Simp Score

Three years ago, my best friend and I signed onto a reality show together.

I got cast as the fiancée the lead is going to chew through and spit out.

She got cast as the cold bitch coming to take him.

The contract said one of us has to finish the Devotion Arc — give him everything, on camera, and die for him at the season finale — or neither of us walks.

Cass cried in my bathroom that night, hands twisted in the hem of my shirt. *Ren. I don't want to die on this show.*

I took her shift.

For three years I am Crew Thorne's most devoted, most disposable woman.

I give him my money. I give him my contacts. I drink for him. I bleed for him.

The night he goes prime time, he smiles into the live feed and tells fifteen million people: *Wren Sutherland — sweet girl, no brain — was always just a stepping stone.*

Everyone watching expects me to fall apart on broadcast.

Instead I reach up and lift the dusty-pink halo off my own head, walk it three steps across the stage, and set it on his.

*Your turn, sis.*

What Crew doesn't know — what the show's executive producers don't know, what the algorithm that built this whole shrine to female humiliation doesn't know —

is that the Devotion Meter was never coded to bind only women.