Chapter 117: The Trial Begins

Jenna arrived at 9:52 with a clipboard, which Adrian chose to treat as a weather event.

“Rough plan,” she said, handing him a page. “Like you asked.”

He read it. 10:00, hello. 10:03, mission statement, two minutes. 10:05, introductions, six minutes, one anecdote each. It ran down the page in neat blue ink past a list of five goals to accomplish before lunch. Sound check wasn’t on it.

‘Rough.’ He’d have hated to see her precise.

“We said twenty minutes.”

“This fits in twenty.” Jenna was already unpacking her lights. “Barely.”

Rose arrived at ten exactly, which meant she’d waited in her car four minutes. She carried a canvas tote that clinked. Adrian knew the clink: charcoal, tape, a tin of something that would never wash out of anything.

“Supplies,” he said.

“In case the wall looks terrible on camera.” She set the tote down with great innocence. “I’m not using them.”

“They’re in my apartment.”

“They’re in my bag. Not on your wall.”

That was airtight, which annoyed him. Everyone had agreed to a plain trial and then gone off to prepare in a different flavor, and he was the only one holding a calculator.

He set the microphone on a stack of calculus textbooks, the most expensive thing ever to sit on one, and propped his phone against a mug. Jenna aimed her lights at the couch, then squinted at the wall behind it.

“It’s beige.”

“It’s cream.”

“It’s beige with ambitions.”

Rose, not looking at her tote, moved the left light three inches. Both said “better,” meaning different things.

“Intros,” Jenna said, checking the clipboard. “Who we are, what the channel’s about, why people should stay.”

“What do we tell viewers? We haven’t decided.”

“I have an answer.”

She tapped record and smiled at the phone. “Hi, we’re a creative collective exploring the intersection of music, art, and everyday life.” Even to her own ears the sentence wore a lanyard. “Okay, that sounded rehearsed.”

“It sounded like a LinkedIn bio,” Rose said.

“Take two.” She reset. “Hi, I’m Jenna, and with me is Rose, who sold her first painting for—”

“I haven’t sold anything,” Rose said. “VJ asked.”

“That’s basically the same.”

“It’s the opposite.”

Jenna stopped recording. Adrian checked the time. Twenty-two minutes, and nobody had introduced anything.

“That’s longer than the whole recording I proposed,” he said, “and we don’t have a channel to introduce.”

“Wow.” Jenna set the clipboard down very slowly. “If you’re so good at spotting problems, suggest something better.”

“Test the equipment. Thirty seconds of nothing, check the audio—”

“Excuse to avoid participating,” Rose said.

“Quality control.”

“Hiding behind a microphone.”

He had no counterargument. She was right in the specific way that hid in plain sight.

Rose proposed drawing, in the voice of a woman who’d been holding the idea behind her back. She’d sketch an ordinary object, Jenna would get five seconds to look, then recreate it from memory, and Adrian would judge. He hit record on his phone before anyone could change their minds. Somebody had to be the adult.

“Why am I the contestant?” Jenna said.

“Because you’re the one trying to prove she can do other things.” Rose flipped open her sketchbook. “Something easy.”

She drew a bicycle.

Jenna’s eyes narrowed. “A bicycle?”

“It’s ordinary.”

“It’s a trap.”

Six strokes, quick, clean, carrying the whole structure. Rose held it up for five seconds, then hid it. Jenna sat on the floor with a pad and a marker and began to draw like she was settling a score.

Rose wasn’t playing fair. A bicycle was the one object people swore they knew and couldn’t draw. Adrian had once tried and produced a creature with a bad hip.

He stayed neutral on the arm of the couch, face professional. Jenna worked in furious silence, tongue between her teeth, then held up the page. “Judge.”

It was a bicycle the way a potato was a car. Two unequal circles, a frame that connected nothing to nothing, a seat that had given up.

“The front wheel’s a little oval,” Adrian said, offhand.

Jenna’s head snapped up. “A little oval.”

“Slightly. Like it’s tired.”

“Oh, you think it’s easy.” She thrust the pad at him. “Then you do it.”

“I’m the judge.”

“You were. Now you’re a participant.” Her competitive streak had teeth. “Draw it.”

