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Everly bit her bottom lip. No wonder the guests always looked like deer in headlights in the first episode. This was a literal ambush.
The showrunner’s hazel eyes scanned her. “We want to tell your story. There are so many people out there who will connect to it.”
What story? Everly’s list of fun facts included that she detested guacamole enough for it to be a defining character trait, she and her mother saw eye-to-eye on exactly nothing, and she knew zero fat people outside of the show’s forums. Not exactly the stuff of legendary TV.
For a second, she imagined herself sitting with Stanton at a fancy Mexican restaurant in Boston, cameras zoomed in to a close shot of their booth by the window. Sun glinted off the pane and caused the traffic lumbering by to glitter like diamonds. Stanton leaned in, his silky black curls falling across the rims of his round glasses. He knocked the strands out of his eyes. “Tell me about your hatred of guacamole, Everly,” he said seriously. Then he dug a tortilla chip deep into a mound of that green abomination and held it out to her. “We’ll face it together.”
Oh yeah, the Emmys would stream in.
Still, if they wanted her, the last thing Everly would do was talk them out of it. She was going to be on her favorite TV show. How many people got to say that?
“Let’s do it!” she declared, glancing up to catch the gaze of Sady or one of the hosts. Instead, her eyes locked on Logan, and as much as Everly tried, she couldn’t look away.
The first episode for a newOn the Plus Sideguest was always pure chaos. Jazzy and Stanton would burst into their home or workplace, exuberant and loud, chatting with everyone around them and rifling through their belongings to get a sense of who their newest participant was.
When they watched at home, Becca and Everly would speculate about how they’d react if they were the guest. Becca would cry. No question.Everly, they’d both agreed, would follow in the hosts’ wake, picking up every mess they made.
Except Everly was learning that the reality was even more out of control. There was no time to clean up when Jazzy was making James and the rest of the design team laugh as she tried on an old, pilly sweater Everly had left at the office, and Stanton was settling in at her desk, pawing through her Tasks folder and rearranging her figurines by size and color.
It was like being at a circus when all the acts were performing at once. Everly didn’t know where to look. What to do first.
Stanton leaned back, his tall body filling the chair, his camel-colored loafers propped up on the edge of the desk. The phone’s headset squashed his curls. “Is this what you looked like when I called a few minutes ago?”
Everly choked at the idea of Bob Matten, CEO and quintessential granddad, seeing her lounging at Reception like it was a resort pool. “That was you?”
Stanton had deep sable-colored eyes that practically twinkled when he grinned. “We had to confirm you were here before we came up.”
“Has that ever happened? That the guest wasn’t where they were supposed to be?”
“Episode one. Ashley had called in sick at the ice-cream parlor and no one told us. We burst in on this poor overworked teenage boy and about ten customers. Half the people dropped their cones on the floor in shock. Kids were crying. It was mayhem.”
Everly laughed, mentally filing away that tidbit to share with Becca. They were both obsessed with behind-the-scenesOTPSgossip.
“We learned our lesson after that. Always check first. The ice cream, though, was excellent.”
Stanton had set his feet back on the floor and was now unearthing Everly’s pens and markers from their (very strictly organized) mugs. If it had been anyone but Stanton Bakshi cultivating anarchy on her desk,she might have lost it. But as far as Everly was concerned, he and Jazzy could do no wrong.
She barely had a chance to inventory the pens he was tossing haphazardly into her drawers before Jazzy appeared at her side and slung an arm around Everly’s shoulder. “Soooooo… I’ve been looking at your social media.” She held her phone up between them.
Everly swallowed, knowing exactly what was coming. Jazzy hated when guests only wore dark colors. And since the end of her junior year in college, navy was probably the lightest one in Everly’s wardrobe.
But she wasn’t trying to hide her body like most of the show’s guests. It was more that she was trying to blend in.
Disappear.
With a perfectly manicured scarlet nail, Jazzy tapped open a photo slideshow. “What do you see?”
Everly cleared her throat. “An extensive palette of gray and obsidian hues,” she said with a hopeful grin.
Jazzy barked out a laugh. The sound, so familiar from years of watching and rewatchingOTPS,eased the growing knots in Everly’s shoulders. Jazzy and Stanton had always felt like home to her. They were their whole selves. They let their voices be heard. They didn’t let anything steal their joy.
The same way Grandma Helen had taught Everly to be, before she died. Before Everly was the only one left in her family who was, as her mom loved to say, “a bit too much.”
She wanted so badly to hug Jazzy. To thank her for all the times that her very existence had helped Everly feel less alone. Hopefully, sometime over the next few months, she’d find the courage to do it.
“Spoken like a true artist,” Jazzy said, still flipping through the photos.
“Wait.” Everly gestured to a picture of herself in a black-and-white-striped jumpsuit, which was now buried somewhere in the back of her closet. She’d forgotten how cute she looked in it. “Look. There’s some white.”
