Inside Straight by George R. R. Martin
“I am sick of losing challenges,” she said as she hooked her bra. “We would have won if Matryoshka had kept control of his copies.”
“Yeah, I hate losing, too.” I didn’t like the camera being on us as we changed, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was in the contract. The only time you could be alone was in the bathroom. And then you had to be alone. No one could come in with you unless there was a camera following. No wonder I felt like I was going crazy.
Of course, in my pre-wild-card life I’d been shot almost naked by some of the best photographers in the business. Not that any of them would recognize me now. I’m big as a house.
I grunted as I pulled on my pants. I was still pretty large, even after all the bubbling in the last challenge. There had been one last hard hit before we lost, and it had plumped me up.
There was a knock on the door. Ink stuck her head in the room. She was a tiny girl with spiky black hair and tattoos writhing across her body. “They’re set up and ready for the Discard ceremony,” she said.
Tiffani glanced in the mirror. She looked amazing—her cloud of fiery hair a sharp contrast to her milky skin.
I didn’t bother to look at myself. I knew I’d be disappointed.
Jetman and Matryoshka were sitting at the table when we arrived. Matryoshka had recombined himself, so he was at his full intellect. Not that his full intellect was any great shakes, but he was a nice guy, and he made great pierogi. Not as good as the late, lamented Second Avenue Deli in New York, but damn good nonetheless. We were the same age, but I always felt as if I were older than him. Like a big sister.
“Come along, children,” said the Harlem Hammer. He was the one judge I actually liked.
Tiffani and I took our seats. The Hammer had a deck of cards in front of him. The Discard deck. Blarg.
I glanced at Tiffani. Her mouth was pulled in a tight line. Losing that last challenge had been horrible. We all hated losing.
“I think we did okay, until the end,” said Matryoshka.
Tiff shot him a look that could have melted glass. “Well, it doesn’t matter how we did up until the part where we lost, does it?” she snapped.
Matryoshka looked at her like a wounded puppy. I felt bad for him.
“I think you’re being too harsh on Ivan,” Jetman said. He was slightly older than the rest of us and, because of his obsession with Jetboy, he tended to have old-fashioned notions about things. “He can’t help getting kind of, well, er, uhm…”
“Stupid?” I said and immediately hated myself. It was true, but…
“I’m sorry, Ivan.”
Matryoshka shrugged. He was stoic, I’ll say that for him. The Harlem Hammer tried to get us talking about the challenge, but we weren’t much help. We’d lost every one thus far. Our team was pretty much decimated. And now we had to throw another person under the bus.
The cards were dealt and I slowly picked up my hand. Tiffani, Jetman, Matryoshka, and my own face stared back at me. Tiffani had plucked her card out, and it was already lying facedown on the table. She looked calm and cool, and I wished I felt as certain about whom to choose.
I doubted I would be chosen. I was the only one who had performed well on all the challenges. I figured, if the Diamonds ever hoped to win one, they needed to keep me.
Jetman had a way with gadgets and he always managed to come up with the right gizmo during challenges. And he could fly with his jetpack, which came in handy. Oh, and his guns were good, too. One shot sleeping gas and the other a net.
I fiddled with the edge of Matryoshka’s card. Despite the fact that his Mini-Me’s got dumber and dumber as he divided, they could be effective at overwhelming opponents. I looked at Tiffani’s card. There was a slight smile on her face in the photo. It made the corners of her aquamarine eyes crinkle. She was pretty much impervious to harm, and that was great except… well, she sucked in a fight.
I pushed that thought away. It wasn’t really fair. She didn’t choose to have a power with no real offensive capabilities. And Tiffani and I had been together since the Atlanta tryouts. We were the only two who had made the show from Atlanta. She’d never voted against me, and I’d never voted against her. I guess we had a sort of unspoken alliance.
I glanced up and caught Jetman looking at me. I felt a stab of fear in my stomach. Maybe he was thinking of putting me in the Discards.
