Mom’s still mad which is fair enough. She really has shut the fuck up and hasn’t talked to me since our fight. To punish me. To make me realize that I miss her and I love her. It’s just sad that I don’t. In fact, her punishment is a gift.
Time flies like watching clouds. You can spend hours and hours looking up at the white candyfloss, but only have a few minutes worth of memories when you look back on it. Funny how time is so regular yet not at the same time. Soon after posting the form, a taxi pulls up at my house. No, the taxi. The ride to my dreams. Two minutes early in fact. I skip down. Valerie and the others aren’t here, probably in their own taxis but that’s ok. I can talk to the no doubt sarcastic taxi driver because, let’s face it, when has there ever been a taxi driver who hasn’t been snarky.
“When do I meet the other players?” I ask, climbing into the back seat with my bag. I know they said not to pack, but I doubt they’ll have the right shampoo that keeps my hair from going dry.
“When you get there,” he says. He does not disappoint, I think. I can see him raise his eyebrows to adjust his sunglasses in the rear view mirror. It looks kind of dumb. It’s like talking to Sheena. Waste of energy. I decide to direct that same energy into brainstorming tactics for winning (even though I still don’t get the game) but end up just staring blankly out the window instead. Gray and then green and then gray again, all underneath blue. What I think is a kite, glides above a copse of trees. It might be the other kite actually. After maybe one or two hours of scenery, I catch a glimpse of the sea, a beautiful sky-mirror, glinting with sun rays surfing the waves. I open my window to smell the salt-air but the driver shuts it from the controls on his front seat. All I smelt was road anyway.
“You can breathe in outdoor air when you walk to the airport,” he says. We turn away from the deep blue and turn down some twisting roads before arriving at the airport. I open my door and sling my essentials (and essential oils) bag over my shoulder. I’m thankless to the driver and walk to the doors, my shoes clicking on the cold hard ground. Even though I’m entering and not exiting, a woman stands with a sign. Scrawled across it is ‘Vicky Vickers’. With an ‘i’ mate. Get it right. She looks bored and is tapping her feet along to some Mimi Webb song playing in the background. I make my way over to her and she drops her sign.
“What is my crown made of?” she asks. Weird question. My eyes flit to her head where there is only flat blonde hair. No crown. Gold? My bracelet jangles on my wrist. Crown of-
“Snakes,” I say. The password seems to be correct because she marches me to the first security.
“Give me your bag,” she says. I hand it to her. Instead of searching through it, she just throws it to a bin nearby. It’s a shot elementary boys would be proud of and it lands in. I watch in horror as a different woman puts her leftover lunch in the same bin. “Cool. Now we get to skip this crap.” She leads me past luggage and hand luggage security and we get our passports checked. Samoa Anderson and Victoria Vickers. The metal detector beeps when I pass under it. My heart starts beating faster, the feeling you get when someone tells the whole class off even though you’ve done nothing wrong. I empty my pockets (nothing in there) and he realizes it’s my bracelet.
“Please,” says Samoa. “It’s very important to her. It’s not dangerous, you can check.” The guy looks unconvinced and calls his workmate over. She in turn, checks it over, charm by charm. The 13, feather, bird, crown and the snake are deemed safe. She prods the end of the key with her finger which is dumb. What if it was sharp, or poisonous or all the things you’re checking for? Her finger doesn’t explode however and she hands it back to me.
No time for airport shopping which depresses me. After you’ve thrown away my bag, you could at least let me buy my shampoo again but no. I’m jogged past more white walls until I’m queuing for the plane. That was quick. Very, very quick. I spot the back of Valerie’s head in the line and cut in with her.
“Hey, how are you?” I ask. She looks strange without all her necklaces and other jewelry on, almost naked. I suppose her ‘guide’ didn’t persuade the guard that they weren’t dangerous. “Where’s Kiyoshi and Sheena?”
“Oh she’s fine. She’s over there,” she says, gesturing vaguely to a clump of girls talking.
“Oh ok. Cool,” I say. The girls she’s talking to don’t really look her scene but then again, what is her scene? She turns around and comes over to me. I scout the backs of people’s heads to find Scorpio. I want to ask what team he’s in and making allies seems like a good plan but he’s not here. It could be that he’s just late or on another plane. A waste of seats on our plenty big enough plane though. Wait. I see a guy with ebony wood hair standing next to a girl at the front of the queue. In Scorpio’s profile picture, his hair was so black it had an almost bluish haze to it rather than brown but it could’ve been the lighting. It’s worth a shot anyway.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I push in front of people to the boy. The conversation he’s having with the girl looks more serious than the other layers to the white noise. There’s no laughing and smiles are only coming from him. As I come closer, I discover ‘him’ isn’t Scorpio. I’m about to walk away when he taps me on the shoulder.
