Round one, a single product scavenger hunt, starts off with a bang.
Pat Crumsky reads out the first clue. “It’s a frosted menagerie for your mouth!”
“Frosted Animal Crackers!” I whisper-shout frantically in Leo’s ear, cupping with my hand so our competition can’t read my lips.
Leo bolts out from behind our podium like a racehorse. My heart pounds erratically as Leo disappears into the aisles. Bulked-up cameramen with heavy-duty equipment strapped to their torsos run after Leo, Alexia, and Darla.
Leo beelined straight for snacks. I have to watch on the monitors to see where he swerves next. With a plastic basket swaying from his muscular arm, he goes sheet-white panicked when he charges down the aisle and sees Alexia coming in from the other side.
I grip the sides of my podium, leaning forward, praying and hoping and cursing under my breath. Is this what a premature heart attack feels like? I could honestly pass out with nerves.
Leo lunges in front of Alexia grabbing a red box and causing a smattering of others to fall. Alexia, with catlike reflex, slides away before getting hit and grabs a pink box.
No...
Leo rounds the corner running back to me with his arms outstretched and a smile on his face not knowing he’s made a losing mistake. I’m shaking my hand, waving him back. I’m not allowed to speak or we lose automatically, but if he runs around one more time maybe we can still cinch this.
But Leo isn’t looking. He bypasses me and slams our buzzer.
Bzz.Alexia slams the buzzer on her Team Salmon Sliders podium second. Darla is way behind.
Pat comes over to us. “All right, Leo. The clue was:A frosted menagerie for your mouth. What product did you come up with?”
Leo’s smile falters when he holds up the box and registers his mistake, too. “Animal Crackers.”
Pat scrunches up his face. Or, gets as close to scrunching up his face as he can because of all the Botox. “Oh, no. I’m sorry that’s not the product we were looking for. Team Salmon Sliders buzzed in next.”
Alexia, flipping her hair out of her face with one hand and holding up the box with the other, says, “FrostedAnimal Crackers here, Pat.”
After they’re crowned the winners and given a twenty dollars off your purchase of one hundred or more for the final round, Buckley and Alexia hit me with matching sneers. I should’ve known, even back in the day when I felt like the third wheel despite being Buckley’s boyfriend, that this is how everything was going to shake out. I was the guy with the dead mom. I was never going to get happily-ever-after. The universe foretold that.
A bell rings and the director yells cut. Commercial jingles pipe in from overhead.
Leo leans in. “I’m sorry. I reached for the first box I saw.”
It’s like we’re back in the grocery store on that first day. I’m trying not to be annoyed with him over something out of his control. This set is overstimulation city. No wonder he had tunnel vision. Had I been the one running, I might’ve done the same thing. Except, it’s hard to sand off the edge to my voice when I say, “It’s fine.”
I can sense Buckley’s and Alexia’s smugness from across the room. It’s overpowering like the aroma of garlic in an Italian restaurant.
“We’ll get the next one. You’re going to crush the trivia round,” he says reassuringly, undeterred by my unwarranted exasperation.
Round two is more evenly matched than you might expect.
Flummoxed by us fumbling the bag in round one, my head is garbled, making identifying blurry produce and unscrambling animated alphabet soup even more daunting.
When Leo taps in, I can tell that he studied, but the cousin duo (Team Artichoke) to our left has this down to an art. All those times they auditioned must’ve really given them the training they needed because they hit the button with robotic superspeed.
“Celery!” Jessica shouts.
“Clam chowder!”
“Wagyu beef!”
They are an unstoppable right-answer machine, and we’re falling far behind.
But then, Pat Crumsky says, “On to our next trivia challenge: The Mighty Mascots.”
I perk up. My mind races with memories of Mom, to the silly voices she did when she pushed us down the aisles on a crisp December afternoon picking up snack foods and cereals.
