swim, jump, run, starve, lie, search, steal and talk their way into a million dollars out in the jungle. “I could do this,” you’d heard yourself say through a mouthful so many times. “Yeah, okay, Geanie,” he’d say and wiggle his too-sculpted eyebrows at you. Why were they so sculpted? You’d wondered about that your entire relationship, but were much too nervous to say it aloud because you never knew what the answer might be. That’s one thing you won’t have to look at anymore, you think, and take a sip.
The show wants the normal paperwork, name, address, waivers for personal injuries, etc. and a no-more than three-minute-long self-made audition tape. “Just tell us about you, that’s all we want.” You’ve forgotten all about hitting send on the application with the nearly finished appletini in-hand, until five months later when the show’s host and executive producer, Chip Palmer, calls your cracked cell phone to tell you that you have been selected as an alternate cast member for the show, while you are on coffee break at your work-from-home editorial job.
“We think you’re a great fit, Geanie,” Chip says with the overwhelming enthusiasm of a sports commentator on a night the home-team is winning. “We’ll let you know by the fifteenth of the month, but between you and me, I think you should prepare to go to an undisclosed location with a terrain similar to that of Fiji but can’t be Fiji for legal reasons.”
When the confirmation call comes in from the network and you’ve made all the pros and cons lists of taking your Paid Time Off to participate in what may be the opportunity of a lifetime, or really just an opportunity to prove your ex-boyfriend (ugh, yuck, don’t even say his name) wrong, you swiftly decide to take a chance.
***
You’re whisked into a black town car and onto a small, rickety plane that makes you want to barf, onto a cramped motorboat with three other people and a camera guy, and then—you’re there. The island, with sunshine glittering on turquoise water and hairy coconuts dangling from treetops, much like your ex-boyfriend’s (gross, stop) scrotum, rest before you. You’ve been equipped with a metal water bottle wrapped in a cloth carrier stylized to look as if it survived a shipwreck, a distressed canvas messenger bag, and you have been allowed these items only: a bathing suit; tampons (that must remain hidden in your bag at all times says your contract, because this is to be a family show); one warmer outfit of your choosing for the unforgiving pitch-black night; and one outfit for hotter weather. A singular hair tie. And the necklace the show has provided you with—a black cord with a tacky “seashell” that reminds you of an item you picked out at an aquarium giftshop on a school fieldtrip, that doubles as a microphone. Your only privacy will be when you announce to your fellow contestants and the camera people that you must go take a shit in the dug-out latrine kept somewhere behind some conveniently thick shrubbery. There are 14 contestants total, and you stare at them all as you wipe sweat from your brow.
“Your goal,” says Chip, with an off-putting smile, once the camera rolls, “is to be smarter, play harder, and live longer than all your fellow Risk Takers to win a half a million dollars.” Colored armbands in orange and yellow divide you into two teams of seven and someone from the crew yells cut while you and the other Risk Takers busy yourselves with introductions.
There’s Ben, a retired hedge fund manager that gives you the creeps. Ilka, a first-generation Hungarian immigrant and mom of two small children. Delancy, an aspiring stand-up comedian from New England. Xolani, a married butch lesbian from Chicago. Mindy and Mandy who you have already mixed up. Cooper, a surf instructor from California who lives out of a van with three rescue dogs. Daveed, the single chef. Min-Jun, the elementary school teacher who failed to mention his home state. Gray, a personal trainer in an LGBTQ-owned gym, who clocks your own bisexuality immediately and gives you “the nod” of recognition. Joe, who makes no impression on you whatsoever. And Geanie Mallone. A nail stylist from New Jersey. Who has your exact name, and is not you.
***
The first challenge plays just like it should, as seen on other TV shows. The obstacle course goes like this: after clawing your way out from a mud pit the size of the public pool in your town, you are expected run up a steep wooden incline until you can reach a dangling rope and pull yourself to the top of a ramp where there is a key is inside a water balloon the same shade as the appletini you were drinking when you made your fateful audition tape. Each player must pop the balloon with any body part except for their slippery, rope-burned hands before grabbing the key and climbing down a narrow ladder, where a puzzle of heavy blocks waits. The puzzle, once finished, is in the shape of the show’s emblem, a pirate-like skull-and-crossbones, a snake peeking out from the dead man’s eye.
The physical players emerge: Gray, Ilka and the surprise dark-horse player, elementary school teacher Min-Jun. The puzzle solvers define themselves: Daveed, the chef, Xolani, the married lesbian, and Mandy, whatever her occupational and personal identifiers may be. Leaving the rest of you somewhere in the middle of the pack—you’ll either become players who will get lost in the mix, voted off the island quickly, or players who emerge as the social schemers of the game.
