Night One Miranda wants me to act like I'm about to meet my husband. She says I should walk toward him like I'm walking down the aisle. Through the dark tinted window of the limousine, Dylan looks like the model in a Folgers commercial, so blandly hot that he could be anyone's husband, which is exactly why he was picked for the role. Miranda starts counting down for the woman across from me to exit the car first. The next time she gets to one, it will be my turn. I'll step out of the limo and make my debut on national television. The first woman seems composed as she greets him, her cornflower blue silk dress flowing over her thin frame, and her skin like the skin of a regal baby in a painting. They hug, talk back and forth a bit, laugh, and hug again. I want him to look at me the way he's looking at her already, his eyes crinkling at the edges with a smile. I can be desirable if I try hard enough. In my regular life, I do it all the time, pouting about the heat so my downstairs neighbor will install my window A/C unit for me, laughing too hard at barely a joke from a man on the phone to get a discount on my renter's insurance. It's never come naturally to me, not that it needs to. I learned how the world works by being a quick study. When the tall double doors of the mansion close behind the first woman, Miranda starts counting again. On the ride over, all of us took tequila shots. I sweated through each curve of the desert road, up the scrubby hills toward my potential future husband. We bit down on pristine wedges of lime from the minifridge, careful to not smudge our lipstick on the rinds, and then we screamed. I tried not to think about what I was getting myself into. Earlier today, when I modeled different outfits for Miranda, she said it was an asset that I never watched the show. "What's he going to be like?" I asked her for what felt like the hundredth time. I was in a ribbed butter yellow dress, so cheaply made that it pilled beneath my armpits within fifteen minutes of wear, as though it was only ever supposed to be looked at and never used. "Tall," Miranda said. I spun, and Miranda shook her head no, vetoing the dress. "Stop overthinking. He's going to like you." "And if he doesn't?" "Then eventually you'll go home, and then three months from now, you'll see yourself on TV and think, 'My whole life is different now. Better. Thanks, Miranda.' Trust me," she said. "I do trust you," I said. "Good. You'll need to." When Miranda gets to one, the driver opens the door and the damp skin on my thighs, exposed through the slits of my jumpsuit, shears off from the leather seat. In my peripherals, there's an encampment of tents, travel trailers, filming equipment, and porta-potties. Two women dressed in black sit on a grassy slope behind the limousine, staring at a phone. The blue light illuminates their faces. My own phone was taken away as soon as I landed at LAX, and I miss its pretty, sedative glow. I had trouble falling asleep the first few nights at the hotel away from it, my brain unable to slow down without the anonymous lull of my Instagram suggested page, filling in square after square of lithe dancing teens and reports of dogs elected as small-town mayors. Next to the women on the grass, a cameraperson sits behind a rig the size of a medieval catapult and turns the camera toward me. "Thank you," I say to the driver as he shuts the door behind me, a habit ironed into me by my mother. Thank the bus driver when you leave. Thank the men who hold doors for you at church. Thank the cashier at 7-Eleven for giving you free coffee every morning for being pretty, sixteen, and in a Catholic school uniform. Thank as many people as possible, and then, every morning and night, thank God for all your blessings. The driver nods and backs away. When I feel brave enough to look up at Dylan, he's focused on Miranda, who has slunk out from the passenger door. "Again," she calls out. The catapult camera swings back toward the fountain to recapture my entrance. "Don't thank the driver. I thought I told you that." "Oh, sorry," I say. I apologize more loudly to Dylan, who's smiling at me across the driveway. "Think of them as moving furniture." He gestures to the vast number of people responsible for creating the atmosphere for us to fall in love, which seems at least a little ungrateful. Dylan tries to ask my name, but Miranda yells at him from inside the limo to cut it out. "Patience is a virtue," I respond, and I know it's a good line, that I'm being alluring. Back in the limo, Miranda starts counting as soon as the door shuts and the other women stay silent. As we drove here, I tried to think about what made me stand out from them, but we're all slim and beautiful, dressed up like it's an adult prom. I've heard that in the dank corners of boys' locker rooms women are ranked by two factors: tits and ass. Whatever television executives chose Dylan to be the One would pick someone more evolved, surely, but as each of us parades in front of him for ninety seconds max, he can't rank us on much else. My assets on both counts seem to be lacking. I'll have to make a go of it based on a sugar-sweet personality. When I get out the second time, I stare at his hair, parted down the middle. It's almost unfashionable, but for some reason it looks good, so precisely tousled that he must have his own hairstylist. He may even be wearing makeup. Later tonight, I could touch his hair and find out if it's stiff with gel or crispy with mousse. Now that I'm here, I could press my lips, coated in a dry cupcake-flavored liquid lipstick, against his and see if any of his balm comes off on my own. The makeup artist kept referring to the color as "your lips, but better." This seems to