Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,2

unless you count the time he sent me a plastic-wrapped tray of hallucinogenic cookies.)

Suffice it to say, I was turned down for internships at all our nation’s great metropolitan newspapers, and quite a few of the not-so-great ones, too. Same story with the big magazines. And the TV news networks. Then Dad’s Irish peasant genes went and gave him cancer, and shortly after that god-awful funeral in the church he’d been to only once before, I embarked on my Novel of Immense Profundity. Or rather, I spent a year living at home, staring tearfully at an empty Word document. I wanted my book to be epic. A generation-spanning masterpiece. Something Gabriel García Márquez himself might have written. The problem was, I couldn’t decide where to set it. Long Island seemed too obvious. Aside from college, however, I’d never really been anywhere else before…

I was saved from this indecision by Brock—calm, funny, excitingly toned Brock Spencer Daniels—whose frat buddy worked at Rabbit News and was looking for a talent booker’s assistant. Before I knew it, I’d been offered the job—if the word “job” can be used to describe a position whose salary consisted of a MetroCard and a daily canteen allowance. My first assignment: help organize a panel interview with the cast and crew of Project Icon, led by none other than Leonard Braithwaite.

A couple of months later, Len called my cell (I hadn’t given him the number) to offer me a “dazzling opportunity in Hollywood, California.”

“I bet they’ve got you working for free over there at Rabbit, haven’t they?” he chuckled.

“Yes,” I admitted (stupidly).

“Well, then—I think we can offer you a raise,” he replied. “How does more than nothing sound?”

The line went fuzzy with laughter. To Len, the world’s funniest joke is the one he’s just told.

The money he offered wasn’t good, but it was good enough for Brock and me to hatch a plan: He’d move to Honolulu to focus on his “surfing career” (while making cocktails on the weekends and finding us a place to live), and I’d take the job at Icon until my savings account was refilled. Then I’d join him beachside to finish my novel. He’d win the MegaWave Super Crown. I’d win the Most Immensely Profound Novel of Our Generation Award.

We had it all worked out.

So off I went to LA.

“Another one of Len’s Lovelies, huh?” sneered the vinegar-faced woman in Icon’s accounts department on my very first morning. “Funny—they’re usually blondes, not redheads. His standards must be slipping.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just met Len’s wife.

2

A Horrible Farewell

I CHECKED THE TIME on my cell phone: Barely seven minutes to go now before the press conference—or “The Reveal” as Len insisted on calling it—was due to start.

The run-through.

Must do the run-through…

I began speed walking down a yellowing hallway, wondering vaguely if the exercise might spare me yet another depressing visit to the Starlight Gym on Hollywood Boulevard—which typically involved an hour of heavy breathing on an elliptical machine while staring at the absolute perfection of some cow town beauty queen’s Lycra-encased buttocks. I could definitely have used something to burn the dumpster-sized box of sticky buns that I had emptied into my digestive system earlier, when I thought Len wasn’t there. (No such luck. “Look, everyone, here comes Miss Cinnabon!” he’d boomed over the PA system during rehearsal.)

The corridor dead-ended.

Where the hell were the dressing rooms?

I wished for a moment we were on the more familiar territory of Greenlit Studios. It would be months before we reached that stage of the competition, however. For now, Project Icon was still touring from city to city, prescreening potential contestants. This week, conveniently, we were in LA—but we needed a venue with a big enough parking lot for the “cattle call” of mostly delusional masochists who wanted to line up all day for the opportunity to be insulted on TV. That’s why Len had rented The Roundhouse, a big old concrete arena down by the oil fields. The place had originally been designed to resemble a Roman coliseum, only they’d slathered the entire thing in cheap sixties stucco, so now it just looked like a giant overflowing porridge bowl.

“Six minutes!”

Shit.

Another corridor.

I broke into an undignified half-jog, half-run. At last, after turning a corner, there they were… two doors, side-by-side, a golden star on each. Pushing my hair back from my eyes, I tried to breathe deeply from my abdomen. “You’re a majestic mountain,” I told myself. Then I knocked twice loudly, in