Inside Straight

I glanced up and caught Jetman looking at me. I felt a stab of fear in my stomach. Maybe he was thinking of putting me in the Discards.

“You need to make your selections,” the Harlem Hammer said. His voice was deep and reminded me of the Barry White albums my parents used to play. I shoved that away, too. I tried not to think about my parents anymore.

Matryoshka pulled a card from his hand and placed it facedown on the table. Jetman followed.

“What’s it going to be, Bubbles?” the Hammer asked me. I couldn’t put it off any longer. I sighed and picked a card. The Harlem Hammer gathered our discards, shuffled them, and made a small deck.

He turned the first card over. Tiffani’s face stared up at us. I glanced at her. She gave me a tight smile, then looked back at the board.

The next card was Matryoshka. He frowned and shook his head slightly. Another card turned. Matryoshka again.

“One vote left. Is it going to be two pair or a set?”

With quick efficiency, The Hammer dealt the last card.

Matryoshka.

Tiffani breathed a sigh of relief. So did I.

Matryoshka and Jetman were already standing, shaking hands, and doing that back-slapping thing guys did to prove that they liked each other, but not in a “gay” way. I stood and walked around the table. Matryoshka and I hugged. He was a big guy, but his arms barely made it around my girth. I felt terrible that I had chosen him, but I had to think of the team—and who would be the best American Hero.

~ ~ ~

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at my reflection, depressed about voting Matryoshka off. I started thinking about all the other nice people I’d voted to discard. Blrr and the Maharajah were both really decent. Joe Twitch had some issues, though, and I knew he had pissed Tiff off.

“Michelle, you know you can’t be in there for too long.” It was Ink—again.

I glowered at my reflection. I’d been using a colored hair spray to change my platinum hair to black. The shade did nothing for me—turning my skin sallow rather than the pale olive luminescence which had earned me hundreds of thousands of dollars in modeling contracts. But no one had recognized me thus far. The dark hair alone wouldn’t have masked my identity—but my wild card did.

The face staring back wasn’t the one I knew. The upward-slashing cheekbones, so beloved by photographers, were buried under chubby pink flesh. The sculpted jaw line that had once made my neck look even more swanlike was obscured by a roll of fat. Only my eyes were unchanged. I called them dog-shit brown. They were fringed with one of my genetic quirks—a double row of long black lashes.

I was a freak of nature long before my card turned. I’m taller than average, and my legs and arms are abnormally long for my body. In short, I was a photographer’s dream. I’d been modeling since I was a child. My parents had leased me out to the highest bidder and exploited me like carnival barkers peddling Siamese twins.

But then my card had turned.

Things were different now. People didn’t stare at me in the same way. And when I did catch someone’s eye, now there was usually a breathtaking look of pity there.

Ink banged on the door again. “Michelle, you have a contract. Everyone else has already done their Confessional.”

“Can’t I go to the bathroom in peace?” I put the toilet lid up and let a small bubble rise on my fingertip, then let it drop into the water with a satisfying plop. It looked pretty until it hit—as iridescent and apparently insubstantial as any soap bubble. But I’d given it plenty of density, and it sounded convincingly turdlike. Unfortunately, it was heavy enough that it chipped the porcelain, but I decided that no one would be likely to notice. That should keep Ink from bugging me for a few minutes.

Then I felt crummy. Ink had been nice to me.

At least it still felt good to bubble. It tingled and sang in my bones and skin. Bubbling pulsed through my blood and throbbed like another heartbeat. Sometimes I thought I’d go crazy if I didn’t get to bubble more often—but the bubbling made me skinnier, and I couldn’t afford to be recognized.

“Are you okay?” Ink sounded worried.

“What’s going on?” I heard Tiffani ask.

I flushed the toilet and opened the door.

“You’re supposed to do a Confessional after Discard,” Ink said. She had changed her tattoos, and they scrolled across her arms like a crazy Mayan tally board.

“Are you okay?” Tiffani asked. She gave Ink a pleading look. “Can you guys give us just a few minutes?” If she had looked at me the way she was looking at Ink, I’d’ve agreed to anything. “Just have them turn on the shower cam. We’ll keep in range. I mean, it’s the bathroom. How far are we going to go?”

Ink snorted. “Fine. You have five minutes, and then I’m coming in with the whole crew.”

Tiffani and I went back into the bathroom and closed the door. The light on the shower cam blinked on.

“Okay, so why are you so depressed?” Tiff asked.