be the general perspective of the show. I'm going to date, but better. I'll showcase my personality, but better. If I do a good enough job, my life, too, will end up being better. "Hi, I'm Emily," I say. "Dylan," he answers. "You look great in that dress." For a second, I go to correct him, but decide against it. I'm not even sure if men like him understand what a jumpsuit is and, further, I'm not sure how I would explain it. It's a dress, but it has legs. It's supposed to be sexy, as the entirety of my naked back is visible, but cool, in that I'm in the minority of women not wearing sequins tonight. Because I'm trying to show that I have independent thoughts: I'm supposed to wear a formal dress to this event, but instead I'm wearing something that only looks like a formal dress. It's meant to be subversive. "Oh, thanks," I say. "I've been looking forward to meeting you and to beginning this adventure." Miranda told me to call my time on the show an adventure or a journey, and never a process, situation, or circumstance. She kept telling me I needed a hook for when I introduced myself to Dylan. I tried to make a pirate joke and she didn't laugh. She offered up ideas about costumes, fancy transportation, animal sidekicks, special gifts from home, and musical performances. She said I should show him that I'm down-to-earth. She asked if I had any cute photos of me and livestock that I could share with him, or if I had a sweet old granny who lived on a farm who could write an encouraging note for me to carry around. If it happened to slip out of my pocket and fall directly at Dylan's feet, then so be it. I failed to answer a series of probing questions about what I liked. "I don't know," I kept saying. "I like everything." Eventually, she told me to say my name and something flattering. The day before I auditioned for the show back in Boston, I had been fired from my job as an administrative assistant at a biotech start-up. My boss told me that, as I could probably guess, it wasn't working out. I nodded, though I hadn't expected it. I had been working there for almost two years with the same total lack of skill and enthusiasm. I didn't know why he'd decided he no longer wanted me. Whenever my semiannual reviews approached and I got worried about my nonexistent deliverables beyond refilling the staplers, I googled whether or not I would be terminated. The forums said as long as I had a cheery disposition, I would be fine, so I baked treats for the office every week and had extended chats with the annoying men from the research unit as they walked by my desk. I kept a special calendar of staff birthdays and wrote handwritten notes to celebrate them. In a generous estimate, I spent about 10 percent of my time each day doing my actual job, which involved organizing detailed meeting agendas and the endless scheduling for said meetings. The professional advice columns told me that managers hate firing people. It's such a hassle for them, I've read, so I apologized to my boss for the inconvenience. The next morning during rush hour, I took the bus into the city wearing business casual. I wanted the semblance of a commute, though I was only going to a coffee shop to trawl through job boards all day and drink cup after cup of frothy matcha lattes that cost $6.50 including tip. A woman stopped me on the street, and I looked at the ground, thinking I had dropped something. She was dressed like the kind of young professional I wanted to be, pretty in a loose geometric-printed top and white pants. She asked me if I had heard of The One and I said that I had. I'd never seen it but knew about it in the way that everyone did: each season alternating between helicopter rides and women sobbing, then switching to giant jacuzzis and men shedding a single tear. The woman was a casting associate in town for a general recruitment day at the hotel ballroom down the street. She showed me her badge for the event and pointed to the sign outside the hotel's wide automatic doors. It featured a woman with a beatific smile and floating script above her head reading, "Are you ready to find The One?" The hotel was fancy enough to have red carpeting extending out toward the street, with bellhops and their gleaming golden carts in front. "I love your look. You'd be a fresh face. A breath of fresh air," the casting assistant said, and then asked if I would be interested in learning more. She was heading there now, and if I had a few minutes, they could do a short screen test before the throngs of other women arrived. The event was to ensure they had a backlog of willowy young singles at their disposal, but there was a last-minute opening for the season that was about to start filming. The whole thing felt like a happy coincidence, a pot of gold dropped in my lap if only I had the gall to take it, and I had no reason to say no. I told myself I could be done applying for jobs that day, postponing the hours of reformatting my résumé, pressing the space key again and again to make sure all my life experiences were perfectly aligned. If I got a callback, I would be even more pleased. I didn't have any memorable experiences to share at dinner parties, and it would be a quirky story to tell if I ended up on the show. "I'm actually in the market for a new opportunity," I answered, and thus my journey to find love began. Four days later, as I slept on my flight to LA, Dylan was announced as the lead. Miranda, having already taken my phone, flipped through hers to show me photos of him. One was a screenshot of him at a tropical dais from last season, looking sweaty and upset. I assumed it was a photo of when he got dumped after proposing to the lead, a woman named Suzanne. I felt bad that millions of