Brynn and Sebastian Hate Each Other, page 1
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Dedication
This one goes out to my dad, who has insisted for years that I would achieve instant superstardom if I wrote about a dog. I created Murrow just to (lovingly and respectfully) shut him up, but ultimately Murrow was the key to understanding Sebastian. So . . . thanks, Dad. (Disclaimer: Dedication is contingent upon superstardom status. The author reserves the right to retroactively bestow this dedication upon Paul Rudd.)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: Brynn
Chapter 2: Brynn
Chapter 3: Sebastian
Chapter 4: Sebastian
Chapter 5: Brynn
Chapter 6: Sebastian
Chapter 7: Brynn
Chapter 8: Sebastian
Chapter 9: Brynn
Chapter 10: Sebastian
Chapter 11: Brynn
Chapter 12: Sebastian
Chapter 13: Brynn
Chapter 14: Sebastian
Chapter 15: Brynn
Chapter 16: Sebastian
Chapter 17: Brynn
Chapter 18: Sebastian
Chapter 19: Brynn
Chapter 20: Sebastian
Chapter 21: Brynn
Chapter 22: Sebastian
Chapter 23: Brynn
Chapter 24: Sebastian
Chapter 25: Brynn
Chapter 26: Sebastian
Chapter 27: Brynn
Chapter 28: Sebastian
Chapter 29: Brynn
Chapter 30: Sebastian
Chapter 31: Brynn
Epilogue: Brynn
Discussion Questions
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Bethany Turner
Also by Bethany Turner
Copyright
Chapter 1
Brynn
Friday, March 18
8:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
“Coming up in the third hour of Sunup, Elena and Hayley are going to sit down with a few of the heroic women and men who were on the ground fighting last month’s tragic wildfires in the Sierra Nevadas. So many amazing stories, Mark.”
“There really are, Brynn. So many unsung triumphs among the heartbreaking devastation.”
“And later, Lance will be joined in the kitchen by one of the queens of the Hallmark channel, Lacey Chabert. I hear they’ll be cooking up a batch of Lance’s perennial game-day favorites—sweet-and-spicy fried plantains. Yum! I may just have to stick around for hour three today, Mark. How about you?”
“If not for the plantains, then for the inside scoop on the first round of NCAA March Madness, courtesy of ASN’s Ellis Haywood. Have you been keeping up with ASN’s behind-the-scenes coverage on Facebook, Brynn? It’s really been a lot of fun.”
“Well, no, I haven’t, Mark. But I have been keeping up on TikTok.”
Mark laughed . . . just as the teleprompter told him to. “Oh, I get it. I see how we’re playing this today. Subtle, Brynn. Very subtle.”
I feigned innocence. “Whatever do you mean?”
The crew in the studio laughed, just loud enough to be heard perfectly on-air in the background. They didn’t have to be told when to laugh. After years in the business, they could sense the exact moment to make their off-camera presence known, to help our viewers believe we really were just a big, happy family they invited into their living rooms each morning.
“It’s no secret I’m the elder statesman around here.” Mark threw his hands in front of him in surrender. “Guilty as charged!”
“I’m not giving up until I get you on TikTok.” I strategically faced the camera. “Don’t you want to see Mark Irvine on TikTok, America?” Mark laughed and shook his head as I read my next lines. “You would crush some of those dances, Mark. I just know it!”
It was probably as clear to all of America as it was to me that our producers were gearing up for some megalaunch onto TikTok for Mark. Probably during sweeps. And indeed, America was going to love it. Was Mark truly going to crush it? That was much less certain. In fact, they would probably play up his elder statesman persona and allow him—nay, force him—to humiliate himself for the amusement of millions.
I’d been making bets with myself over which long-obsolete trends they would subject the poor man to first. Would it be that bottle-flipping thing that had been so popular with teenaged boys forever ago? Nah . . . that was too lame, even for Mark Irvine. Besides, as much as he professed obsession with March Madness coverage, I’d witnessed the effort he had to put forth in sports segments. The effort he had to put forth for anything that required more hand-eye coordination than it took to avoid jabbing a microphone into his own eye, really. Bottle flipping would not go well for him.
They’d probably make him film something like the first-name challenge or one of the other trends that had been popular among middle-aged adults whose teenagers fled TikTok the moment their parents set up an account. Yeah . . . that was probably the low-impact effect they would go for. He’d “surprise” his wife by calling her by her name (Lulabelle, I think?) instead of “Bunny”—the name Sunup audiences had been hearing him refer to her as for fifteen years. They’d eat it up. Mark Irvine had turned his hokey-dad personality into an art form, despite the fact that at—what? forty-seven?—he was only about a decade older than me. Yet here I was, cast in the role of the young, trendy ingenue.
Morning audiences were great about accepting whatever twenty-first-century version of a Norman Rockwell painting you threw at them. And you wouldn’t hear the thirty-six-year-old trendy ingenue complaining.
Mark’s charming, self-effacing monologue came to an end on the teleprompter, and I refocused my eyes on the words that began next to my name.
“I know what trend would be perfect for you, Mark. The Rockafeller Skank!!”
