Off-Camera Hearts

I gazed through the rain-smeared window at New Mexico's red adobe hills. It was a little past dusk, and the sky above them was a deep, starless violet. I'd never been in this part of the country, and I was still trying to find my bearings. Getting to Santa Fe had taken ages. I didn't live anywhere near a major airport, so reaching this place had been a production. After several flights and more layovers than I cared to count, I'd had just enough time to check into the hotel we weren't actually sleeping in, wrestle myself into a cocktail dress, and wedge myself into the limo's rear seat beside a cluster of women I'd never seen before. I glanced around at the bright, expectant faces of the six women sharing the back of the black limo with me. They chatted in excited bursts while scraps of their awkward conversation bounced around my head. "I wonder whether he's as handsome offscreen as he is on TV," a blonde in a bubblegum-pink dress said to no one in particular. She looked a bit like Malibu Barbie. A few others echoed the thought while I kept looking out the window. The storm had passed, and beyond the watery tracks on the glass, nothing suggested it had rained at all that day, which I guessed was just how the high desert worked. "God, I'm ridiculously nervous," the brunette beside me murmured. Her green off-the-shoulder dress matched her emerald eyes. "About what?" She twisted in her seat and stared at me like I'd sprouted a third eye. "Everything," she blurted. "Everything we do or say is going to wind up on television. They could cut us together and make us look insane." "Then why come?" I asked. "B-because-because." She stumbled over the answer and looked thrown by the question. "Why are you here?"