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Within a few minutes, Romi, Joel, Conor, and Zana had arrived too—and so had Camille, who was looking a mixture of nervous, stressed, and excited.
When we were all seated around the big table, looking enviously at the food but not quite daring to touch it, Camille stood up.
“Okay, so the presenting format of this show, I’m not sure if you know, will be voice-over. We’re going to have a very exciting celebrity presenter, but for contractual reasons I can’t reveal who it is—”
“That means they haven’t actually signed anyone,” Dan whispered in my ear, and I suppressed a laugh. “They’re hoping for Neil Patrick Harris but they’re probably going to end up with that permatanned guy from the shopping channel.”
“—and for logistical reasons it’s just easier if they record their commentary to be dubbed on afterwards—”
“Again, haven’t signed anyone,” Dan whispered.
“Shh!” I hissed back sternly, and he made a mock contrite face and folded his hands.
“—so what’s going to happen is I’m going to read off the challenges, the crew will film your reaction shots, and we’ll overlay my voice with the voice of the mystery presenter in edits. For that reason, please try not to look at me when I’m reading out the tasks. We want it to sound like there’s a disembodied voice and to really maintain the idea that you’re alone on this secluded island. To make it easier, I’m going to stand out of eyeline.” She indicated a bamboo screen standing in the corner of the cabana, and then moved across to it, shuffling a stack of cue cards in her hands.
“Okay, everyone ready?”
There were murmurs from around the table and Camille cleared her throat.
“Welcome to Ever After Island, contestants! Here we’ll be finding out who among you is truly the perfect couple—and who are Mr. and mismatched.” There was a pause and then she stuck her head out from behind the screen. “Kim, I don’t love that pun, I’m not sure if Baz approved it, but we might tweak in edits, okay? I think something about kissing frogs would be better. So, guys”—she turned to us—“just bear in mind the final voice-over might not be exactly the same, but we’ll make it work in the editing suite.” She cleared her throat again and continued, “For this first challenge we’ll be running a Mr. and Mrs.—with a difference. You’ll each be assigned a tell-all questionnaire to fill out about everything from your favorite dessert to your deepest and darkest secrets.”
There was a distinctly stagey gasp from Angel, and glancing around the table I realized that the other islanders were vamping up their reaction shots in a way that I totally wasn’t. There were varying expressions of shock, surprise, and laughing trepidation. Nico was looking around the circle, wide-eyed. Romi, Joel’s partner, had her hands clasped in a pantomime of terror, and Bayer was blowing a kiss at Angel with a very macho display of self-confidence. Only Conor was leaning back in his seat, looking truly relaxed, though beside him Zana looked anything but—she was gripping the edge of the table so hard that her knuckles were white. Glancing across at the crew, I saw that one of the cameras was pointing my way, and I tried hastily to adjust my face to something that wouldn’t look completely gormless on-screen—a kind of intrigued surprise—and then realized Camille was still speaking, and that I probably needed to listen to what she was saying.
“—end of the day, you’ll be asked for the answers… and we’ll find out the truth about how well you all know your partners. Who was their childhood crush? What’s their worst habit? To truly love someone, you have to know them through and through, flaws and all. So let’s find out: Who’s really the one perfect couple?”
There was a brief pause, and then she emerged from behind the screen and said, “Was that okay, Kim? Do we need any more reactions?”
“I don’t think so.” Kim was staring down at the screen in front of her, apparently scrolling through the various camera angles. “We’ve got plenty of angles, and we can always patch it together with other footage if we need to fill time.”
“Okay, you’re good to eat, guys,” Camille said. “I’ll be coming around with the questionnaires in just a minute. In the meantime, fill your boots, because we won’t be stopping again until dinner.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Joel stood up and reached for the coffee, and it was like a signal had been given, and everyone began to dig in.
I was extremely hungry, I realized, as I began loading my plate and filling up my cup, but when I sat down and finally took a bite of a jam-filled croissant, I found the food wasn’t quite as good as it looked. It had clearly been shipped in, ready-made, and the pastries and Danishes in particular had the slightly plastic quality of long-life food. The fruit salad was obviously out of a tin, which seemed nuts on an island covered in coconuts and bananas, and the bread had a spookily soft crumbly texture that was more like cake. The best thing was the rice porridge, which Santana told me was called congee.
“Dan and I positively lived off this in Thailand,” she said between mouthfuls. “Absolute heaven, total comfort food.”
Across from me, Angel was picking disdainfully over the pastries.
“Carbs, carbs, it is all carbohydrates,” she said a little disgustedly. “Where is the protein? Where are the nuts and fresh fruit? I cannot drink this.” She flicked a long, manicured nail at a big jug of orange juice that looked like it had last seen an orange quite a while ago. “It is basically Orangina minus the gas.” She pronounced it gaz with a z.
“Chill, babe.” Bayer, beside her, was shoveling down a raspberry Danish and gulping at a tall mug of black coffee. “God, this coffee’s shit. Wish I’d brought my Nespresso.”
“Hi!” Romi was saying to some of the crew, who were paying her absolutely no attention and were busy taking action shots of Santana booping Dan on the nose with a tinned cherry. “Hi! Could I get a soft-scrambled egg? Ideally two.”
“Hon.” Joel pulled at her arm. “Romi, let’s leave it. I don’t think they’ve got time to be making food right now.”
Only Zana wasn’t really eating anything. She had a plate of food in front of her, filled up by Conor, I’d noticed, but she was picking at it without any evident enjoyment, pulling the blueberries one by one out of an oily-looking muffin. Beside her, Conor glanced at her plate and put a hand on her knee as if silently encouraging her to eat something, but she only pushed the plate away. Yikes. I’d been at an all-girls school and seen my fair share of eating disorders, and this was ringing all my alarm bells. I glanced across at Nico, to see if he had noticed too, but he was busy chowing down a chocolate croissant, and when I caught his eye, he only blew me a kiss, checking to see that the film crew had caught it.
We were finishing up when Camille came back with a set of envelopes, each with one person’s name on it.
“Right,” she said busily, distributing the envelopes. “Here are the rules. You’re going to be split up from your partners—boys stay here in the cabana, girls go to the Ever After Villa. You can chat, but do not reveal too much about your answers. We want to save that for later.”
“So wait,” Romi said, her brow furrowed. “I don’t get it. Am I answering for me, or Joel?”
“For you,” Camille said patiently. “The other part of the Mr. and Mrs. will come later. Ready girls?”
It was a long time since I’d heard someone seriously address a group of women my age as “girls,” but nevertheless, we all stood, Romi still looking a little puzzled, and followed Camille down the steps.