Daveed wins the whole challenge along with the Safety Bracelet that means he cannot be voted out of the game; his orange arm-band teammates win rice, and the rest of you are left to scramble hungrily for dinner before the sun sets. The scramble reveals that you and Not-You Geanie are social players. Each able to make easy “friends” with everyone, except each other. You sweettalk Delancy while washing your muddy clothes off in the ocean and find that your movie taste is in alignment with California Cooper as you both hack at coconuts with machetes at camp.
Joe, who left no impression on you, seems to have left no impression on anyone, and is the first player to be voted out at a dramatic counsel that’s held on a stage made to look like the ruins of the shipwreck your water bottle survived, and is illuminated with a pit-fire that was started with a long-nosed lighter by a PA with a septum piercing.
***
The game goes on like this. It is ocean water, sand, hermit crabs, and people pretending not to see the cameras following them around. It’s obstacle courses that leave you with dirt under your nails and a long scratch along your cheek and the worst sunburn you’ve ever had on your upper thighs.
At night you and Not-You Geanie catch each other looking at the other through campfire flames. You sleep at opposite ends of the bamboo shelter. You watch her bikini-ed body, so average, just like yours, and freely let yourself wonder what the hell it was about her that was so much more interesting than you.
It might not be her, after all. The Geanie. There could be, and probably are, other Geanie Mallones in the world. You wouldn’t know, as you blocked him on all social media platforms immediately following the breakup, and never once, even on your loneliest night, looked for her online. Except for that one time you unblocked him for less than five minutes only to find an infuriatingly untagged image of their shadows standing side-by-side on a boardwalk—it was a vow you made to yourself and were proud to have (mostly) upheld, even if it killed you. However, the woman here on the island is also avoiding you, and that makes you believe it must be her, the imposter who came in and removed (don’t say his stupid name) from your life.
You don’t know this, but the game hasn’t really started yet. It is about to though, as you rest your head to sleep on your balled-up sweatshirt, with the stars swirling above you in the night sky.
***
“Does anyone else hear that?” Min-Jun says into the dark; only embers are left in the fire and you have been half asleep for some time.
“Probably the damn bats,” answers a voice in the dark that might be Mindy or Mandy.
“No, it sounded like a scream,” Min-Jun says.
“Is everyone here?” asks Gray.
“Let’s do a roll call,” Min-Jun says.
Creepy hedge-fund Ben is not at camp.
“Shitting, I’m sure,” says Ilka in her thick accent.
“Have you seen him?” Not-You Geanie asks the camera guy who is crouched low in the sand to better capture her face through night vision.
“I’m not at liberty to say,” says the camera guy. “If you speak to us, we have to edit it out later.”
The wind is rustling the palm trees and you’re too tired and hungry to fight the sleep pulling at your eyes. You find that you don’t really care that Ben isn’t at camp. Afterall, it’s an island owned by the streaming network. How far could he have gone? You drift back into an uncomfortable sleep, dreaming of mosquitos biting at your neck, before the mystery can be solved.
***
At the next challenge, one in which you are all meant to dive into a roped off section of the ocean and retrieve “hidden treasure” in a chest locked to a heavy chain at the bottom of the seafloor, Ben is conspicuously still nowhere to be found.
“It’s all part of the game,” Chip says off camera, his pink tongue licking the edges of chapped lips. “Not to worry.”
Despite yourself, you catch the eye of Not-You Geanie, who despite herself, raises a conspiratorial eyebrow in your direction. Her eyebrows are a little bushy, like caterpillars crawling across her forehead. The acrylics on her fingertips remain surprisingly in-tact. She does not have a thigh gap, and neither do you. Did (fuck that guy) even notice this?
Xolani wins the Safety Bracelet and her team, which you are on, wins a pile of grilled cheese and ham sandwiches with a pitcher of iced-tea, which you all devour in silence and in embarrassing manners, hunched over like a pack of wild animals who have survived the desperation of winter. Cheese stuck to your upper lip, and seaweed threaded in your hair, you feel happy, sated, sun-drunk—and quickly become suspicious of the feeling. That’s how it has always been for you. Happiness has always made you suspicious, has always made you wait for the other shoe to drop. But you push that feeling away and reach for a second sandwich, unsure when you will next have the opportunity to eat processed lunch meat.
