Something Real (16 page)

“Boo … Hiss … Don’t quit your day job,” I snark.

“Okay, but, seriously, that first kiss sounded…” Here Benny shivers from head to toe.

“Benny, did you take an extra gay pill this morning?”

He throws the pillow at my face. “Did you take an extra bitch pill this morning?”

“My subconscious
sabotaged
my first and only date slash kiss. I think I am allowed an extra bitch ration for the day.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t solve our problem.”

We sit in silence for a few minutes, the house waking up all around us.

“We have to do the show, don’t we?” I ask miserably.

He frowns. “Yeah.”

“After we graduate, I’m immediately moving out. Even if I have to hook to scrape together the money.”

“Or you can write a tell-all. There’s just as much whoring, but you can work from home.”

“But I wouldn’t get to wear pleather stilettos and get beaten up by my pimp.”

Benny sighs. “Decisions, decisions.”

These are the kinds of pep talks reality TV kids have when the cameras aren’t rolling.

SEASON 17, EPISODE 11

(The One with the Photo Shoot)

Benny puts his arm around me as we make our way down the stairs.
Good Life
magazine is waiting. DeShaun™ and Deston™ (both fated to be professional wrestlers someday) career past us, whooping and shouting.

“Yo! Walk!” I yell.

Deston™ flips me off, and I stare at him, aghast.

Benny just shakes his head. “Chuck should never have given those fools Killer Kombat Five,” he says. I’m imagining what will happen to these boys, with their crazy reality TV life and dumbass video games.

“Don’t you think people should have to create, I don’t know, a mission statement or something when they start a family?” I ask.

Benny trips, cursing as he nearly breaks an ankle on a Barbie doll left on the stairs. He picks it up and hurls it down the hall, and there’s a satisfying
thunk
as it hits a door.

“Something like,
We at Baker, Inc., think that a child should be raised in the most stressful environment imaginable. That’s why we firmly believe in having so many children that you can’t remember all of their names
blahblahblah?” he asks.

“Yep. Sounds about right to me.”

When we step into the kitchen, all hell has broken loose. The triplets are sitting at the table arguing over the pros and cons of using OJ instead of milk in one’s cereal. The tween boys are shoving one another around (natch), and the tween girls are flitting in and out, casting shy glances toward the cameras. Farrow™ has spilled a bottle of nail polish on the new rug, and Tristan™ looks like he’s about to cry as he holds a crushed Lego superhero thing in his hands.

“Tristan™, it’s okay,” I say, wrapping an arm around him.

He just looks at the mangled body, shaking his head like he’s the only kid who’s not going to get adopted. He’s sensitive, and Mom worries he’s falling behind developmentally. Which is, of course, why she’s now agreed to have him filmed 24/7. I wonder if he wishes a different American family had adopted him.

“We’ll fix it later, I promise,” I say. He leans into me, and after a minute or so, I feel his thin body shudder against my side. I kiss the top of his head—it smells like Play-Doh.

Mom gives us a frazzled wave as I pass her, apparently deciding to forget the whole argument for now, and then turns back to Sandra, who goes back to plucking at Mom’s eyebrows with a medieval torture device. Puma Guy starts to shadow me as I struggle to get to the refrigerator, like he’s a shark following the scent of blood.

“Where should we set up wardrobe?” asks an arty-looking woman.

“Uh, let’s do it in the family room,” says Sandra.

“Great,” the woman says. She opens the front door and shouts, “Family room!”

Two seconds later, racks of clothing wheel by, followed by a couple of carts with boxes labeled SHOES and ACCESSORIES.

“Props in the dining room!” calls a lanky man of utter fabulosity.

I can see that over his shoulder our dining room is being transformed into the kind of chic, glossy space you see in magazines. A girl pushes past me, holding bags from Whole Foods.

“Sorry!” she calls over her shoulder.

“No problem,” I mumble.

“So, like I was saying, we don’t have anything you’d call a ‘quiet day,’” my mom is saying to a thin, fashionable woman with a mini tape recorder in her hand.

“How do you manage it all?” she asks.

“Well, I’m pretty organized. Kirk and I have synchronized calendars on our phones, which we update constantly. I have a whiteboard over near the kitchen table where I write announcements. I have to admit, I have literally e-mailed some of my older kids before!”

I pull open the fridge and pretend to have trouble choosing the kind of yogurt I want so that I can hear what Mom’s telling her.

The reporter laughs and looks down at the list in her hand. “So why have you decided to do the show again?”

This should be good.

“I want to reach out to other women like me. Women who are having trouble creating families of their own or struggling to move on after a divorce.” Her voice grows soft. “I want to encourage them not to give up. At the end of the day, there’s nothing better than being surrounded by your kids.
Nothing.
”

It’s weird thinking about us Bakers influencing people, considering we’re probably America’s most dysfunctional family. I almost feel bad for anyone who watches us and can feel
inspired
. That’s ten kinds of messed up.

I grab a yogurt, then fish around in a nearby drawer for a spoon. Mom calls Daisy™ over so that she can braid her hair while she interviews.

“Last question,” the reporter says to Mom. “As I’m sure you know, the
New York Times
recently reported that since your adoption of Deston™ and DeShaun™ through the foster care system, there has been a forty percent increase in foster parent applications. How does it feel to know you’ve touched so many lives?”

Mom’s lip trembles a little. “You know, when Andrew and I decided to work with foster kids after so many international adoptions, it was a scary step. But it was so rewarding. I love my sons, and I’m incredibly thankful that they’re a part of our family. I’m so happy that our experiences have encouraged people to open up their homes. There are so many kids in need.”