“You need to make your selections,” the Harlem Hammer said. His voice was deep and reminded me of the Barry White albums my parents used to play. I shoved that away, too. I tried not to think about my parents anymore.
Matryoshka pulled a card from his hand and placed it facedown on the table. Jetman followed.
“What’s it going to be, Bubbles?” the Hammer asked me. I couldn’t put it off any longer. I sighed and picked a card. The Harlem Hammer gathered our discards, shuffled them, and made a small deck.
He turned the first card over. Tiffani’s face stared up at us. I glanced at her. She gave me a tight smile, then looked back at the board.
The next card was Matryoshka. He frowned and shook his head slightly. Another card turned. Matryoshka again.
“One vote left. Is it going to be two pair or a set?”
With quick efficiency, The Hammer dealt the last card.
Matryoshka.
Tiffani breathed a sigh of relief. So did I.
Matryoshka and Jetman were already standing, shaking hands, and doing that back-slapping thing guys did to prove that they liked each other, but not in a “gay” way. I stood and walked around the table. Matryoshka and I hugged. He was a big guy, but his arms barely made it around my girth. I felt terrible that I had chosen him, but I had to think of the team—and who would be the best American Hero.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at my reflection, depressed about voting Matryoshka off. I started thinking about all the other nice people I’d voted to discard. Blrr and the Maharajah were both really decent. Joe Twitch had some issues, though, and I knew he had pissed Tiff off.
“Michelle, you know you can’t be in there for too long.” It was Ink—again.
I glowered at my reflection. I’d been using a colored hair spray to change my platinum hair to black. The shade did nothing for me—turning my skin sallow rather than the pale olive luminescence which had earned me hundreds of thousands of dollars in modeling contracts. But no one had recognized me thus far. The dark hair alone wouldn’t have masked my identity—but my wild card did.
The face staring back wasn’t the one I knew. The upward-slashing cheekbones, so beloved by photographers, were buried under chubby pink flesh. The sculpted jaw line that had once made my neck look even more swanlike was obscured by a roll of fat. Only my eyes were unchanged. I called them dog-shit brown. They were fringed with one of my genetic quirks—a double row of long black lashes.
I was a freak of nature long before my card turned. I’m taller than average, and my legs and arms are abnormally long for my body. In short, I was a photographer’s dream. I’d been modeling since I was a child. My parents had leased me out to the highest bidder and exploited me like carnival barkers peddling Siamese twins.
But then my card had turned.
Things were different now. People didn’t stare at me in the same way. And when I did catch someone’s eye, now there was usually a breathtaking look of pity there.
Ink banged on the door again. “Michelle, you have a contract. Everyone else has already done their Confessional.”
“Can’t I go to the bathroom in peace?” I put the toilet lid up and let a small bubble rise on my fingertip, then let it drop into the water with a satisfying plop. It looked pretty until it hit—as iridescent and apparently insubstantial as any soap bubble. But I’d given it plenty of density, and it sounded convincingly turdlike. Unfortunately, it was heavy enough that it chipped the porcelain, but I decided that no one would be likely to notice. That should keep Ink from bugging me for a few minutes.
Then I felt crummy. Ink had
At least it still felt good to bubble. It tingled and sang in my bones and skin. Bubbling pulsed through my blood and throbbed like another heartbeat. Sometimes I thought I’d go crazy if I didn’t get to bubble more often—but the bubbling made me skinnier, and I couldn’t afford to be recognized.
“Are you okay?” Ink sounded worried.
“What’s going on?” I heard Tiffani ask.
I flushed the toilet and opened the door.
“You’re supposed to do a Confessional after Discard,” Ink said. She had changed her tattoos, and they scrolled across her arms like a crazy Mayan tally board.
