‘I wonder what it’s like in the Convent,’ I said, peeling off the other eyelash. ‘It doesn’t look very big. It can’t have more than one bathroom. It might be okay now, but when we get deep into the competition and nearly everyone is down there, it’ll be a nightmare situation.’
Dylan shuddered. ‘Let’s hope we never have to find out.’
I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? At least one of us was going to experience the Convent sooner or later, and it was almost certainly going to be me.
Someone hammered on the bathroom door. ‘Hurry up!’ Lily yelled. ‘Some of us have skincare routines to do!’
‘All of us have skincare routines to do!’ Dylan yelled back, before turning back to the mirror and making a face. ‘Why couldn’t it have been her who went?’
I opened my mouth, stopped, thought for a moment, thenturned the tap on as high as it could go in case someone was listening. ‘I think Lily’s a producer plant,’ I whispered.
Dylan paused, halfway through wrapping her hair up in a silk scarf. ‘What?’ she whispered back.
I told her what I’d seen in the maze. ‘Sorry I didn’t tell you before,’ I said, ‘but it’s so hard to get you alone without the cameras or a million people around.’
A muscle had started twitching above one of Dylan’s eyebrows again.
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘I really am sorry.’
Because I was looking at her in the mirror, I couldseeher pull herself back together, the same way I did sometimes. ‘I’m not mad at you, Mandie,’ she said. ‘Of course I’m not.’
Lily pounded on the door again. ‘Hurry up!’
‘Are you mad at her, then?’ I said. ‘It makes sense to me, actually. Surely no one could be such a cartoon mean girl by accident.’
‘It’s not that either,’ she said. ‘I just… fuck, I hate feeling like a chess piece.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, flipping my head over, tying my hair into a topknot, and then straightening back up.
‘We’re not people in here,’ Dylan said. ‘We’re puppets. They’re pulling our strings and making us dance so they can put on their big show, and there’s nothing I – we – can do about it.’
She threw all her stuff back into her make-up bag and zipped it, so forcefully I was worried it would break. ‘You’re the only thing in here I know for sure is real, Mandie,’ she whispered, meeting my eyes in the mirror.
Dylan’s face was drawn the next morning after her daily phone call with Noah. ‘Is everything okay?’ I asked her, as we sat down on the sofas for the next group date card reveal.
‘Noah’s good, he’s fine,’ she confirmed, squishing in close to me so Parisa could sit beside her. ‘I’m just – ugh.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing new, anyway. It’s just hard, being away from him.’
She sighed. ‘He started crying on the phone. My ex made some off-the-cuff comment about how fun it was to have Noah living with him and his wife, and Noah interpreted that to mean that he’d be living there forever now, and he was like, “Mummy, why don’t I live with you now, don’t you love me anymore?”’
‘Oh God, Dylan,’ I said. ‘That’s brutal.’
‘I’ve explained to him so many times that this is just temporary, that I’m just going away for a little while so I can be home with him more often,’ she said. ‘So many times, Mandie. But I don’t know how to make him believe me. And the mum guilt is piling on top of the nurse guilt, and…’
Her voice trailed off. I reached over and squeezed her fingers. ‘I’m sorry you’re going through this,’ I said. ‘I wish there was more I could do to help.’
She squeezed back. ‘Just keep telling me that I’m in the right place,’ she said. ‘That I’m doing the right thing.’
‘You’re in the right place,’ I told her. ‘You’re doing the right thing.’
She let her head fall onto my shoulder. ‘Maybe if I can work out how to believe you when you say that to me,’ she said, ‘I can work out how to make Noah believe that I haven’t abandoned him.’
My name wasn’t on the next group date card (‘Roses are red, bright is the sun, if you want to find love, how far will you run?’). Dylan’s wasn’t either, which I was surprised about, but it made sense the next day, when Marija read out the single date card. ‘Roses are red, Darth Vader’s a villain,’ she said, ‘I’ve found an oven, bake with me, Dylan?’
‘Oh my God, you’re going to the Romeo Residence!’ Belinda squealed. ‘You lucky bitch.’