people had watched him perspire. Miranda said it was an ounce of sweat and tears for a whole lot of reward. She told me he was a fourth grade teacher, which was a good sign-not just a teacher but an elementary school teacher-because it meant he probably didn't have major issues with his masculinity. That, or he wanted a career surrounded by women where any semblance of caring behavior toward children would be celebrated as an astronomical feat, skyrocketing his hotness through the stratosphere. I thought about these scant facts for the next three days as Miranda shuttled me to meetings with other producers, a primary care doctor, a psychiatrist, and a cast therapist. Each night, I ended up back at my hotel room, where I filled out a five-hundred-question personality test. Trapped, I had to order room service for every meal with a hundred-dollar per diem, but the hotel food was so overpriced that I only ate appetizers. I watched the four channels of cable news for hours on end, the first time doing so since I was in middle school. It reminded me of my parents' house. I had nothing to click, nothing to do. Outside the mansion, Dylan tells me he's looking forward to talking to me more later tonight. As we hug goodbye, his breath skitters by my ear, warms my neck, and his eyes crinkle for me, too. I sway my hips as I walk away since I know he's watching me. Another cameraperson tracks me as I go through the doors. I'm desperate to hear that I'm doing a good job, to ask what Miranda has said into their earpiece, but I keep walking down a set of short steps that opens to a large living room. The prick of my heels on the tile echoes from my ankles to the walls and I can feel the reverberations in my rib cage. The first woman to enter, Winna, sits on the couch alone. Trays of crudités, dips, cold cuts, and crackers that look like fancy Ritz line a side table near her. "We're the first ones here," Winna says as though to welcome me. She has a thin flute of champagne in her hand and a stick of celery in the other. She's so thin that I can see her ribs through her dress like rungs in a ladder, making their way up to her long collarbones. "My friends back home made me watch the last season with Dylan after I applied. They wanted me to see the group of men the producers were going to pick from for the next One. They said the order of the limo exits matters, like the first ones and the last ones are the people who are wife material." "Oh, wow. I didn't know that. I'm Emily." We already exchanged names in the car, but I don't know what else to say. I try to think about our similarities, what makes us both wife material, but all that I can latch onto is that we were the only two women in the limousine who weren't blonde. For a second, I try to suss out whether she is prettier than I am, and hope she is doing the same to me. "Winna. You should sit down," she says, gesturing next to her. "I was feeling like a social pariah all alone in here." This is the kind of thing an actual social pariah would never admit to, which reassures me. I pick up a butter cracker and take a bite, caking my mouth with dry, salty dust. I have trouble forming an appropriate next sentence. The feeling of Dylan's breath on my neck still tingles there and my cheeks flush. "Did you know Dylan was the first out of the limo last season?" she asks into the silence. "Oh, wow," I repeat. "Well, this is looking good for you then." "I didn't mean it like that," Winna says. "I'm nervous. I'm just saying things. I'll feel better soon." "I'm nervous too." The ceilings are tall and vaulted. A large bronze statue that could be a vagina or a peapod takes up an enormous corner of the room. Out the window, twinkling lights dangle from the house to a gazebo. The circular pool shimmers blue like one of those tropical coves from the show's previews. The whole house and outdoors are alit, the studio lighting creating a false, bright daylight against the dark sky. "I'm glad it's him though. Dylan seems too mature for drama. He never got in a single fight last season," Winna says. I file this information away, hoping it will help me at a nebulous point in the future. "Hi, ladies," a woman says, wearing a fanny pack full of wiring and black rectangles. She hands me a glass of champagne. "The bartender is over in the kitchen and he'll be here all night. How many girls do you think are going to come?" "I don't know, at least two dozen more," Winna says. "Can you say it in a full sentence? And look at Emily." The producer knows my name, but I don't recognize her. She must have seen the mortifying headshot photo they made me take plastered up somewhere in the staff break room, my face on an index card, flipped over and shuffled before I arrived. At the shoot, the photographer kept telling me I needed to work my angles. Tilt your head, tilt your head, he said, as though he wanted me to pose like a mangled corpse in a horror film. It felt like school picture day when I would look panicked no matter how hard I tried to look my best. I would prepare for days in advance, picking an outfit and flipping through a girls' magazine for intricate braids and piecey updos I could never pull off. I would enter the classroom, the marbled blue screen behind me that you could pay extra to get photoshopped as another color, and feel confident. Weeks later, when I would open the set of 2x3 prints my mother bought in bulk, I was disappointed. How I looked in my mind was never how I looked on camera. I listened to the photographer against my better judgment, tilting my head. "Hands on your hips," he said, "girl power!" And I tried to listen to that too. Excerpted from The One by Julia Argy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