I hadn’t been listening or following along with whatever Mark had been saying, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t have any trouble faking the enthusiasm the two exclamation points were intended to help me feign. Yes. The Rockafeller Skank was absolutely the only-trendy-among-TikTok-users-with-a-handsome-401k trend they would make him start with. Ballroom dancing to an annoying, repetitive dance beat from a few years before Billie Eilish was born? What’s not hip about that? Yeah, it had Mark Irvine written all over it.
Mark’s featurelessly handsome face morphed into an expression of good-natured horror. “Rockafeller . . . what?” He continued to play his part perfectly, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was possibly not just an act. Perhaps he had done what no one else on earth had been able to accomplish: he’d somehow lived nearly fifty years on this planet free of both TikTok and Fatboy Slim.
I laughed sweetly at his “scripted” cluelessness and patted him on the arm. “Don’t worry about it, Mark. I have a very, very strong suspicion this will all make sense to you very soon.” I patronizingly patted again, and the crew laughed to perfection.
“I’ll trust you on that, Brynn.” He shrugged for the benefit of the camera and then carried on with his lines. “Now, before we hand things off to Elena, Hayley, and Lance, I want to say, on behalf of all of us—on behalf of the entire Sunup fam, tuning in all across the nation—what a joy it has been to finally have you seated next to me on this couch. It’s been a long time coming.”
“Has it? For me, the last ten years have flown by,” I responded. Because that’s what the teleprompter told me to say. Never mind that I could have told stories for days about being passed over for the “fresh face” or “up-and-comer.” About the “good old boy” guys from the network’s club of safe, boring, demographic-approved men like Mark filling the rotating vacant seat on the couch while I kept working hard and paying my dues and smiling sweetly when network executives dangled the “your day is coming” carrot in front of me to keep me happy. “I feel like every seat I’ve been blessed enough to sit in here at Sunup, no matter the hour and no matter the role, has been as cozy as it could possibly be. And I loved every single minute of my time in the third hour.”
Mark nodded. “I know that Elena and Lance are going to miss you dearly.”
Well, now, that simply wasn’t true at all. It was one thing to serve one’s time. To earn one’s keep and prove one’s worth. To invest the time and effort it took to become an invaluable asset. It was another thing entirely to spend five years on a couch with Elena Delgado, pretending to be besties while the cameras were rolling and skillfully avoiding every attempt she made to sabotage my career when they weren’t.
And Lance . . . Well, he had just never liked anyone.
But the lies came so easily once you knew how to play the game.
I clasped my hands over my heart and squished up my face like I was watching a baby bunny rabbit eating a carrot. Then I spoke into the camera. “You guys! Thank you. For everything.” I knew this was what they all wanted from me. What the public wanted to believe. They wanted to believe—they did believe—that Elena and Lance were watching from the studio next door with tears in their eyes, cheering me on and making plans for our Sunday brunch together. “I love my fam, so much.” I curled my fingers in front of me an
Convincing viewers I loved the Sunup fam was the job. I would continue to do it each and every morning and every single time I spoke to the press, forever and ever, without complaint. But I had just about reached my limit on concealing the disdain I felt every time they made me say the word fam. One time—one time!—two years ago I had read what was on the prompter, not realizing they had abbreviated what they actually intended for me to say: “Happy holidays from our family to yours.” Ever since, #SunupFam had been our official hashtag, sunupfam.com was our website, the Sunup Fam Reunion was the name of our annual fan gathering in Washington Square Park, and you could purchase One Big Happy Fam shirts in the network store.
Fine. But did we really have to work it into every sentence?
“She really is, Brynn. And I speak for all of us—our little fam here and the entire extended Sunup fam—when I say we’re so glad Hayley made her way to Sunup3 and that you’ve made your way to hours one and two.”
“Aww, thanks. I certainly have big shoes to fill.” Considering my predecessor, Shauna Magwell-Moray, seemed to give birth every ten months, it seemed likely that was a physiological fact. Though, from what I heard, it wasn’t her ever-swollen ankles that had caused her to be replaced so much as the fact that she and Mark had the on-screen chemistry of a piece of chalk and a marshmallow.
“We’ll certainly miss Shauna around here, but our loss is Trevor and the kids’ gain. Shauna texted me just this morning to say how nice it was to join Trevor in the school drop-offs all week.”
Okay, yeah. Sure she had. Former Miss America Shauna Magwell-Moray had texted Mark Irvine, with whom she had worked unhappily for all of six months, to tell him she and her NHL goalie husband—who, I was pretty sure, lived on the road this time of year—were running their kids to school together every morning.
There was just a certain suspension of disbelief that accompanied being a devoted Sunup viewer.
“That’s so nice for them, Mark.”
I glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen next to Orly at camera one. Six minutes? We still had six minutes left? How much more schmaltzy tripe were they going to make us subject America to on a Friday morning?
Mark shifted toward me and camera three. “We have a surprise for you, Brynn. This won’t be on newsstands until next week, but the verdict is in.” He held up an advance copy of People magazine. “‘America’s Ray of Sunshine: Shining Brighter Than Ever,’” he said, reading the title superimposed above my photo.