Mandy, who you now can really identify as Mandy, is voted off the island and you’ve become that much closer to the half million. As you squat in solitude at the latrine, just as the sun lowers gracefully beneath the horizon, you can’t help but think, “I told you I could fucking do this.”
***
Then Min-Jun is missing. It’s the afternoon and there is no challenge today—it is an “off day,” one in which you are encouraged to connect with the other players, make beaded fobs to adorn your water bottles, search for Secret Safety Tokens among the rocks and brush; a day for the camera crew to catch you all doing more than just sweating or hyping yourselves up for the obstacle course. A day for close-ups on rice-making and palm fronds being weaved into fans to better morale. His absence isn’t noted as something concerning right away, and then it is. Because you all realize Min-Jun is smart and crafty, and there is a good chance he has gone far into the jungle to hunt out the Secret Safety Tokens. If he has one in his back pocket, he cannot be voted off the island, and in that way becomes another obstacle to overcome in order to reach the money.
But then the afternoon gives way, and all the close-up shots have been taken, the rice eaten, and the pomegranates all collected, and people have come to and from the water well and the latrine. It becomes clear that Min-Jun’s ocean-logged sneakers have been left at camp along with his drinking bottle and the sweater he often wears to sleep.
“Maybe this is part of the game, too?” asks Gray.
“He must be with Ben,” says Ilka.
“I think we should look for him,” says Xolani.
And you all agree, though nobody says aloud that darkness is coming soon and the bats will be waking up, that the only light you will have if you go into the deep greenery, is that from the unfortunate camera guy assigned to follow you in.
“Min-Jun!” you call.
“Min-Jun!” calls Not-You Geanie simultaneously. Her voice has a nasal tone to it, kind of like the sound Shakira makes when she sings. Her New Jersey accent is thick. The people from outside the East Coast would say your New York accent is similar, but nobody from home would venture to say it is the same thing—that would be sacrilege. Did (that fool of a man) from prefer her accent over yours? The harsher consonants and the rounder vowels? Did she whisper “let’s fuck” more appealingly at night?
“Guys, come look at this?” says Xolani with a question in her voice.
Under a knobbed tree with a conspicuously low, long branch, is a pile of recently dug-up dirt. Not far from the pile is a long shred of near-translucent, flaky snakeskin. You have all been warned there are snakes in the jungle. The network told you, the island is a real island, and the wildlife, unless to be killed and eaten as a source of protein in times of extreme hardship, is to be left alone. You have not yet had an encounter with one of the jungle snakes, though you have watched them slither across people’s belongings on similar shows.
While the group gathers around the skin for a closer look, something catches your eye. A glint of the lowering sun, or a lens flare, has reflected off something on the tree branch closest to you. As quickly as you can, you reach up and grab it, knowing full well that you have found one of the Secret Safety Tokens. You shove it down your pants, just as Not-You Geanie lets out a short, nasal screech. A bloody fingernail is mixed in with the loose dirt.
***
At the next challenge in which Chip continually reminds you all that now is when things will start to get hard, and screams no less than seven times that you must search within (!) to find the strength to keep going, and you swear his teeth look a little whiter or longer or something, you and Not-You Geanie are handcuffed to each other. With your collective three hands, you must tie short sticks together to form a long stick, which then must be stuck through a narrow hole to knock down a series of small hoops on a hook. Upon being handcuffed together, Not-You Geanie says straight into the camera, “Two Geanies are better than one!” and for a moment you almost believe it. As the other Risk Takers are handcuffed and the camera guys sip iced coffees that make you salivate, Not-You Geanie says, “Hey girl, I know we haven’t exactly become friends out here, but maybe we can work together today.”
“Yeah, I mean, winners get chicken wings, so,” you hear yourself say and you hate the childish, petulant tone in your voice.
“Yeah, gotta love chicken wings,” she says.
“Yeah,” you say and have the wild urge to cluck like a chicken. You would like to think this is from the heat of the day and the near 16 pounds you’ve shed, but the truth is this has always been your sense of humor. And the truth is that your (dumb) ex once told you weren’t funny, just weird, and you should try to reign it in, so you have felt ashamed of your urge to do things that make you laugh in awkward situations ever since.
The two of you, as a three-armed, two-stomached beast, win. The chicken wings are brought out on rustic wooden platters and for a moment you picture yourself sitting at your diner-style table in your little kitchen with the pink KitKat clock with the swinging tail tick-toking behind you as you munch on wings made in your air fryer. You realize you’re feeling homesick for the first time since arriving on the island, just as Not-You Geanie says through a mouthful of meat, “I could cry, these are so good.” She smiles and you can see a dab of sauce at the corner of her mouth, a shred of the chicken caught between her front teeth. Despite yourself you feel an undeniable thawing in her direction. Her smile is beautiful, uneven, natural—and then there is no denying that this must be the reason he noticed her. Because even you are noticing her. She would be impossible not to notice.
