Page 8 of Just Friends Forever
Even though the apartment doesn’t need the intense cleaning she comes to provide, I’m glad she doesn’t take me up on my offer of a paid vacation day. If Joyce didn’t come twice a week, I’d go crazy. Apart from the three times Curtis’s team has flown me out for a publicity event—got to allay any suspicion that all isn’t right in paradise—she’s my only in-person contact with the outside world. Her insistence on coming has every bit as much to do with making sure I don’t wither away from lack of human interaction as it has to do with her amazing work ethic.
“How are the pets?” she asks as she gets to work.
I turn on my phone again, and Furzy stares back at me. I throw him a bone, and he blinks. “Difficult, as usual. Oh, shoot! I need to take Mavis to her check-up!” I swipe away from my picky virtual dog and scroll through dozens of others until I find the purple, deer-sized dragon who’s due for a vet appointment.
“What did she do this time?” Joyce asks. She’s a saint to even pretend she cares about my embarrassing hobby, but when you’re stuck inside by yourself for months on end, you do what you’ve got to do. For me, that was acquiring an obscene number of fake and mystical pets to take care of on the PetUniverse app. I’m not just a virtual crazy cat lady; I’m a virtual crazy dragon, alien, and phoenix lady. “Virtual” being the key word. I’m justvirtuallycrazy. In real life, I’m so normal. Promise.
“Another burn,” I respond as I load the dragon into her enormous crate and drive her to the vet. “She just doesn’t have good control of her fire-breathing yet. She’ll get there.” I can’t believe I, a twenty-six-year-old, erstwhile respectable human who has appeared inPeople,Vogue, andHarper’s Bazaar, am saying these words. Curtis would be mortified if he knew what things had come to. And his publicity team? I shudder to think of it. He’d probably fast-track the divorce, which is suddenly making me wonder if I should tell him about it after all.
Taking care of imaginary pets isn’t all I do, though. In my oodles of spare time, I’ve taken up a lot of hobbies. I’ve learned basic coding, read the entire Penguin Vintage Classics collection (and developed a deep, abiding hatred ofWuthering Heights), and tried every meditation app out there. I’m pretty well-rounded for a hermit.
The doorbell rings, but neither Joyce or I acknowledge it. The concierge, Gibbs, knows to leave the food outside the door. He’s discreet. It’s why the people who live in this building pay him the big bucks.
After a couple minutes, Joyce leaves her cleaning cloth on the onyx countertop and heads for the door. She brings the bag of food to the table, where I take a seat and look at the receipt. It has the name Mandy on it. The food orders always do. It’s my code name, or as I like to call it, mynom de plume. It sounds a lot better than the ugly truth: having all my orders sent to “Mandy” prevents word getting out that, aside from those three whirlwind publicity events, I haven’t seen Curtis in eight months.
“Come eat, Joyce,” I insist.
She shakes her head and goes back to wiping down the countertops, which are already so clean, I could use them as mirrors. I almost miss the quick sidelong glance she sends toward the bags of food.
I suppress a smile. “It’s not a request, Joyce. It’s an order.”
She looks up at me, the stubborn glint in her eye belied by the ghost of a smile on her lips. I raise a brow, and we start the silent battle we fight two times a week.
“You’re here to clean, right?” I ask.
“Yes, Miss Stephanie.”
“Well, I need help cleaning upthismess.” I start pulling the food out of the bag to demonstrate just how much there is. I might be under a gag order to prevent bad publicity from eclipsing Curtis’s most recent big movie, but at least the food I get requires no gagging to get down. It comes like clockwork three times a day. It wouldn’t hurt to change up where it’s ordered from, but I think that’s what they call a first-world problem.
“It’s best cleaned up while it’s still hot.” I wink at Joyce.
She sighs, her smile growing wider as she leaves her things and joins me. “If you insist, Miss Stephanie.” She always gives in because, again, she’s here as much for me as for a paycheck. Thank heaven for Joyce.
This is the most normal my life gets these days: sitting over take-out and chatting about her grandkids and my pets. It’s the highlight of my week.
But Joyce has other apartments to clean—ones that might actually dirty her cloths and where the employers aren’t pathetically lonely—and I’m eventually left with my own thoughts for company. They veer toward pity, and I rein them in like Buffalo Bill.
I can’t complain about my life. How amazingly fortunate am I? Joyce spends her days cleaning other people’s messes, making barely enough to survive on, while I sit in this massive apartment overlooking West Hollywood’s palm trees, high-end apartments, and designer boutiques. And I didn’t earn any of it. I married into it, and I swore to myself I’d never take it for granted.
That’s gotten harder with time—especially not knowing how much longer I’ll be enjoying this luxury with no one but my cleaning lady and lawyer to talk to. Money sure is nice, but you can’t talk to it about your problems. I’ve tried.
My first few months alone were spent in Curtis’s Montana cabin. I only came to LA when it looked like the divorce was getting close to being final. I thought I’d only be here for a couple of weeks, but we’re coming up on four months now. Curtis has been dragging his feet, or maybe he’s been too busy with parties and promotion for the movie that released a couple of weeks ago. I know firsthand how busy his life is.
Either way, it’s getting more and more tempting to violate my NDA—a big fine would probably be worth regaining some normalcy. I never thought it would take this long to get things finalized, and my patience is wearing thin.
My phone dings, and I tap the notification telling me I’ve been tagged in a post. It takes me to social media and the latest photo posted by Curtis’s social media manager.
The picture is of me swinging toward the camera, with Curtis pushing me from behind, smiling widely. “Pure joy.” That’s the caption, and it makes the food I ate swim in my stomach. It makes me wriggle.
Wedolook happy, but I remember that night well, and it was far from it. Curtis’s social media manager posted it like it’s news, but it happened over a year ago. This is what his team has been doing for the past few months: recycling old photos to present the image of a happy marriage.
That particular night, we’d had a publicity event in Miami. I’d changed out of the gold-sequined dress I’d worn and into my sweats, heading straight for the swings on the private beach of our hotel—somewhere I could think in peace.
Curtis came out not long after, and we had one of our many serious talks. The ones where nothing got solved. But his publicity team—never far away—apparently liked the look of us fighting on the swings and asked Curtis to push me for a couple of shots—with less arguing, of course.
Curtis is an A-list actor, so he had no problem faking it, and hey, I’ve also learned a thing or two over the past few years since we met and fell in love. I could be at the top of the up-and-coming actresses list based entirely on this photo.
At least it’s a real photo instead of one of the AI-generated images of us they’ve experimented with posting. Those give me the creeps, and I’m always nervous one of our more obsessive followers will figure out the truth.