“Are you okay?” Tiffani asked. She gave Ink a pleading look. “Can you guys give us just a few minutes?” If she had looked at me the way she was looking at Ink, I’d’ve agreed to anything. “Just have them turn on the shower cam. We’ll keep in range. I mean, it’s the bathroom. How far are we going to go?”
Ink snorted. “Fine. You have five minutes, and then I’m coming in with the whole crew.”
Tiffani and I went back into the bathroom and closed the door. The light on the shower cam blinked on.
“Okay, so why are you so depressed?” Tiff asked.
I sighed. “I guess it’s mostly getting rid of Matryoshka. He was a great guy. He didn’t deserve to go.”
Tiffani glanced in the mirror, then stuck her tongue out at her reflection. “I hate the way I look,” she said, then turned back to me. “Listen, this is a competition. There are rules, and we have to play by them. If we lose challenges, we lose teammates.”
There was a towel on the floor, and I picked it up and began folding it. “I know, I know. I just don’t get why we’ve been losing every challenge. I mean, we all try so hard. I just hate that we have to vote people off.”
Tiff grabbed a brush from my basket of toiletries on the counter. She closed the toilet lid, then sat me down and started working on my hair. “I don’t understand why you keep making your hair black with that crappy spray dye. You’ve got nice hair under this mess.” She sectioned off a chunk and started to braid it. It felt good to have her hands on me, even if she was just doing it out of habit. She had a bunch of sisters, and she’d told me they’d always braided each other’s hair.
The braiding was relaxing. “I’ve been feeling bad since Blrr,” I said. “Joe Twitch was… well, after he stripped you naked in like five seconds, I wasn’t going to have him in the house anymore, but Blrr was a good kid and a great housemate.”
“Her power was useless without the right conditions,” Tiffani said as she started braiding the other section of my hair. “The other teams are all thinking the same way. Who’s good in challenges, and who you can’t stand to live with. Though how any one could live with Stuntman is beyond me. He’s such a jerk.”
Tiff tied off my braid. I stood up and looked in the mirror. I used to love the way I looked in braids, but not now. They just made my face look rounder.
“You don’t like them,” Tiff said sadly. “It’s not them. It’s my face.”
Tiff stood on tiptoe and gave me a quick kiss on my cheek. “There’s nothing wrong with your face, Michelle.”
I blushed and looked down. I didn’t know if she felt the same way about me as I did about her, but my cheek was burning where her lips had touched it.
There was a hard bang on the bathroom door. “All right, you guys,” Ink said. “We’re coming in.”
The door swung open, and the floating camera crew started to file in.
“We were just leaving,” Tiff said as she slipped past them. I couldn’t slip past anyone anymore and had to stand there, like an idiot, until they backed out of the room.
The sound guy clipped a mic onto the neck of my hoodie. I sat in the Confessional chair and started pulling the braids out of my hair.
“You don’t need to do that.” Ink had changed her tats again. Now there were a series of typewritten questions on her arms. But she had kept the Mayan images on her face and legs. “They look nice. You’re one of the prettiest girls on the show.”
I shrank back in the chair. Well, as much as my girth would allow me to. No one thought I was pretty anymore.
“So, why do we always have to drag you into doing your Confessionals?” Ink asked.
The red eye of the camera blinked on. They were rolling again, sucking me into that meat grinder. I looked at Ink so I wouldn’t have to look in the camera again. It didn’t love me anymore. “I know I haven’t done as many Confessionals as everyone else. I guess I just didn’t have much to say.”
A disappointed expression slipped across Ink’s face. I knew I was making her job more difficult, but of all the things we did on the show, this was the one that made me most uncomfortable. Tiffani loved Confessional. I don’t know why. The Maharajah had started calling her the Little Nun because she was always in there. So we had all called her that—until the Maharajah got voted off.
“So, what do you think about the other contestants, now that we’re getting close to a reshuffle?”
I noticed that the end of one of the ties on my hoodie was frayed, and I started to worry it. My hands had been so beautiful. Now the nails were ragged and the cuticles raw. I heard Ink make a throat-clearing noise, and I knew I had to answer her.
