Brand partnerships at the Delmont Network lives on the fourth floor of the admin building. It has no windows, one ficus and a carpet the color of a waiting room.
My new desk faced a wall. On the wall someone had hung a framed print of a sailboat. The sailboat was not going anywhere either.
"You're on Driftwell," said my new supervisor on Monday. She said it on a video call from somewhere with better lighting. "The mattress people. They want Bucket Night contestants to say 'I slept like a Driftwell' after the confetti."
"Nobody sleeps after the confetti. They're too excited."
"That's the brief!" she said, and the call ended.
Petey came by at lunch with two sandwiches and a face like a nephew visiting a hospital. He looked at the sailboat. He looked at the ficus.
"I brought you the batch book," he said, setting it down. "I didn't want it alone in the prop kitchen."
"It's a binder, Petey."
"It's three hundred and five batches of binder. And one None." He tapped the page. "That one keeps me up at night."
It turned out brand partnerships had one good thing about it. It had the research.
Every survey the network ran on every show went through the fourth floor first, because sponsors wanted to see it. On my second day, I found the Bucket Night brand study in a shared folder. It was the one Preston had shown us. The one with STICKY on the slide.
I did what I always do with a document. I read all of it.
It was sixty-three pages long. It was also, once you got past the cover, two different studies stapled together.
The first was an advertiser report. When advertisers called Bucket Night sticky, they meant viewers stuck.
They stayed through the commercial breaks. They didn't change the channel before the Bucket. In advertiser language, sticky was the highest compliment there was.
The second was a production cost review. That one used the word sticky too, eleven times.
It meant the gunge. Specifically, it meant the forty-seven minutes between a Bucket and the next taping, while the crew mopped the stage and wardrobe cleaned the podium skirt. Forty-seven minutes, twice a night, two nights a week, with a full crew on the clock.
"He mashed them together," I said to the sailboat.
Then I read page forty-one, which was a single line item. Wardrobe — dry cleaning, host. Season nine. $0.00.
Zero. Because nothing had ever touched Monty.
I read it again. I put a sticky note on it, which felt like a statement.
That night I went back to the prop kitchen. I was not technically allowed in the prop kitchen. I was technically in brand partnerships, technically working late on Driftwell.
Petey was already there. So, to my surprise, was Edda Cormier, sitting on a stool by the walk-in with her laptop open.
"I'm observing," she said, before I could ask. "For the record."
"There's no record. I'm not supposed to be here."
"Then I'll observe that, too."
I spread the study on the steel counter and showed them. The advertiser pages. The cost pages. The forty-seven minutes.
"So it's not the gunge," Petey said slowly. "It's the mopping."
"It's the reset. He doesn't mind sticky on a contestant. He minds sticky on a schedule."
I pulled a fresh page from the book. "Which means I can fix it. I don't need less gunge. I need gunge that leaves faster."
Edda looked over her glasses. "Is that a chemistry problem or a television problem?"
"In my experience," I said, "it's both."
Batch 306 rinsed off me in two minutes, forty seconds and left a film on the floor. Batch 307 rinsed in two-thirty but slid off the podium so fast it never looked like anything. Batch 308 was promising until it met the hose water and turned into what Petey described, accurately, as cottage cheese.
"You don't have to do every one of these yourself," he said at one in the morning, handing me my fourth towel. "We could use Bernard."
"Bernard can't tell me if it gets in his ears."
"Bernard doesn't have ears. That's his whole thing."
I sat down on the overturned bucket, wrapped in the towel, and tried to remember the last time I'd been this tired. Then I remembered exactly when. That was the trouble with my job. I always remembered exactly when.
"Can I ask you something?" Petey said. "Why do you actually do it? The real reason, not the lab sheet speech."
Edda stopped typing.
"My first job," I said, "was a PA gig on a cable show called Dare Bin. I was twenty-two."
"I held the towel." I nodded at the one around my shoulders. "That was the whole job. Towel."
"Towel Department," Petey said softly, like a man meeting a founder.
"There was a contestant, a forty-year-old guy who sold boats. He won the final round and took the bucket. The gunge came from a vendor, and nobody on the staff had touched it.
"It had a blue dye in it, and it didn't rinse." I looked at my hands. "He had blue hands for eight days. On day three he showed a boat to a client, and he wore oven mitts and told everyone it was a bit."
"Was he mad?"
"He was so nice about it. That was worse." I stood up. "I swore that night nobody would ever trust me more than I trusted the bucket."
The kitchen was quiet. The walk-in hummed. Somewhere downstairs, the floor vent was probably still having a time.
"Batch 309," I said. "Let's go."
The knock came at one-forty.
Edda closed her laptop, slowly, for the record. Petey grabbed a towel, though nothing had happened.
It wasn't Preston. It was Monty Ambler, in a tracksuit, holding two coffees.
"I saw the light under the door," he said. "I couldn't sleep. One-forty! One-forty in the morning!"
"Monty, I'm not supposed to be here."
"Neither am I. My contract says I'm asleep by midnight for my skin."
He handed me a coffee. Then he stood there in the middle of the prop kitchen. He looked at the bucket rig and the hose bay and the binder, and he took a breath.
"I watched the video," he said. "Opal on the podium. Four million views, apparently, though most of those were my sister."
He paused. "It occurred to me that I have asked a hundred and seventeen people to do something I've never done.
"A hundred and seventeen. That's not a prize. That's just a number."
"You don't have to do anything, Monty."
"I'd like to know what it's like." He looked up at the rig.
"Not tonight, and not the hair. Not yet. But I'd like to understand it."
So I showed him. I walked him through the batch book, page by page, and the ingredient sheet for Batch 309, and the safety sheet, and the rinse log. I told him what I tell every contestant. That he could walk away at any point up to the pull, and that the pull was his call, not mine.
He listened to all of it. He asked good questions. He asked whether the green would come out of silver hair. I told him honestly I didn't know, because nobody with silver hair had ever stood under it.
Then he stepped into the booth. He stood there, under the rig, in his tracksuit. Petey had his hand on the rope.
"Monty?" I said.
He stood very still for five whole seconds. Then he stepped back out.
"Not tonight," he said.
"Then not tonight," I said, and Petey let go of the rope.
Monty nodded, a little embarrassed and a little relieved. He looked at the rig one more time. Then he picked up his coffee and squared his shoulders, like a man about to go out under the lights.
"But Ginny," he said. "When you've got the recipe right. The fast one. I want to be the first person you call."
I opened my mouth to answer, and the door opened behind him.
Preston Bexley stood in the doorway, at one-fifty in the morning, in his charcoal suit, holding his lint roller.
Up next: Page Forty-One
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