I want to put off leaving, to extend the conversation as long as I can. But the cameramen are waiting for me, and I’m only here to do a job. “I should be going. But I’ll see you in a couple of weeks at the castle.”
“At the castle!” She rolls her eyes up to the ceiling. “Oh my god, this is really happening.”
“It is,” I tell her with a chuckle, and then I say goodbye and walk out to the car to meet Dustin and Ken. Ken lives nearby, so he took his own car, but I drove out from the studio with Dustin. When I come out, Ken’s already gone, and Dustin is sitting in the driver’s seat with the key in the ignition and the radio cranked all the way up. I wave goodbye to Kristin, who is waiting in her own car, and then climb in.
Dustin immediately turns the radio down. “Well done, man.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, yeah. You had her eating out of the palm of your hand.”
That should be good to hear, but I’m not sure it’s a compliment that I’m good at manipulating women. I knew what I was signing up for, but it felt a lot less real before I had to actually do it.
“You guys were in there for a while,” Dustin says, starting the car. “What’d you talk about?”
“Just some worries she had.”
He nods like that’s not out of the ordinary, which is good. I don’t want to get a reputation for being too close to the contestants. I imagine a lot of new producers screw this up by getting confused about what’s real and what’s for show. “That’s great. She trusts you already.”
“That’s what I was supposed to do, right?” I say. “They wanted me to gain her trust. Is it okay that I let her go off camera like that?”
“Yeah, sure,” he says. “Producers do that all the time. It’s a good way to get them to feel like they can tell you everything, and then when the cameras are on, you know exactly what buttons to push.”
That sounds like an awful thing to do to Becca, who I think actually trusts me.
Shit, is that what I was doing in there?
“That’s how you get them to be vulnerable on camera,” I say.
“Oh, yeah.They start to feel like you’re on their side after a while. It’s like Stockholm syndrome.”
Oh my god. “Stockholm syndrome? Like we’vekidnappedthem?”
“Pretty much, yeah. I mean, they’re stuck in the castle, cut off from the outside world, and they desperately want a friend they can trust, so they’ll believe anything you tell them. Why do you think the girls always say they didn’t expect to feel the way they do? It’s crazy, but it works.”
I stare at the dash. Isthatwhat I’ve signed myself up for? When I took this job, I envisioned all these girls being as whiny and bitchy as they appear on the show.They signed up for this knowing what was going to happen to them.
But did they really? Are they aware of how much they’re going to be manipulated?
Am I really ready to do that to someone as awesome as Becca?
“She seemed like a cool girl, yeah?” I say. I want to hear that I’m not alone in thinking this.That it’s normal to feel a little off-kilter after interviewing a gorgeous, incredible woman who is also untouchable.
“Oh, yeah, she’s got that hot mom thing going on.”
“Hot mom?”That’s not exactly what I was thinking. I would go with plain hot and awesome. “Are you calling her a MILF?”
“Yeah, totally,” he says. “You don’t agree?”
I mean. “She’s hot, man. I’ll give you that.”
“I don’t think she’ll last long, though,” Dustin goes on. “She’s got a good sympathy story, so I’d give her a couple weeks. But if she doesn’t get in on the drama, she’ll probably be gone after that.”
“Unless Prince Charming is into her.”
“I guess.Though, you know what you should do with her? Figure out who in the group is threatened enough by her that they’ll say something bad about her kids.Then Mama Bear will come out.”
“Oh my god,” I say. “So nothing is sacred, then.”
