Page 26 of The True Love Experiment

The reminder crashes into the forefront of my thoughts, and I blink away. “I had a thought about the show.”

She glances up at me and laughs. “I hope you’ve had more than one.”

“This is specifically about the title. What do you think about calling itThe True Love Experiment?”

“I think I’m mad I didn’t come up with it myself.”

A sunburst of pride spreads quickly through my torso. “Brilliant.” I reach for a mystery taco. “So, to recap: We’ll cast the eight Hero archetypes. Filming will be Monday to Thursday, with Friday for crash editing, and a Saturday broadcast. Voting will take place over twenty-four hours after the episode airs, and the following Monday we’ll reveal to the cast who has made it through each round.”

She mumbles a happy sound around a bite.

“And,” I continue, “I think we should go in with the understanding that the show won’t be so heavily produced. I don’t mean from an aesthetics angle, but the actual story lines. I’ve been thinking quite a bit on this, and I really want to do something different, as much as we can. From what I gather, some of these shows are plotted out from episode one, which makes me question the sincerity of any relationship that comes out of them. Since viewers will be voting on our outcome, we want to give them the truest possible narrative we can.”

She nods, licking her lips again, and it splits my focus into foggy tendrils. I squeeze my eyes closed for a beat to recapture the thread.“Because it’s a limited series, you’ll only really be tied up for about five weeks.”

“Tied up, huh?” Fizzy grins. “Sounds fun.”

“You’re trouble.”

She laughs. “I think that’s why you chose me.”

“Ichoseyou because you’re beloved by your fan base. But yes, I am excited to do this in part because you’re also a bit mischievous.”

“Excited?” She drops her balled-up napkin and plants her elbows on the table. “That’s a new development.”

I take a bite, chew. “What can I say? I am continually evolving.”

“I see that.”

“I know this matters to you,” I tell her. “I want you to know it matters to me, too.”

Fizzy takes a long breath, opens her mouth to speak, and then seems to change track. “You said you moved here when you were fifteen?”

A flicker of unease quells the vibrating hum in my blood, and I take a bite to delay what I suspect will be a gentle but surgical interrogation. “Yes, that’s right.”

“And your mother is the Brit?”

I nod. “She lives with her parents now, just outside Blackpool, but she met my father when she was studying abroad in the States. She got pregnant, and my father wasn’t interested in being a father yet. He’d visit every year or so to pop in and tell her what she was doing wrong.”

“Wow, sounds like a nice guy.”

“He’s a mixture of unbearably selfish and unremittingly dutiful.”

She laughs at this. “Why’d you go live with him?” I narrow myeyes at her, calculating whether I want to get into it, and she smiles under the inspection. “What?” she asks. “Is this storyescandaloso?”

“Perhaps a bit.”

“Oh, well now you have to tell me.”

“My mum and I were in a very bad car accident when I was twelve. We were both fine, eventually, but the entire thing really shook her up.”

Fizzy’s expression straightens. “Oh no.”

“For… a few years,” I explain, “Mum didn’t leave the house. I had to for school, of course, and to take on odd jobs. But she suffered from a great deal of anxiety. This whole period is when I got into film, so I can’t resent the solitude, but in hindsight I do see how much I missed of my adolescence.” Before this can veer too bleak, I wrap it up: “Anyway, my father visited when I was fifteen and didn’t like what he saw. By then he’d married and had a couple of kids with my stepmother, but eventually Mum conceded that I needed a change of scenery and agreed to let him take me until I was ready to go to university.”

“Do you ever go back to England?”

“Of course,” I say. “I spend some Christmases there. I speak to my mother regularly. I’d planned to move back after I’d graduated uni, but life had other plans.”

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