Page 88 of Alice Chen's Reality Check

The camera moves on to the next person. Soon it’ll be my turn, but my mind is completely and totally blank.

I squat down and survey my options—designer sunglasses, a bucket hat, and an unzipped duffel bag, the contents of which are spilling out onto the sand. Maybe there’s something here that I can use in my eulogy. Inside the duffel bag is a pair of Crocs. A small bottle of gummy vitamins that I suspect are actually edibles. A worn-down pocket-sized notebook.

I pick up the notebook. It’s a nice one, not one of my trusty Mead Five Stars or Composition notebooks, but an honest-to-goodness Moleskine, and—that’s not important, I tell myself, and start flipping through. It’s a mix of to-do lists, food and drink orders for catering, and the occasional drawing of a dick. I leaf through most of it, and then my eye catches on my name written in the back:

NOTES

Alice—totally faking it with Daniel, thinks she’s smarter than everyone else, mom sick, probably desperate

What the fuck? But I don’t have time to be outraged because there are more names and more notes.

Kendall—suing Get Real

Mikayla—cheater, hounds the crew members for info on challenges

Jaxon—fake accent, actually from NYC

Brittany—takes prescription pills. should we “lose” them for her?

Selena—daddy issues. desperate for approval, afraid of the dark bc of childhood

Chase—head empty, thinks with his dick if smashed on jell-o shots

Dominic—very short fuse. rage issues, has history of disorderly conduct

Ava and Noah—would kill anyone who gets in their way. snuck in a secret phone (can use this)

There’s a line drawn under this list, dividing up the page. Below it, the notes continue.

Leah—unable to function without a fatal amount of caffeine in her system, nose job

Freya—sleeping her way to the top

Peter—enough botox to kill a horse

Dawn—washup, trying to make a comeback with her show. will shell out if she thinks that

I don’t get to see what Dawn Taylor’s going to shell out for because the next couple of pages have been ripped out. The notebook is blank after that, but I can make out faint lines where Anton pressed his pen too hard while writing. I trace the grooves, wishing I had a number 2 pencil I could use to color the paper and reveal the message, like a kid from a detective novel.

I angle the notebook, but all I can read is a number:398

“Hey, what’s all this crap doing here?” Bryan asks, spotting me by the duffel bag.

“Dawn Taylor told me to set up the memorial,” Seth says. “Figured Anton’s stuff would make for a good visual.”

“All of his belongings should go to his next of kin,” Bryan snaps. “Pack it up.”

“Fuck off, Bryan,” Seth says, scowling. He gestures at the filming in progress. “I can’t, not until after they’re done. Unless you want to take responsibility for borking the continuity?” Seth must be having a bad day—his hair is sticking up every which way, and there’s gauze wrapped around his right hand.

Before anyone can notice I’ve been paging through Anton’s notebook, I quickly drop it in the sand and straighten up. My mind is going a mile a minute as I process what I just read. I’d suspected that Anton was murdered, but this is confirmation. He was gathering blackmail material. It can’t have been a coincidence that he ended up dead, with a black eye and a scraped-up hand.

But who did it?

Most of the cast and crew already had a reason to dislike Anton. If you mix that with the pressure to succeed—either on the contestants to win or on the crew to makeDawn Tay’s Infernoa hit—then almost anyone could be a suspect. The producers, for instance, were already willing to poison and endanger us to manufacture drama. What if they went too far?

And why are there pages ripped out of the notebook? Did Anton do that for a reason, or did the person he was blackmailing do that tocover their tracks?

I drift over to Daniel’s side and tune in to what Mikayla is saying.

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