But when I headed upstairs after dinner to the bedroomthat had been mine as a kid and had suddenly become mine again two months, three weeks, six days and three hours ago, I opened up my laptop and went to the application website.
Mum wasn’t wrong. In fact, I could write a list of all the things she was right about, like:
1)Marry Me, Julietabsolutely was a fantasy.
2) The chances of me finding a soulmate on the show were minuscule, even if Iwasready to put myself back out there.
3) No matter how hard I tried, Jac wasn’t going to get jealous and she absolutely wasn’t coming back.
I was right too, though. My application wasn’t about Jac. Or at least, it wasn’tjustabout Jac. It was about me.
Jac hatedMarry Me, Juliet.‘What can you possibly get out of this?’ she’d asked me once in frustration. ‘It’s heteronormative, it’s misogynistic, and on top of that, it’s garbage.’
‘I like to see them fall in love,’ I replied.
‘You know they don’t actually fall in love, right?’
‘Some of them do! Luna and Roger have been together for more than two years now. And Basil and Megan—’
‘Mandie,’ Jac said, ‘I’m not interested. Come to me when you have something worthwhile to talk about.’
I’d tried so hard to be the girlfriend that Jac wanted me to be. I’d bent and broken parts of myself, trying to fit into the mould she’d laid out. But she’d never managed to get me to stop watchingMarry Me, Juliet.
I didn’t know how to put it into words in a way that would make Mum understand. I couldn’t even really explain it to myself.
ButMarry Me, Julietdidn’t have Jac’s fingerprints all over it.Marry Me, Julietwas justmine.
The first page of the application was full of pretty standard form questions that I filled out quickly: name, age, occupation, clothing sizes, whether or not I had any serious medical issues, that sort of thing. The last question wasWhat is your sexual orientation?
Whenever this question turned up on forms, I usually just clickedbisexualand got on with it. I’d been out since I was fifteen. It wasn’t a big deal.
But this wasn’t a drop-down list. It was just a blank space, and it made me pause, finger hovering over thebkey.
There hadn’t been a lot of out bi contestants onMarry Me, Julietbefore, but there’d been a few. Every single one of them had been treated horribly, either in the Villa, by the audience, or both. It was a sort of escalated version of what usually happened to me at work: as soon as people found out you were into women, they found a way to become real gross about it.
No matter what my reasons were for wanting to go on the show, that was… not the experience I wanted.
I date men, I typed in the box.
Jac would be furious with me. She talked a lot about media representation and how important it was. She’d want me to come out immediately, loud and proud.
I saved my answers and clicked through to the next page. Jac had given up any right to have a say in what I did two months, three weeks, six days and counting-the-hours-was-a-pointless-waste-of-time ago.
The next page of the application was all short-answerquestions – quite a lot of them, I discovered, as I scrolled to the bottom.What are you passionate about? When did you last cry?(God, the answer to that one was going to be embarrassing.)What are your favourite outdoor activities? Your five best features? Your five worst features?
There must have been forty or fifty questions altogether. Ooof. This was going to take a while.
I cracked my knuckles. If I’d been wearing long sleeves, I would have rolled them up. I didn’t mind hard work. That could go in my ‘best features’ section.
I scrolled back up, planning to start at the top, but one of the questions caught my eye and made me stop.What scares you?
I leaned back in my chair and looked around my old room. It was exactly the same as it had been when I moved out to start my apprenticeship, nearly ten years ago.
Every day, I woke up in my single bed, stared up at the decade-old posters of cars and pop stars, and thought about Jac. I went to work, put on my coveralls, started tuning up whatever car needed tuning up that day, and thought about Jac. I had lunch, thought about Jac. Knocked off, thought about Jac. Came home, had dinner, argued with my poor mum about how I was thinking about Jac too much and how I needed to stop.
Thought about Jac.
I lived in a small town. There wasn’t a thing I could do or a place I could go that wouldn’t make me think about Jac.