You watch as a camera guy catches her smile, because even though she smells like body odor and piss and her spine is starting to poke through the skin on her back, he has noticed her. And you just know, once this airs, America will too. You wipe your dirty hands across the denim of your cut-off shorts and feel for the Secret Safety Token now tucked in your pocket. If you were in the audience and you had to choose between you and her, you would pick her, too.
You leave the scene, gathering some wings in your hand, and sit under the shade of the woven palm fronds with Xolani and Daveed who lap at coconuts for milk. Min-Jun and Ben have still not reappeared and you wonder if either of them enjoy chicken wings, if they can smell the wafting scent of spicy sauce from wherever they are.
***
Three nighttime voting counsels go by after three challenges that take you through heavy netting, under the waves, and over balance beams: Delancy and Mindy are voted out of the game. One becoming too much of a physical threat in challenges and the other, an easier vote, that simply kept the rest of you alive. Daveed is tricked into giving away the Safety Bracelet he previously won, and then the torch representing his time on the island is also snuffed. Enough people are no longer active in the game that it comes time for a turning point, a mid-season finale—the merging of the Orange and Yellow teams. You are each given Red armbands to replace your old sweat- and salt-stained team bands, and now, it is a dog-eat-dog world, as you are all playing for individual prizes and immunity.
***
On a day when it pours and you are each drenched down to the mauve insides of your organs, you are all sat down for a round of confessionals. You are separated from each other and guided into flattering positions that hide the pubes snaking out from under your bikini bottoms or the persistent tummy roll that remains despite the weight loss, under trees, in the shelter, with semi-cave walls above your heads. Producers and crew wrapped in rain slickers, pulling protein bars from their pockets ask:
“How are you feeling about being here right now?”
“What’s morale like on the island?”
“How hungry are you?”
“How cold are you?”
“Have your lips ever turned this blue before?”
“Can you tell us about a challenging time in your life and then compare that time to your time here on the island while it is raining?”
“What is your game plan moving forward?”
“Who would you vote off the island, right now, if you had the opportunity?”
“What will you do with the money if you win?”
“How did it feel to find the Secret Safety Token?”
“Think about your favorite kind of coffee. Can you describe the flavor, the temperature, the location of where it was made, and the type of vessel you prefer to drink it in, and then talk about how much you miss it?”
“Who is the biggest threat in the game?”
“Where do you think Ben is?”
“What do you think happened to Min-Jun?”
“Why do you think you were selected to be a Risk Taker on this show?”
***
In the middle of a challenge, an obstacle course in which all the other Risk Takers need to dig out of individual sand pits, only to crawl deep within a large barrel of gloopy fish innards to find a 3-inch by 4-inch lockbox and its matching skull key, that you begin to think longingly about a vacation. A real one at some resort with pools so chlorinated you can smell it on your skin for hours after you’ve taken a short dip, your clean hair kept safe in a barrette shaped like a toucan, and a coral-pink drink in your manicured hand.
You’ve been told that within everyone’s box is a sentimental reminder of something from their personal lives, or the game’s special “Do or Die” card—an added challenge, that if found might provide a great advantage and move the Risk Taker one step closer to the half million, or it might not. You are all meant to want what is in the box, and so, while you daydream of vacation, you search through the stinking chum. With every squelch you’re wondering if it is a small device with your mother’s voice recorded on it. Or a letter from your dad. A friendship bracelet tied and tied and tied again from your sister who constantly crafts in her anxious free time.
But when your hand lands on the box and you have slopped fish innards all down your front in your haste to open it, what you find is the framed picture you used to keep on your bedside table with (don’t say his stupid fucking name). The picture is of the two of you on your college campus after a late night at a party; it is a little blurry and you both look sweaty, but you both have your arms around each other in possessive manners. It was one of those rare moments of pure and un-faked happiness caught on someone else’s cell phone camera, so you printed it out at the local Staples and placed in it a small square frame with little doggie paw prints around the sides because at the time you both thought that was dumb and great. The picture you hold in your fishy hands is still in its doggie-paw frame, and before you can put any real thought into how the producers must have known this about you, or procured your very own object from the depths of your closest with the storage bin full of stuff that makes you sad, California Cooper has pulled the “Do or Die” card from his box.
