For Real(69)

“Correct!” our Cupid says. “One point. Question two: what is Samir’s hometown?” I write “Santa Barbara,” assuming he’ll write “Hartford.” He does, and we miss the point. Samir glares at me.

I do my best to get all the answers wrong—I even write that Samir has a cat named Peaches—but I’m not able to slow down the process that much. Dating Miranda for a year has given Samir a surprisingly large cache of information about me. He knows what year I was born, the name of my high school, and the name of the bookstore my dad owns. Somehow, he even knows that otters are my favorite animal. The only question he gets wrong, in fact, is my favorite color. I had always assumed Miranda never even thought about me while she was at Middlebury, but it seems like she actually talked about me a fair amount. I wish I’d known that sooner and that I hadn’t found out like this.

It only takes Samir fifteen minutes to earn us our next pink envelope. We have to wait a few minutes before opening it—Robby has to refilm our Cupid asking all her questions from the front—and in that time, we see several other teams dash off to the next challenge, including Will and Janine. I wonder if they played the Question Game on the plane or if they slept snuggled together. I wonder if he’s making her feel like she’s the only girl in the world who matters. Does she know this is all a game to him, or is she falling for his act, just like I did?

Finally, Robby lets us open our envelope.

Shortly before her wedding day, it is traditional for a Scottish woman and her friends to perform a ritual called “blackening the bride.” The bride dresses all in white, and her friends take turns throwing anything they want at her, such as molasses, tar, feathers, manure, and rotten eggs. Walk north to the middle of the field marked with an Around the World flag, where the female team member must change into the white clothes provided. Then the male team member must completely blacken her from the neck down using only his hands and the available sticky substances. The female team member may not assist him. You will receive your next instructions when no white fabric is visible!

I know I need to stop thinking about Will, but for the briefest of moments, I consider what this challenge would’ve been like with him as my partner. I gladly would have suffered through tar and rotten eggs if it meant he’d have to touch every tingling, eager inch of my body. But that’s just the thing—he’d have to, and that’s not the same as wanting to. Touching me would be another task to complete, and any other body would do just as well. I’m sure he’ll be very happy with Janine’s.

“Ew,” Samir says as he stares at the instructions. “I have to touch manure and tar with my bare hands?” I can’t believe he’s complaining about his hands when I’m going to be coated from neck to toe, but I swallow my annoyance. I can’t let him start to doubt that I’m on his side.

There are makeshift dressing rooms set up along the edge of the field, and I take my time swapping out my clothes for a white T-shirt and white scrub pants that are several inches too long. My bra is bright green and my underwear is black, and both show right through the fabric, but after the pool challenge in Java, I’m past caring about that. When I make my way out onto the field, I see that Martin and Steve are almost done blackening Zora and Miranda. Will and Janine are only about half done, and she squeals like a three-year-old as he dips his hands into a bucket and lovingly rubs something sticky onto her flat stomach.

I find a spot as far from them as possible, and Samir joins me, lugging two heavy buckets of brown goo. “I’m pretty sure this one is chocolate syrup and this one is pudding,” he says. “I wasn’t sure which would be easier to spread. Are you ready?”

“I’m as ready as a person can be to have her sister’s ex paint her with pudding,” I say. “Do what you have to do.”

It’s kind of funny to see Samir grimace as he cups his hands and scoops up some chocolate syrup, trying not to drip on his perfectly creased jeans. But it becomes less amusing very quickly when he tips the cold syrup down my back and drops of it crawl inside my collar like curious insects. I hold my arms out to my sides, close my eyes, and wait for it to be over. To distract myself, I think about being back home on the couch with Natalie, watching Speed Breed and eating banana muffins and regaling her with stories about all the absurd things I’ve done on this show. I just need to get through today, and then it’ll all be over. But it’s hard to think anything but ew, ew, ew when someone you hate is massaging chocolate pudding onto your butt.

Samir is a meticulous worker, and Tawny and Troy have arrived by the time he covers my last patch of ankle. He calls another kilt-clad guy over to check his work, and I spin around slowly, causing my chocolate-covered clothing to stick to my skin in new and horrible ways. Half my hair has come loose from my ponytail and is plastered to my neck, and I can’t lower my arms without making horrible squishing noises with my armpits.

“Jolly good,” proclaims our inspector. Do people actually say that in the UK, or is he just doing it for the benefit of the cameras? He hands me a tiny towel, barely larger than my mom’s dish towels, and sends me back to the dressing room to change.

I can’t figure out a way to pull the gooey shirt over my head without smearing chocolate pudding all over my face and hair, so I find my nail clippers, hack through the collar, and rip the T-shirt all the way down the front like The Hulk. I rub as much of the pudding off my arms as possible, but the towel is saturated in seconds, so I resort to lying down on the ground and wiping my arms on the grass. I can barely stand to put my normal clothes back on over my sticky skin, but I can’t very well do the rest of this leg of the race topless, even if that might win me some sort of special award from Isis.