Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,70

trying to push its way between my clenched jaw and into my mouth. It lasted, oh, five seconds. The moment I struggled against him, Joey broke away, surprised at my reluctance. He’d miscalculated. He’d mistaken my interest for attraction. But as he retreated, something light and hollow fell out of his gown pocket and rolled across the floor. I looked down—and Joey made a dive for it. But it was too late.

I’d seen them.

I’d seen my jar of little green pills, with “Sasha King, take as needed” on the side.

“How the hell—!” I screamed, in a rage that took hold of me with a sudden, almost frightening force. The lunge had been bad enough: But this? He’d stolen from me, too?

“You left ’em right there!” Joey yelled, now slurring his words. It was now so horribly obvious what had happened. He must have taken a pill—or pills—right before I arrived, and they were only just beginning to enter his bloodstream. He was high.

“Where?” I demanded.

“My trailer. In Las Vegas. Shit, Bill, I’m sorry. But you left ’em, you left ’em right there, man.”

It was a lie. It had to be a lie. I’d never been near his trailer, not in Las Vegas, not anywhere.

“Joey—how could you?” I said, the rage beginning to pass. Now I just felt confused. Depressed and confused. “And I thought you were one of the good guys. I really did, Joey.”

I stared at him, still trying to process what had just happened.

He said nothing.

“Dammit, Joey,” I sighed. “I liked you from that first moment in Ed’s office—even when you weren’t even being likable. And after all the shit we’ve been through with Bibi—what she did to Bonnie—I thought you were better. Jesus, what a sucker I am.”

Joey’s entire body stiffened. “… you think Bibi was the reason Bonnie left the show?” he said.

An awful silence. “Yeah. Why?”

“Oh, man. I’m a terrible person. A terrible, terrible person.” He stood up and walked over to the balcony. I hoped he wasn’t about to cry. Tonight had been bad enough already.

“What happened, Joey?” I asked, anger still in my voice. “Just tell me what happened.”

“… I didn’t mean to,” came the forlorn reply. “I just… I’m just built that way, Bill. And that’s what people want, isn’t it? The whole rock star thing. Ain’t that why they pay me all that money to be on the show? It was a kiss, goddamnit.”

“You KISSED Bonnie?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Joey… oh…”

“They made a whole big fuckin’ thing out of it.” Wiping his eyes, he stared out at the groaning, howling city below. “Guess they were just mad at me,” he sighed. “Y’know… for making her pregnant and all.”

21

Bingo-Bitte!

February

WAYNE SHORELINE WAS standing in complete darkness. Or rather, it would have been complete darkness, if not for the single, tiny uplight attached to the microphone in his hand: It shone against his lower jaw, casting shadows across his blandly androgynous features.

To Wayne, it must have seemed for a moment as though he were alone on soundstage three of Greenlit Studios—as though the only noise in the room were coming from his lungs, as they rose and fell in their machinelike rhythm.

But of course he was not alone.

Out in the blackness, a few yards beyond the stage, was a long table at which Joey, Bibi, and JD were seated. And beyond them was a live studio audience—only two or three hundred people in total, but the wall-to-wall mirrors made it seem as though there were more. Facing Wayne, meanwhile, was the cloaked hulk of a pedestal-mounted TV camera, its giant monocle of a lens taking in every last detail of his semi-illuminated face, and rendering it a high-definition video signal.

Then a voice.

My voice.

“New York, can you hear me?” I asked.

A rush of static over the studio monitors.

“Hello, LA,” came the reply. “This is New York. We can hear you. Thirty seconds.”

A long, fuzzy tone.

Soon, the digitized image of Wayne’s face would be funneled through a heavy-gauge cable to a dish of Kennedy Space Center proportions on the roof, and from there beamed up to an orbiting satellite, before ricocheting back down to Earth—only this time in the direction of Manhattan, where it would be processed and distributed to approximately one and a half billion homes throughout the world.

One and a half billion homes.

Barely a single percentage of this theoretical “maximum reach” audience would be watching, of course—or at least by the definition of the Jefferson Metrics Organization, which doesn’t count viewers outside the US, on account of