Alarm bells sound and camera men back up behind each of their assigned Risk Takers. Chip claps his hands, says “Alright!” and nods his head, like a good song was selected by someone who put a dime into a jukebox in a seedy dive bar. And you stare, and clutch your doggie-paw frame, as a gigantic, impossibly long, extraordinarily thick jungle snake, or something a la Tim Burton’s sandworms, rears its head from the dense island forestry. Out it comes, like the first penis you were exposed to on a city bus, slowly and intentionally. The creature’s fangs hang over its bright lower lip. A sickly green tongue caresses the length of a fang, before the beast leans its neck down to gently swallow California Cooper whole.
And then, far too late, you realize that unlike the similar competition shows you used to watch on Wednesday nights with Brody, when the game you are participating in now says “Do or Die” they really mean die.
The creature comically burps and recedes while and Chip, hands on his hips, grin wide, lets out a barking laugh and says in his best TV-announcer voice, “Goooodbye Cooper.”
And then, far too late again, you realize you have been shocked into betraying yourself, because you have just said Brody’s name, if only in your mind, for the first time since he left you.
***
Here’s who is left: Immigrant Mom Ilka. Non-binary gym-rat Gray. U-Hauled Xolani. You and Not-You Geanie. Sorta diverse. Sorta feminist. A couple of underdogs. A Top Five liberals across the country would have liked to have seen on the similar shows more often. A Top Five that conservatives might now especially like to see on this show given its revealed violence.
You and the other Risk Takers huddle around a fire, lean in close like kids at summer camp listening to a well-told ghost story. Ilka’s eyes, wide with fear, dart from side to side. Gray leaves the huddle twice to throw up into the ocean. Xolani keeps the fire stoked and has cried without pause since you were all returned to your bamboo shelter via the same kinds of cramped motorboats that first brought you here. Not-You Geanie has reached out her hands; you and Ilka have taken them in your own.
While the camera crew changes shifts, and you are left utterly, thankfully, peacefully without someone watching the group for a just a few moments, Gray asks “What was in your boxes?”
Ilka says, “my stillborn son’s ultrasound image.”
Gray says, “the letter from my mother explaining why she no longer wanted me to live in the house.”
Xolani says, “beads I cut from my sister’s braids after we had a bad fight when we were kids.”
Not-You Geanie says, “my engagement ring.”
You ask, “How did they know to find these things?”
“What did we say in our audition tapes?” asks Not-You Geanie.
“If I live through the next challenge,” says Ilka, “please vote me out. I want to see my children again.”
“We should use a buddy system,” Gray says. “No one should venture into the jungle alone anymore.”
“Do the Safety Bracelets and Secret Safety Tokens still mean anything?” asks Xolani.
“Did anyone find one of the Safety Tokens?” asks Not-You Geanie.
“I can take first watch if we want to sleep tonight,” you say instead of the truth. Because you would still like the half million; you would still like to prove you can do this. It frightens you how even though everything in the game has changed, nothing really has. You are still you. And you sent in that tape to escape home, to remind yourself of who you are without him, to prove to him that he made a mistake—and that you will be—you are—better for it.
***
When you have had enough of staring into the blackness of the churning ocean, when you have exhausted the images of gigantic somethings rising from the saltwater to pull you into their cavernous mouths, and the smell of the fire smoke is no longer something comforting, you wake Xolani, who is snoring beside you softly.
“I have to switch,” you say. She looks at you with eyes swollen from crying before she gives a nod of understanding. She takes a deep breath, sits up straight-backed, legs crossed pretzel-style, with a grim look on her face. Her left hand clutches the Safety Bracelet she won in the challenge some days back, thumbs the soft leather strap.
As you close your eyes, you think of the time at the playground that you had the swing set to yourself. You were too old for the playground, nearly eleven or twelve, and already asking your mother to buy extra pads at the pharmacy. But the beginning of summer was upon you and your sister had left for sleepaway camp, and your parents had gone to see some boring biopic at the movie theater in town, and the playground was just down the street, and you had been given a small gemstone of freedom. A novelty to you then, and sometimes still now, too. It was a brief, magical moment in time in which the sky was becoming the smoke of twilight and not a single person in the world knew where you were.
As you pumped your legs, still yet to ever meet a razor, you let your hands slide down the rusted chains of the swing, and lowered your back until the tips of your tangled hair touched the dirt below; your body curved into an archway stretching away from girlhood. You watched the leafy trees behind the playground from upside down as you swung back and forth, up and down. The world at a new vantage point that you liked much more than the one you were used to—something real but false, something appealing for reasons you couldn’t quite articulate.