Ugh. “America’s Ray of Sunshine.” There was nothing in life that I simultaneously treasured and loathed as much as that designation. It’s not like it was clever or original in any way, shape, or form. But for whatever reason, it had stuck. It was how I’d been introduced at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it was the title of a memoir I’d been paid six figures to write (of which I had yet to write a single word, incidentally), and it would probably be the epitaph on my headstone. America loved me and felt like they knew me. Fantastic. If there was anyone left who didn’t love me, surely reminding them over and over that I was just a happier version of them—People magazine, White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and six-figure book deal aside, of course—would do the trick. Right?
“Would you look at that?” I pretended to humbly marvel at the “surprise” magazine cover that I had posed for. “Thanks, People magazine. And thank you, Mark. I have to admit, after some of the rustier bits this week, I thought you might want to cart me off to a less public hour of Sunup. I really think we’re missing out on a key middle-of-the-night demographic, come to think of it. Don’t you think I would kill as the host of Sunup2am?”
There it was. That was what made me “America’s Ray of Sunshine” in the minds of the network suits. The gleeful, good-humored self-deprecation that made everyone believe I was just happy to be there. That was my trademark. As if I ever had the opportunity to say a single word that wasn’t written for me. As long as they scripted me as self-deprecating, that’s who I was. No matter that, as a result, I never got to draw attention to my own accomplishments and instead had to act embarrassed whenever someone else pointed them out. No matter that Sunup seemed to have perfected a business model that had apparently been crafted while June Cleaver was cleaning the house in heels. It worked. Viewers across all mediums were insisting on diversity. They were rallying around strong, independent women. But here at Sunup, our favorite pastime was choosing not to care how Little Ricky was conceived from two separate twin beds.
“You’re being too hard on yourself!” Mark replied with a laugh. “As for the ‘rustier bits,’ some of those names are really difficult to pronounce.”
My eyes caught the monitor, which was currently focused in on the death glare I had received from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan when I’d pronounced his name with all the enunciation skills of a drive-thru window.
Of course. They were going to wrap up my first week as the cohost of the number one morning show in the world with a blooper reel. Why not? What could be better than humiliating me for the sake of uniting three and a half million live viewers—not to mention another ten million or so later online—in laughter? Laughter that they no doubt believed would further endear me to America but that I suspected would inch me ever closer to the role of lovable-but-inconsequential morning dingbat.
Mark adjusted his position on the couch next to me so he could offer me a good-humored sideways glance. “It is true, though, that it hasn’t all been smooth sailing this week.”
In response I covered my eyes with both hands and shook my head dramatically. I also laughed, of course. I had no choice but to laugh.
“Oh no,” I groaned and then took a moment to silently rehearse the next two words from the teleprompter before saying them aloud. “Chiwetel Ejiofor has forgiven me, Mark.” Nailed it. “Don’t you think the noble thing would be for you to let me off the hook as well?”
“Noble, yes,” Mark replied. “But not nearly as fun.”
The red light on the camera directly in front of us shut off as a monitor began rolling footage of the multitude of blunders I had made in five short days.
“Don’t worry,” Mark whispered to me and straightened his tie once we were no longer being filmed. “Audiences eat this stuff up. Your mistakes make them see you as human. And once they see you as human, they can decide whether or not they trust you and want to spend time with you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I muttered.
“You’ve just got to be a good sport.”
I looked down at the hemline of my skirt and made a small adjustment. Just enough to keep my eyes concealed while I rolled them into the back of my head.
“Oh, I think I’ve got the good-sport thing down. No worries there.”
“There it is.” Mark chuckled as the clip of me stepping into a mountain of elephant dung at the Central Park Zoo flashed across the screen. “That’s my favorite.”
At least Chiwetel Ejiofor had laughed and charmingly insisted I continue to call him Chai-WET-ul for the remainder of the interview. My Jimmy Choos and I had yet to make amends.
“Fifteen seconds,” the new production assistant shadowing Carl at camera two called out. Carl whacked the production assistant on the shoulder and pointed to the clock, causing him to yell out, “Five seconds! Sorry!”
“Colton!” Mark called out to our director with an impatient groan, and we each sat up a little straighter and perfected the angle at which his gray-slacked knees and my pantyhose-encased ones faced each other.
Colton raised his hands in acknowledgment before shouting, “Carl!” in the second before the red light illuminated once more. Poor Carl. It wasn’t his fault the new guy under his skilled tutelage kept looking at the wrong clock. Even I had to admit the main stage of studio 2-A was a confusing place to be, timewise. Sunday night, before my first episode, I’d dreamt that all the different digital clocks—ticking down until we were live, ticking up until commercials ended, and in some cases communicating something only Colton seemed to understand about local affiliates versus the network—were accompanied by the theme music from 24. When my 3:30 a.m. alarm clock went off, I woke up in a panic, certain I had prevented Jack Bauer from saving the world because I couldn’t remember my employee code for the Xerox machine before the day ran out.