“And it wouldn’t have happened unless you’d done
Baker’s Dozen
. No regrets?”

Mom gives a firm shake of her head. “None. I wouldn’t have any of my children without MetaReel’s help, and that’s the truth. This show gave me my family. I’ll be forever grateful.”

I’m guessing she means MetaReel footed the bill for all the expensive adoptions and procedures, but it’s crappy to know we wouldn’t exist as a family without a major corporate sponsor.

“Excuse me, Bonnie™?”

I turn around, prepared to scowl, but the guy with the fancy camera around his neck is kinda hot. Like rugged, foreign correspondent hot.

“Yeah?” I say, wishing I had at least run a brush through my hair.

“I’m Eric. I’ll be doing some candid shots throughout the weekend. I just wanted to say hi and see if it’s okay if I get you in some of them.”

“Um, sure. Yeah, that’d be fine.” I can see Benny snickering out of the corner of my eye, so I tilt my head so I can’t see him.

“Great,” Eric with baby blue eyes and sexy tattoos says. “I just figured you probably get sick of people shoving these in your face all the time.”

I grin. “You have
no
idea. I appreciate you asking.”

He smiles and walks over to where Tristan™, DeShaun™, and Deston™ are arm wrestling.

“I appreciate you asking,” Benny says in a falsetto, batting his eyelashes.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Do you think you should play Two Minutes in the Closet with him before or after we break for lunch?”

“How,” I ask, “are you always so horny? My God, doesn’t Matt do enough for you?”

“A gentleman never tells,” he says.

Lacey Production Assistant walks in, a clipboard pressed against her chest and a walkie-talkie strapped to the waist of her skinny cords. She and Lex are doing the girl compliment game, where you go back and forth and say “Oh, I like your (fill in the blank); where did you get it?” until one of you runs out of things to point and squeal at.

Chuck waddles into the room, all three hundred pounds of him, and claps his hands to get our attention. “Okay, folks, let’s get started!”

The room goes as silent as it can when there are thirty, no, wait, here are six more, and I haven’t even counted the camera dudes—

“There are forty goddamn people in this house right now,” I whisper to Benny.

He rolls his eyes.

Chuck is still talking. “Today and tomorrow are going to be pretty hectic around here. Let’s not forget that this is a
home
, so please clean up after yourselves. A quick reminder that the second floor is totally off-limits to the magazine crew. Now, I’m going to turn it over to Melissa Shapiro from
Good Life
.”

The woman with the tape recorder smiles and waves. “Hey, everyone. We are
so
excited to have you on our January cover! I promise we’re going to have a lot of fun this weekend.”

Benny coughs, but I know I’m the only one who hears him say
bullshit
.

“Now,” she continues, “we’re going to do a big family shot outside and then after lunch we’ll do a dinner scene in the dining room. No eating the props until after we’re done!” The room fills with polite chuckles. “Tomorrow we’ll be at Harvest Studios for the actual cover shoot. I need all the ladies to hair and makeup, which is in the kids’ classroom for today, and, guys, we need you in wardrobe. Let’s have a great shoot!”

Everyone claps, but I just busy myself with a scone in between texting Tessa and Mer. No, I tell them, I can’t go to a movie or the mall.

Chuck: “Bonnie™, can I have a quick word?”

I sigh and put my phone in my back pocket, following him to the front porch. He stops a few feet away from the tent that MetaReel has already put up at the side of the house. This is where the monitors are—one for each camera. Crew I rarely see sit in front of them in director’s chairs, their headsets on, oblivious to the world around them as they focus on the filming inside.

“What’s up?” I say.

Little beads of sweat line his upper lip, and his eyes flit over me like he’s an appraiser who finds I’ve come up short.

“Well, sweetheart, I feel like we got off on the wrong foot. I can see this is hard for you, but I hope you know I’m on your team.”

I want to say, No, Chuck, you are
not
on my team, but I just stand there and shrug. I’m gutless like that.

He sighs, like I gave him the wrong answer to a test question. “Look, hon. I hope you’re thinking about the big picture here. Because the show is a great opportunity for you to set the record straight about all that nonsense back in season thirteen. It’s your chance to show the world you’re not still that little girl who overdosed.”

The sucky part is that, in his twisted universe, he’s kind of right. I could morph into the Bonnie™ everyone used to love or a new Bonnie™, who’s clever and witty and explains away the most painful night of her life with a roll of her eyes and a self-deprecating joke or two. It’d be that easy. But I don’t want to play by Chuck’s rules. In his world, you have to sell your soul to gain your dignity. I don’t think that’s a fair trade.

“Chuck, I don’t care about setting the record straight. I just want it to go away. I was a kid, and I made a mistake. It’s over.”

But it’s not. It won’t ever be.

He cocks his head to the side, trying to catch my eye. “I hope your mother wasn’t mistaken when she said all you kids would be happy to do the show. It’d be a shame to have to cancel the series because one person out of fifteen doesn’t want us here.”

“Two,” I say. Chuck raises his eyebrows. “Benny doesn’t want to do it, either.”

He sighs and his hands jangle whatever’s in the pockets of his massive cargo shorts.

“This is what I’m talking about, Bonnie™. This attitude. We’ve done this before, Bon-Bon, haven’t we?”

His eyes stray to the big front window, full of laughing, smiling kids. And, once again, I’m the piece that doesn’t fit. The one on the outside, looking in. Why can’t I just let all my angst over this go? Mom and Kirk are beaming, and cameras snap snap snap. I catch Benny being his usual affable self, and I know that if it weren’t for me, he’d be making the best of the show, doing whatever anyone wanted him to.