When the sun rises, Not-You Geanie whispers into your ear, “The latrine. Now.” She’s had last watch of the night, and your other castmates are each still in various states of sleep or disarray.
***
“I think we need to form an alliance,” she says as you squat in the bushes.
“What do you have in mind?”
“Two Geanies are better than one, girl,” she says.
“I want to live through this.”
“Yeah, duh, me too. I just got engaged and I want to plan my wedding.”
“I just bought an air fryer and I have only used it a couple of times. I want to make crispy Brussels Sprouts and healthier chicken fingers and pomegranate-glazed salmon.”
“Right,” she says and looks at you like she might regret the whole conversation. “So, you and me, we need to stick together.”
“Ilka has kids,” you remind her.
“To hell with that, mothers aren’t better women than non-moms. I want to live,” she extends her filthy hand out for you to shake. “You with me?”
“I am,” you want to say, but instead you blurt out, “What’s your fiancé’s name?”
“Brody,” Not-You Geanie says.
“How did you meet him?”
“The Internet, duh.”
“Who asked who out first?”
“Are you with me, or not, girl?”
“Does he love you?”
“I think I hear someone coming,” she says and extends her hand out further, her index finger nearly poking your thinning midriff. You take her hand in yours but you know deep down, this alliance is only in motion until you can figure out something better. Until you can show Brody, and everyone else watching, you can do this—and you can do it on your own.
***
In the next challenge, Chip uses his announcer’s voice just like any other scene and acts as if what happened with the jungle snake is normal and to be expected. He explains that the task this time is simple: a race. Whoever makes it back to the beach after following a marked, winding path, seven miles through the greenery, wins a reward of peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches on Wonder bread with pitchers of ice-cold alternative milk. “Run fast, and make good choices folks,” says Chip with a hungry grin before he pulls down a flag that signals you all to start running.
Around mile three, your heart thudding to burst against your rib cage, your legs aching, an ankle twisted and sweat falling unpleasantly from the tip of your nose into your open mouth, a three-pronged fork in the path presents itself. You pretend to jog in place for a moment, looking at the paths, each keeping their true nature hidden like the poisoned apples of fairytales. Lush green leaves hang over them in abundance while dirt mingles with tall grass at the base of each. The camera man assigned to follow you takes a moment to breath as you vacillate, his camera down at his feet, his hands on his hips. Xolani, far, far ahead of you, ran to the left; you can see her sneaker tracks at the entrance way of the path.
As you linger there, trying to be decisive, a personal challenge of yours that you have spent many a therapy session talking about, flashes of the jungle snake curl around thoughts of your jade-green couch in your living room and Brody’s forearms in the dark and a half a million dollars and the taste of crunchy peanut butter and the luxury of Chapstick and how you hated running around and around the track of your high school during gym class—Ilka runs straight past you. You feel the breeze of her body passing yours as you watch her pale, tall figure disappear into the center path without hesitation, a camera man following her fast pace as best he can with his cumbersome camera equipment balanced on his shoulder.
You’re leaning towards the right-side path and feeling like you might need to kneel down and vomit, when Not-You Geanie catches up; her panting and the jingling of keys hanging from the belt loop of her camera person are more welcome sounds than you had expected. She grabs your wrist and nods a breathless thank you, believing you had waited for her in an effort to stick together. You don’t correct her, and act as if the right-side path is the best path, something you have instinctively known all along, and lead her into the forest.
***
Around mile five, you’re both spent. Stumbling, side-stepping, tripping over your own feet and more dehydrated than you have ever felt in your lives. Her shoe catches in the mud and as she starts to go down, you reach for each other instinctually. You soften her blow and she drags you down with her.
“I have to just stop moving for a minute” you say through gulping breaths.
“I have always been bad at running,” she says equally as slowly.
“Do you love your fiancé?” you ask after a few moments of heavy breathing. The mud under your bottom is cooling and you’d like to sit there for the remainder of the challenge, jungle snake be damned.
“I think so,” she says.
“That’s good for you,” you say.
“What about you? Single? Relationship? Situationship?”
“Just out of a long relationship,” you say.
“Who broke up with who?” she asks.
“I was dumped for a girl also named Geanie. Can you imagine that?”
“No!” Not-You Geanie exclaims. “Well, three Geanies is one too many, that’s for damn sure. I bet when he sees you on TV, all fit and brave and competitive, he’ll feel really stupid for having left you for some other girl.”