“Victoria?” he asks. How does he know my name?
“Uh yeah?” I say. He motions to himself in almost disbelief. Am I supposed to know him? The girl he was talking to slinks away, her meter-long super-tight braid swinging behind her.
“It’s me, Ash Hollaway,” he says. I look him up and down trying to find some resemblance between him and the dorky kid I used to know when I was eight. The only thing I can see are the lines on his face when he smiles and his eyes but even they seem a deeper green than last time I saw him.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I ask playfully, trying to ignore his jawline (god I do have a thing for chiseled jawlines).
“I was going to ask you that,” he says, which is fair enough.
“I’ve been looking for this for a long time and I found a leaflet in my bag,” I say. The more I think about it, the more I am confused. I don’t actually remember picking it up and people don’t just find stuff in their bag.
“Oh that’s great! So are you in Black Mambas or Silver Boas?” he asks. I’m confused.
“Umm neither? I’m in the Kingsnakes with my friends.” I gesture vaguely towards Valerie. “I found out a few days ago.” The look on Ash’s face tells me something’s wrong.
“A few days ago? Victoria, people don’t let you know you’ve gotten in a few days before they start shooting. I got the letter eight months ago, same as everyone else,” he says. He’s right. It doesn’t make sense. Before I can think about it any longer, people in front of us start heading into the tunnel to get us on the plane. We shuffle forward, my brain spinning. Why did it say on the leaflet that the auditions were open on those dates if everyone went to the auditions eight months ago? I thought it was weird that our audition room was so empty.
I walk down the aisle next to Ash. Sounds different when you say it like that. He sits down before me and I make my way to the back of the plane to seats 12-14 with Sheena and Valerie. Wait. Where the fuck is Kiyoshi? I buckle myself into the window seat.
“On the journey home, you sit in the middle,” Valerie says.
“Yeah sure but guys, where is Kiyoshi?” I ask. And Scorpio. He said his letter hadn’t come yet when we called. Maybe he didn’t get in? Why not though; he did just as bad a job as Valerie did. Would they cut him out because of his english? I know I was rude about it but I was angry. To be fair, the guy running our audition was angry too. Valerie looks around as if he’ll be hiding in the hand luggage compartment. Sheena looks relatively uninterested and pulls out the menu from the net in front, flicking to the gin section. She drinks gin?
“He’s boring. His only personality trait was that he only uses present tense,” Sheena says, moving onto the selection of wine.
“That’s not fair. Not knowing your second language as well as your first isn’t a personality trait. Being kind and introverted are,” Valerie says.
“Ok. So his only characteristics are kind and introverted. That’s even more boring than skipping determiners,” Sheena says. I feel as though the conversation has drifted away from where he is.
“As a kind introvert, I am offended,” Valerie says, looking down the aisle.
“Don’t be offended. That’s just the truth. You use astrology and boba and pet snakes and all the other forms of quirkiness to distract people from the fact you’re boring,” Sheena says. On one hand, I want to stand up for Valerie but on the other hand, I don’t want a rude yet accurate analysis of my personality. Valerie doesn’t reply.
Roughly 87 mentos later, the plane has taken off. Square fields stitched together with thin lines of trees make a green patchwork quilt below us before we ascend above them, so we’re level with a blanket of cloud instead. A lot of the 21 hour flight is spent looking at that and another a lot is spent sleeping/trying to sleep. I thought the plane journey would feel magical which it does in a way but not really. I’m just confused. And wound up by Valerie and Sheena’s winding up of each other. Being on a TV show with just us three is going to be a nightmare if they keep this up. At this point, I’m looking for duct tape.
“Vicki, back me up here!” Valerie pleads.
“What?” I say sleepily. I wasn’t listening. I was wondering if anyone would mind if I went to sit somewhere else. Maybe with Ash to try and figure this out. I’m about to do just that when the seatbelt light flashes and we’re told we’re on the descent. We dip beneath the clouds, me sucking mints aggressively. All I can see is the green aqua of the sea until a white sanded, lush green tree filled island floats into view. I recognise it from the pictures on the website. The long, snaking shape of it is unmistakable.
The plane continues to point downwards and I can see the runway we’re going to land on. Tiny camera crew point their tiny cameras at the plane. There’s no doubt about it as I step off the plane.
It has begun.