‘Tell you what,’ Romeo-Dylan said. ‘Lily, how about you come with me for a while, and we’ll leave Amanda and Dyl to finish this off.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Dylan said. ‘She’s not getting alone time with you. She doesn’t deserve that.’
I recognised the look on Romeo-Dylan’s face. I wore it myself on the regular. I call it ‘oh no, there is no way here to make everyone happy’.
(I never said it was acatchyname. I’m a mechanic, not a poet.)
But even my niceness had its limits. ‘I don’t care what you do with her,’ I said, kneeling back down in front of the wreckage of the love machine. ‘Just get her the fuck away from me.’
I didn’t realise until much later that they didn’t make me reshoot for swearing.
‘What the hell?’ Dylan demanded, when Z announced that Parisa, Kumiko and Jess D had won the challenge. ‘They only got eight hearts into the pool. We got seventeen! That’s more than twice as many!’
My rage had subsided enough for me to feel some pride at that. The love machine I’d built was clearly the best one of the bunch. By far.
‘Ah, but we never said that the team who got the most hearts into the pool would be the winners,’ Z said. ‘Little did you know that while you were building your love machines, one of our Romeo Dylan’s best friends was watching your every move.’
‘Who?’ Kumiko asked.
‘How?’ Naya asked.
‘Dylan JM’s friend was the one responsible for picking the winning team today,’ Z went on, ignoring them. ‘But because they’re his friend, they were also looking for red flags – for women who might not be right for our Romeo. And I’m sorry to say, they spotted one.’
That could mean literally anyone on my team. My whole body went cold for a moment.
It wasn’t any of us, though. ‘Heather, your heart isn’t the other half of mine,’ Romeo-Dylan said. ‘We’re on very different pages, and I don’t think it’s right that you continue on this journey.’
‘What?’ Heather exclaimed. ‘This is bullshit.Bull. Shit!’
‘I wonder what she did,’ I said a while later, as the five of us who hadn’t won trudged back up the hill to the Villa.
‘Hmmm?’ Dylan said.
‘Heather,’ I said. ‘I wonder what she did.’
‘Oh,’ Dylan said. ‘Probably something racist, knowing her.’
‘What?’
The answer came from an unexpected source. ‘She was super racist,’ Lily said.
‘Thank you!’ Naya said. ‘I thought I was going crazy for a while there. I’m so glad it wasn’t just me.’
‘I was making toast one morning and she was all like, “Oh wow, I didn’t think you people ate normal people breakfast!”’ Dylan said, putting on a high-pitched voice.
‘What did she think you ate?’ Naya asked.
‘No fucking clue,’ Dylan said.
‘She asked me if I felt bad that my people had spread the virus around the world,’ Lily said.
‘She did not!’ Naya exclaimed.
‘She did,’ Lily said. ‘Then I told her I was Vietnamese, and she was like, “So? It’s all the same, isn’t it?”’
‘Fucking hell,’ Dylan muttered.
‘What did you do?’ Naya asked.
