But now that she’s back in the creepy, boring park, she thinks Jaden must be right. The destruction at the camp was staged. She doesn’t think it was another contestant, though. She thinks it was the game itself.
That’s why she hasn’t seen any cameras. It’s not a traditional reality show. It’s a horror reality show.
She watched something sort of like this, once. They took a bunch of college students to a house, told them about the grisly murders that had happened there, explained past hauntings, then led them to the most haunted spot in the woods and had them report on what they felt. Almost all of them felt something—intense cold, an inexplicable presence, overwhelming fear.
Only after everyone had shared their experiences did the filmmakers explain that the house had been built only ten years prior and there was no history of violence or hauntings or really anything, at all, there.
Most laughed it off, sheepish. A few still insisted that something must have happened that no one knew about, because they felt what they felt and wouldn’t deny it. It was meant to make a point about how we trick ourselves into feeling things, but really, it made a point about how we trick other people into feeling things.
Ava is pissed. It’s fucking rude that they were brought here under false pretenses. Lied to. Misled. Maybe the early contestants were in on it. Setting up things for the others to find, like the lost jewelry. Hell, with her conveniently horrifying backstory, maybe Mack is a plant. She could be an actress.
Ava stumbles, Jaden’s arm around her catching her. If Mack’s a plant, and Jaden’s the one who told the story about her, then he’s in on it, too. That would be super unethical, right? To get into a physical relationship with her—what little they had managed on a cot in the middle of other people, but still—when he was an actor and she wasn’t in on it? Surely that wasn’t legal. Had she signed something in the NDA that made it okay?
No. No way. Besides, how good would an actress have to be to be Mack? Ava has a sense for bullshit—she’s worked enough service jobs to be able to bullshit with a smile in the most aggravating situations—and nothing about Mack seems fake or like a performance.
It doesn’t make sense.
But none of this makes sense, and the idea of the whole game being a mean-spirited deviation from what they were told is more comforting than the idea that there really was something violent that went down at the camp.
Maybe Jaden’s right. Maybe Ava and creepy LeGrand set it up to freak them out. She could see Ava being that ruthless, that clever. Almost admires her for it.
Or maybe Mack really did do it, either to win, or because she’s so completely twisted from what happened to her that she wants to break everyone around her. Again, doesn’t seem like Mack. But Ava doesn’t really know Mack, does she? She doesn’t really know any of them. Except Jaden, and she doesn’t know him, just his type.
Still, he’s being nice this morning, and she can sense an impending ending, but she’ll take this calm before the storm. Maybe tonight they’ll part ways. She’ll break it off with him. But in a friendly way, so he doesn’t retaliate. I don’t want to hold you back. Or, I don’t want you to feel like you have to worry about me. You should focus on winning for yourself. Those are both good options. Implying that it’s obvious he’ll win, and she’s happy about it. Bullshitting with a smile.
She wonders what the other Ava and Brandon and Mack and LeGrand are doing right now. If they’re freaking themselves out even more, or if they’re having fun at her expense. She hopes not. She’d rather they be scared than laughing at her. She doesn’t know that’s the biggest thing she has in common with Jaden.
A slight but telltale gush between Ava’s legs rips her back into the present. She swears softly.
“What?” Jaden snaps.
“Nothing.” Her period, right now, of all times. Another reason to wish she had gone with the others. At least Mack and the other Ava might have something on them. She really doubts Jaden thought to grab pads from the bathroom before they left.
Praying that it’s not her period, or that it’ll be a trickle of a first day before her usual apocalyptic bleeding, Ava scurries to catch up to Jaden. “It’s almost light,” she says, noticing how soft the night is getting, the sky shifting from indigo to something weaker, watered down.
“It’s fine,” Jaden says. “We’re almost there.”
The tracks would have been a good spot, and they seemed stable enough, but it was nice of him to worry about her. Maybe she’s wrong about him. Maybe underneath the muscles and the posturing he’s not like every other version of him she’s dated before. She should give him the benefit of the doubt. She’s the one who’s being unfair.