“See?” he told his son. “Not everyone can do what we just did. They can’t handle it.”

After work, Mara dropped Wes off at headquarters, setting him in the nicest terrarium, and bought a sandwich and a milkshake for the drive home. But when she got to the camper, Ethan was grilling pork chops. So she ate again, though she was full. Then she sucked Ethan off on the futon. He touched her hair and kissed her, and she stroked his neck the way he liked, and when they were done she put her head on his chest. The next day she left, hopefully for good.

3

There was a big deal about how Mara couldn’t know where she was going. In retrospect she wished she had tried to find out. But what difference would it make? She hoped the show would be set somewhere tropical, or at least exotic, where the novelty of the environment could offset its inevitable miseries. She imagined coconuts with their rich meat, turquoise water to the horizon, and biting sand fleas. A red desert with its venoms and frigid nights. Somewhere far away and nothing like home.

Instead she flew to Green Bay, Wisconsin, on a day’s notice, and slept in an airport hotel room that had been reserved in her name. In the morning she found a box outside her door with a tunic and matching shorts, brown underwear and a brown sports bra, and handmade leather sandals. She tugged the clothes into place before the bathroom mirror. They fit, mostly. The shorts were snug. She wondered who had decided that everything had to be brown.

Around noon she got a call to go to the parking lot, where a woman in a velour sweatsuit picked her up with a four-door pickup. The woman eyed Mara’s backpack. “That all you got?”

“They said I didn’t need anything.”

“Put your phone and wallet in there, too. I’ll take it.”

“I get it back, right?”

“Sure,” said the woman. She gave Mara a blindfold to cover her eyes.

That was the last thing she said for a while. She didn’t talk as they drove. Then her phone rang, and she answered on the first ring. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I have number three. On track.” She hung up without saying goodbye.

By the sun’s warmth through the window, Mara figured they were driving north. She didn’t mind the silence. She went over her plan in her head—not for surviving nature, but for surviving the show. Though she hadn’t wanted to admit it, Simone was right. The show was her greater concern.

Mara felt confident she could make it six weeks in the wild, save some injury or television plot device. She trusted reality shows about as much as she trusted anything, which was to say she assumed everyone was in it for themselves, and if she wasn’t in charge, or paying, then she was being used. That didn’t bother her. In this case, it was almost reassuring. She knew her role; her role was entertainment. She was there for the producer, who was there for money, which meant he was there for the audience. Mara was disposable.