Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,16

of season, available 24/7. Limo to be Rolls-Royce Phantom, white. Artist to select driver (male, under twenty-five) from head/torso shots.

There were seventy-eight pages of this in total—the last twenty devoted entirely to the requirements of Bibi’s “dressing compound,” including a lengthy addendum to promote “a deeper understanding of the tastes/preferences of the Artist, with regard to beverages and snack items.”

When Ed Rossitto had finished reading the document, he slammed down the lid of his laptop, stabbed the case repeatedly with a letter opener, then threw it off his office balcony into the bunny-shaped lake below. (Or so I heard from Len.) Then he logged on to another computer, retrieved Teddy’s list of demands from his e-mail, and forwarded it to Chaz Chipford, the ShowBiz reporter. Within minutes, the entire unedited file was available on the magazine’s website as a downloadable PDF.

That afternoon, Bibi called Teddy while her assistant took notes.

“You’re an asshole,” she told him.

“That’s why you employ me,” he replied.

“I don’t employ you.”

There, the transcript ends.

6

Sanity Check: The Sequel

I STOOD OUTSIDE JOEY’S dressing room in a hot panic. The run-through was so far behind schedule now, there was no conceivable way that the press conference could start on time.

This was ridiculous.

How the hell could I… lose the judges? They had to be around here somewhere. “Think, Sash, think!” I said to myself. But I could think of only one thing: Len’s face when he realized the biggest news event in Project Icon’s history would have to be delayed because his assistant producer couldn’t find the panel.

With no better ideas, I checked the catering area, the conference facility, the public bathrooms, the hallway that led to the parking lot, and then—in rising desperation—the janitor’s storage closet. (You never know with Joey Lovecraft.) All empty. Shit. So I returned to the backstage lounge area, where a couple of crew members in black T-shirts were standing around, looking confused.

“Hey—shouldn’t this thing have started by now?” asked one of them, in an accusatory tone.

I offered him my very best shut-the-fuck-up face.

He was right, of course: The judges should have been on stage two minutes ago. A few more minutes’ delay wouldn’t be so bad, I kept telling myself. Even ten minutes—well, we could just about pull that off. Any longer, however, and we’d be charged an extra half-day for the venue and crew—not to mention all that wasted bandwidth for the live streaming—which would put us into overtime rates. It could add up to a few hundred thousand dollars, easy. Len had already been hospitalized twice since returning to Icon, due to a peptic ulcer and a burst appendix. A bill of that size could send him right back to the ER again.

Come to think of it, though… why hadn’t Len called me already? It wasn’t like him. Under normal circumstances, he would have threatened me with some kind of medieval torture at least three times by now. Unless… oh God, please no… unless he was already front of house with Sir Harold, waiting—and waiting—for “The Reveal” to begin. I could just picture him now: cheeks ablaze, nostrils flaring, the Merm quivering with fury. And in his eyes, two words, written in flames:

KILL BILL.

Sir Harold had blown twenty million dollars on the new Project Icon panel—and it all came down to this moment. Indeed, Big Corp’s newlyissued “earnings guidance” for the next year depended heavily on Joey and Bibi (even JD Coolz, I suppose) keeping the show viable for one last season. Sir Harold had granted an interview to the Monster Cash Financial Network that very morning on the subject—I’d watched it with Mitch and a few others in the Roundhouse’s canteen. Jesus, what a disaster. The anchor had started out with a long, ass-kissy intro about Sir Harold’s upbringing in South Africa—all that stuff about his English merchant-banker father and Nguni housemaid mother, the national scandal of their marriage, and how the young Harry had literally inherited a gold mine at age seventeen, fought the apartheidera government to hold on to it, then used the profits to build the world’s largest media empire. Standard life story, basically. And then, just as Sir Harold was beginning to relax—or grow bored (hard to tell the difference)—out came the Gotcha Question: “Wouldn’t you agree, Sir Harold: Project Icon without Nigel Crowther is a zombie franchise, with only three ways to go—down, down, and down.”

The anchor’s smug attempt at humor was a bad idea. The mogul’s great face trembled. His sun-spotted lips gathered into a sneer.