You’re about to ask for reassurance, say, “You think so?” when you’re cut off by a long, high, horrible scream. You aren’t made aware of what’s happened, but the two the camera guys, who are also hoping that you just sit down for the remainder of the challenge so they can stop running, have been told through their ear pieces that Ilka was the unlucky Risk Taker to have run herself straight off the edge of the cliff at the end of the center path.
After the scream, you and Not-You help each other up, and hobble your way to the end of the forest path that opens up to the beach, now purpled with twilight. Xolani is already there, feasting on PB&J through tears. Gray is conspicuously gone; and when you ask the camera guy to your left where they are, he only shrugs. When the two of you Geanies have your own platters of sandwiches placed in front of you and you have each been served almond milk (not as cold as Chip made it sound), he says “Congratulations, you’ve made it to the Top Three.”
Someone from the crew shouts “cut”; the daytime crew switches out for the evening crew. Gray is never mentioned again, and you eat until the sky returns to black and the ocean roars once again.
***
The show gives the Top Three another “off day” for the last round of confessionals. It’s cruel and you know it, but you and Not-You Geanie near shun Xolani. You avoid looking into her eyes and “forget” to ask her if her water bottle needs refilling when you venture to the well. The alliance that Not-You Geanie is seemingly so sure of is playing out nicely. You can feel her really begin to trust you. And that’s all you’ll need in the end to win over her—one moment of trust or weakness. The problem is that you feel you have begun to trust her as well. And that in another lifetime, you might very well be friends.
***
The challenge that takes out Xolani and bumps you and Not-You Geanie into the Final Two positions goes like this: You each swim to a wooden platform buoyed in the ocean where heaps of meat are rotting in the sun. Once there, you reach into the sticky assemblage, as far as you can, to retrieve three whole human body parts hidden way into its squelching center. The body parts are those of the other Risk Takers, those who have been voted out of the game or are otherwise gone. Once you find all three of your hands or tongues or ears or toes or lungs, you must place them under one of the names carved into the platform. You guess you have parts of Daveed, Delancy, and Ilka—and you are right. Not-You Geanie procures pieces of Mindy, Mandy, and long-voted out Joe—and she is also right. The two of you share smiles over bloody workstations, each knowing you have made it that much further into the next part of the game. Together. And alone.
Xolani, the only Risk Taker left with any form of a moral compass, pulls herself from the meat pile, throws her Safety Bracelet into the water and sits down on her platform to cry ever harder. Her assigned camera man zooms in on her face while Chip gleefully asks her how it feels to be a failure. How it feels to be bested by someone else.
That night you and Not-You Geanie are seated at a table with a white-linen tablecloth, real silverware, and are served The Feast of The Final Risk Takers by white-glove-trained waitstaff. The producers have not allowed you to bathe after the challenge and you can smell an undertone of the offal congealing on your warm-weather outfit, but it’s no matter. You shove arugula tossed with goat cheese and sliced apricots; scallops seared in butter and garlic; chicken breasts drowned in capers and cream; crab-stuffed lobster tails; Wagyu with a balsamic glaze and mushrooms heads; and tagliatelle in rich rabbit Bolognese into your gullet with your hands, realizing silverware is for slow-pokes. You drink French red wine, champagne. and clean, cool water from artful glasses; your filthy hands leaving smears of blood and three-star Michelin food in the crystalline grooves. For dessert you lick clean the plate that held a slice of a seven-layer fudge cake, stick your fingers into the soft centers of baked pears atop mascarpone; and reach into decorative bowls to pull out fistfuls of pastel-colored chocolate candy that remind you of your 1950s-style kitchen.
Both of you Geanies eat until bursting, until you can see bloated roundness form around your middles. Until you feel ill, until one of you projectile vomits on the sneakers of the camera guy closest to you; chunks of undigested lobster tail sliding down the New Balance tongue. You and Not-You watch each other in silence, sizing the other one up, taking the final opportunity to note your differences and similarities before the last challenge that will start at dawn. You see a chicken-pox scar over her eyelid; she sees the gap between one of your lateral incisors and its neighboring canine. You see the beginning of a mustache start to sprout over her normally sugared-smooth upper lip and wonder if she gets it done for free at the salon where she works, by some girl named Tracey, or if Not-You Geanie knows that Tracey is a bitch with bad breath so she goes somewhere else to become the hairless girl Brody wants to put his mouth on at night. She sees the thickness of your ankles, something your own grandmother pointed out once when you were young and wearing a sundress you loved but never wore again after that.
“You’re very beautiful, you know,” you say to her.
“You really are, too, Geanie,” she says back and reaches for your hand. You place your disgusting palm in hers and squeeze.
