‘Why is that bad?’
I was going to break apart. I was going to ignite, like a firework, and burn this whole Villa down.
‘We both have hard edges.’ I dug my fingernails harder into his forearms. ‘When they rub against each other, they make a spark. But they also wear each other down. Erode each other. Destroy each other.’
I took a long, shaking breath. ‘What we have – this thing of ours – this friendship – this partnership – it’s so important. It means so much to me. And if we destroyed it – if I lost it—’
‘Hey, hey, don’t cry!’
Murray put his arms around me, but this was the hug of a friend, not a lover, hand pressed to the back of my head. ‘Whatever you want, Lily,’ he said, voice muffled as he spoke into my hair. ‘If you don’t want to do this again, that’s fine. Of course that’s fine. This doesn’t have to change anything.’
‘You understand what I’m saying, right?’
‘Of course I understand.’
I didn’t need to see his face to know he was lying. How could he understand, when I didn’t understand it myself?
14Murray
‘What?’ Suzette said.
‘Trust me.’
‘Doyoutrust you, Murray? Because this is the exact opposite of what you said two weeks ago.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
I gestured at the whiteboard with my marker. On the Episode Five group date, we were going to split the nine Juliets into three teams. I’d written my proposed groupings on the board. Kumiko, Parisa and Jess D would be one team (level-headed serious contenders). Naya, Heather and Belinda would be the second team (less level-headed, less serious contenders).
Neither of these were controversial, but it left Amanda, Juliet-Dylan and Lily as the third team – ie. the three women we’d been working our hardest to keep separate.
‘I know it sounds counter-intuitive,’ I said, ‘but let me explain.’
I started drawing a diagram. ‘I put the fear of god into Amanda on her single date.’ I drew a love heart beside her name and then crossed it out. ‘Her crush on Dylan G isn’t going to be a problem anymore. But—’
I drew an arrow from Amanda to Lily. ‘—she’s so damn sweet that Lily will definitely run a villain play on her, which will—’ I drew an arrow from Juliet-Dylan’s name, intersecting the Amanda/Lily line, ‘—trigger Dylan G’s hero instinct.’
‘But then it becomes Dylan G versus Lily,’ Carrie said. ‘Which is exactly what we don’t want.’
‘Winners focus on the romance with the Romeo,’ Suzette said. ‘They don’t focus on the drama with the other Juliets.’
‘Yes, that’s always been our approach,’ I said. ‘But the rivalry between Dylan G and Lily is too pronounced for us to try and edit around it now. We’ve got to lean into what we’ve got, not force what we’ve… not. Don’t. You know what I mean.’
Suzette didn’t look convinced, raising her eyebrows at my grammatical tangle, but Carrie looked thoughtful. ‘It’s a different kind of season. It makes sense to try a different approach.’
‘Exactly. Let’s mix it up. Let’s make it more interesting.’
‘Isn’t this just going to play into our girl-crush problem, though?’ Suzette said. ‘Dylan G’s protecting Amanda. Amanda’ll get all stars-in-her-eyes about it.’
‘No, she won’t. Like I said, fear of god. And if we centre our narrative on Dylan G versus Lily – a hero versus villain story – rather than on Dylan G and Amanda – a hero protects damsel story – then we can gloss over any potential girl-crush content and—’
‘Look at the diagram you’ve just drawn, Murray,’ Suzette said.
My scribbles were an incomprehensible tangle of lines.
‘The very first thing you taught me when I started working with you was that reality TV is a broad-strokes medium. “Subtext is for cowards”, I believe your exact words were.’
Suzette gestured at the whiteboard. ‘How do you expect the audience to understand any of this? I don’t.’