“I guess… I guess I like most of the other players.” I glanced up and saw Ink frown at me. “I mean, I like my teammates. The ones that are left. And I think Dragon Girl is sweet, even if she is, you know, kinda young to be on the show.”
“What about Rosa Loteria?”
I looked away from the camera. I wished she hadn’t asked about Rosa. “Well, I don’t know her all that well,” I said. “I’ve only really seen her at press stuff.”
“But how do you feel about her?”
I sighed. I had to talk—it was in that damned contract. “I don’t think she cares about being a hero. She only cares about making money and being famous.”
“And that’s bad, right?”
I looked up at the camera this time. “No, it’s not bad to want those things. But this isn’t about getting money or being famous. It’s about being a hero.”
“Do you think Tiffani is heroic?”
“I think she tries to be.” I assumed Tiff felt the same way about American Hero that I did. She had had my back. She’d told me she had never voted against me, not once.
“Well, what do you think a hero is?” Ink asked.
“It’s not just acts of physical courage. What’s a hero, if you can’t trust them to keep their word? What’s a hero, if they would betray a friend? What’s a hero, if they think of themselves before anyone else?” I looked Ink straight in the eye. “That’s not being a hero. Anyone can do that. We all do that. But a hero tries to do better.”
I dropped my head again, and my hair covered most of my face. I scrunched down into the chair and didn’t say anything else. After a few minutes, Ink told the camera crew to stop rolling.
“You did great, Michelle,” she said.
“You’re supposed to be calling me Bubbles,” I reminded her. She gave me a funny smile.
“What’re you working on now?” I asked.
Jetman was in the garage tinkering with yet another of his gadgets. Since the Maharajah had been voted off, Jetman pretty much kept to himself.
“I’m not sure what it is yet,” he replied. “Things just… change as I’m working on them.”
He started looking for something in his toolbox, and I handed him a Phillips head screwdriver. He grunted and took it from me. Sometimes I hung out with Jetman when he was gadgeting. Whenever he couldn’t find something in his toolbox, I gave him a random screwdriver. It seemed to work. Or maybe he was just humoring me.
“You know, I thought you were going to vote me off during Discard,” I said.
“Actually, I was thinking about voting Tiffani off,” he said. “But then I thought you might get pissed.”
It took me aback. I would never get pissed at Jetman for votin
“Yeah, I realized that,” he said. “But I knew that you and Tiff were planning to get rid of Matryoshka after the last challenge. So I figured, go along to get along.”
I leaned against the bench running along the west wall of the garage. I was baffled. “But we didn’t ha—”
‘C’mon, Diamonds!” Tiffani yelled from the end of the driveway. “We’re going on a mysterious ride.”
“Our master’s voice.” Jetman wiped his hands on a greasy rag. We went outside, and he pulled the garage door shut behind us. There was an SUV limo waiting for us. Tiff was already inside, and Jetman and I piled into the spacious backseat. It was roomier now that there were only three of us left on the team. “Where do you think we’re going?” I asked.
Tiff shrugged. “Reshuffle. After all, all the teams have lost at least two players.”
“I hope it’s a reshuffle,” Jetman said. “We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”
The limo took us to the Warners back lot, where American Hero was taped.
We piled out of the back of the SUV, and Ink led us through one of the soundstages to makeup.
Peregrine was standing under a spotlight, arguing with one of the directors about her lighting. “I’m telling you, if you don’t put a decent filter on that thing I’m going to look like a crone,” she said.
“Peregrine, my goddess,” the director replied. “You will never look like a crone. I don’t care how hard you try.”
Peregrine gave him a lethal glare. “Shameless flattery is one way to get around me, but don’t think I’m not going to notice if you don’t fix that.”
Ink left us at the makeup area backstage. We were used to doing the whole makeup, blocking, hurry-up-and-wait routine that was part of the show taping.