He took the marker like a man picking up a bomb. Rose, to level the field, entered the round with her eyes closed.

He bent over the page for thirty seconds with the focus he’d once given calculus. It was bad. Two oval wheels, a triangle frame, a line that might have been a handlebar. He held it up without shame.

“It’s technically defensible,” he said.

Rose looked up from her blind bicycle. “Is it?”

“The wheels are oval because it’s in motion. Motion distorts. The frame’s a triangle because triangles are structurally efficient, and this bike is built for efficiency, not appearance.” He pointed with the marker. “The missing seat is a design choice. It’s for standing riders.”

Rose lost it. A full collapse, forehead on her knees, her marker dragging a long black line across the page that ended any hope for her attempt. She wheezed out “motion,” and Jenna, who’d been preparing to be furious, started laughing too, which made her furious about it.

Adrian looked at his page and wondered which sentence had been the mistake. He decided it was all of them, and that he’d stand by every one.

“That’s not a defense,” Jenna managed. “That’s a hostage statement.”

“It’s accurate.”

“I’m taking control back.” She wiped her eyes and stood. “New rules. Three seconds, not five. Winner is whoever’s closest to the original, and the judge stays neutral—”

“You’re a contestant,” Adrian said. “You’ve proposed seven rules and drawn nothing.”

“The rules matter.”

“Seventy seconds of rules. Eleven seconds of bicycle.”

“Okay.” Jenna picked up the marker like a sword. “Round two. Watch me.”

The next twenty minutes were the best of the morning, and nobody had planned any of it. Jenna attacked a teapot with the grim focus of someone filing taxes under oath. Rose kept moving the goalposts: left hand only, one eye shut, then from underneath. Adrian offered commentary from the couch in the flat voice of a man calling golf.

“The spout appears to be a rumor.”

“It’s a handle.”

“A rumor with ambition.”

He told himself he wasn’t enjoying it. He’d stopped checking the levels around the third insult.

In the end Rose’s blind teapot beat Jenna’s, unreasonably elegant for something drawn in the dark. Jenna lay on the floor in protest. Rose looked like a cat fed twice. Adrian was bent over his phone, scrubbing the audio.

“You can hear the fridge,” he said, listening.

“Of course that’s what you checked,” Jenna said from the floor.

“But the mic caught everyone. Even Rose’s marker. That’s actually good.” Nothing in it was great television. It was good audio: three voices, one fridge, no clipping.

Jenna sat up, took the phone, and scrubbed to a section. Then another. Her face went quiet. “Look at this. The best parts are where we stopped following the plan.”

“Your plan was a clipboard,” Rose said.

“It was a rough plan.” But she was already scrolling. “Next time, a challenge again. And Adrian, the off-the-cuff stuff, the ‘rumor’ bit, that should be central.”

“No.” They both looked at him.

“I don’t mind being on camera.” He said it carefully. “I’m not manufacturing a personality because it might get views. The second I write the jokes, they stop being jokes.”

“He’s right,” Rose said. “It worked because none of us was playing a role.”

Jenna looked at the phone, then the clipboard, then the phone again. She closed the notebook. “Fine. I don’t script you. I plan the challenge and you react to it. Something to push against.”

“That I can do.”

They spent the last hour going through the footage. The phone sat too low and cut off the top of his head. The light washed Rose’s hair out to an orange haze. The fridge hummed under every minute of it like a patient animal. Jenna took notes, Rose drew a diagram, and by the end they had a direction instead of a concept: collaborative challenges built around three different people, Rose bringing ideas, Jenna running the format, Adrian on camera instead of behind it.

He was packing the mic into its box when Jenna said, “You’re not allowed to volunteer as judge every time.”

“I’m good at it.”

“That’s why.” Rose zipped her tote and backed her up with one eyebrow. “You participate.”

A small drop in his stomach: they’d turned one accidental good recording into a commitment to make another. He still wasn’t sure strangers would watch three people argue over bicycles.

Then Jenna held up the phone and pressed play. His own voice came out flat and entirely serious. “The missing seat is a design choice.”

Both women started laughing again, and Rose put her face in her hands.

Adrian watched them. He considered asking Jenna to delete it.

He didn’t.