You do these things because you are women, and because you are alive, and because you are here together, and because this is just what the show wants you to do.
***
The last challenge takes place as the sun rises over the island and asks you to perform the most basic survival skill: make fire. You’re provided with flint, a fibrous husk that you should know the name of by now, kindling and a knife with a wide, faux-chewed-up handle to match the show’s aesthetic.
Two large pyres are set up, each with a rope connected to it. You’re to build your fire up so that it is tall enough to burn through the rope, raise a flag, and set your pyre aflame. Though the pyre feels like overkill, this is, after all, to be show’s finale episode, and it needs something big. Something flashy.
You have managed to keep your Secret Safety Token throughout the game and so you are allowed to trade it now, at the final hour, for an Advantage. You are given a single match, which you are only allowed to light after two minutes of attempting to build the fire with the materials presented to you. When Chip hands you the match, you look straight to into the eyes of the woman you have thought about incessantly for far longer than you have been on this island, and you spy jealousy there. The nakedness of her emotion, a turn-on.
While you concentrate on building your flame and sweat is crawling down your neck and embers blow in many directions like puffed-up dandelion seeds and it smells like: campfires you made on Girl Scout field trips, a beach bonfire on a vacation with your cooler college-aged cousin who gave you beer when you were only 16 years old, and admittedly, a little like the time you burnt parchment paper in your air fryer the first time you used it—Not-You Geanie’s flame grows taller than yours. It ever so gently licks her thin rope the way Brody used to lick your earlobe, and her rope catches deep yellow.
She blows on it carefully to stoke the flames and the vibrant color of danger spreads along the thread like a moment of embarrassment remembered just before bed, quickly and unstoppable. The flames reach toward the end of her rope. She begins to think things like “This is over” and “I’ve won!” Her flag is about to lift into the air, when Chip yells, his wristwatch pointed directly into one of the cameras on a tripod: “That’s two minutes! You can now use your Advantage!”
In a perfect circle around the fire-making station, multi-color sparks shoot up, like those at a pop concert when the diva hits a high note or at an underground dog-fighting ring with glitchy pyrotechnics by somebody’s sketchy uncle. Not-You Geanie screams, and whether it is because you both realize this show wants you both to build the fire to kill, or because she understands she has become the underdog of the situation, you’re unsure.
“He told me all about you, you know,” she screams above the fire-cracker din, an animal cornered up against the pyre.
“What did you just say?”
“Brody. He told me all the ways in which we are different.”
“You know who I am?”
“I looked you up on social media as soon as he told me all about his ex with my name. Duh!”
“It’s my name,” you say lamely.
“Well, girl, I am the one with the ring. I’m the one who won. It doesn’t matter if you raise your flag, or light your pyre or, hell, even set me on fire,” she says. “I won.”
So, you do what she says doesn’t matter.
You take your Advantage match and strike it with purpose. You think about the Risk Takers who disappeared, starved, were eaten—the mother who fell to her death. You think about the college nights you gave up waiting for Brody to come back from a “jam session” with his friends just to be able to share his twin bed and watch movies on his laptop with his arm over your shoulder, just to feel important. It’s a montage of your past, a video package similar competition shows would reveal to the audience at just the right moment. As it rolls, you think, “I told you I could do this, fucker,” and throw the match on Not-You Geanie’s pyre.
***
You won’t know this, because you are both gone after the finale fire that became so uncontrollable it even took out two of the camera crew and singed Chip’s khaki shorts, but all your show-stopping efforts will never be seen. The series is deemed too controversial by at least seven out of ten focus groups and the budding streamer cancels it before it can hit smart-TV screens around the country. They put the footage on a hard drive on a shelf in some executive’s office, and it’s possible that someday they might take it out of the archives, but that’s something else you’ll never find out either.
A short few months after he has grieved for his lost love, Brody will settle onto the couch on a Wednesday night to watch a competition show with his new girlfriend, Jody, who kind of reminds him of one of his exes. They’ll eat popcorn and he will watch her thin, manicured fingers fishing around the buttery bowl for the perfect kernel, and he will feel a moment of sadness for the money he lost on the engagement ring that went as missing as his fiancé.
Michele Zimmerman (she/her) is a queer writer with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work appears in Catapult’s Tiny Nightmares horror anthology, Post Road, and Harpur Palate, among others. In the past, she was a winner of the Fractured Lit Anthology II Prize and the 2021 Blood Orange Review Literary Contest as well as a Best of the Net Nominee. By day she writes and edits for a magazine about illumination and design. Find her at www.michelezimmerman.com.