Friends with Benefits
Table of Contents
In memory of my great-grandfather,
a Hollywood legend
1
Kiley McCann
Dear Momâ
Every day I still feel like pinching myself to see if it's true: I'm really a nanny for the kids of a famous rock star! And it is real, Mom, because you were brave enough to let your seventeen-year-old daughter stay in Los Angeles by herself. I can't thank you enough for your faith in me.
Anyway, enough mush. Sorry we haven't had a chance to talk on the phone lately, I've just been so busy. But I wanted you to know that everything here is going great. I know that Platinum seemed kind of crazy when you met her, but that's just a rock star image she puts on for publicity. Actually, she's a nice person with good morals and values just like people back home in Wisconsin, so no worries.
You remember her kids from when you were here with me: Serenity, almost eight, is very sweet, and Sid, age nine, is so mature for his age. Bruce, who's fourteen, has been at rock and roll camp, so I haven't seen him much. I'm sure when he's home I'll get along with him just as well as I do with the littler kids.
This is great, MomâI've made two friends here, both nannies like me. Esme works for a famous TV producer (Steven Goldhagen!!) and his wife; they have two adopted kids who only speak Spanish. I think they hired Esme because she's bilingual. Lydia (her dad is a doctor in the Amazon and that's where she lived for the past eight years!) works for her aunt, a sports commentator on ESPN. They have two kids also. It sure helps having friends here, so you don't need to worry that I'm alone or anything.
Remember that guy I told you about, Tom Chappelle, the one I met in line at the movies? Well, it turns out he's from Iowa and he grew up on a farm, so we have a lot in common. He's a model and he just did his first film role in that new movie The Ten. He is the one in the car on the freeway in the desert who gets smothered by locusts. We are just friends.
How is Dad doing? I hope okay and not drinking too much.
So as you can tell, you made the right decision by letting me stay here in Los Angeles. I am sooo grateful to you. You don't need to worry about anything becauseâ
Braagh-aah! Braagh-aah! Braaghâ
Kiley winced and stopped writing midsentence. The hotline phone that Platinum had installed the day Kiley moved into the guesthouse blared. All her boss had to do was lift the receiver of the red phone in the mansion's kitchen, and the matching red phone in Kiley's living room shrieked as if announcing the start of global thermonuclear war. Kiley snatched it up just to protect her eardrums from the assault.
“Hello?”
“Kiley, you bitch! If you do not have your corn-fed ass up to the main house in exactly one minute, you're fired.”
Before Kiley could reply, the phone went dead.
So much for Kiley's one day off per week, which she'd planned on enjoying with her friends right after she finished writing to her mom. The phone call was just so Platinum. Everything she had just written regarding her employer and her employer's kids, other than facts like their ages, was a big fat lie. Platinum was a substance-abusing, egocentric pain in the ass. That Kiley put up with it was Kiley's own choice. She knew she could always go back to La Crosse, Wisconsin, and waitress at Pizza-Neatsa.
Pizza-Neatsa was probably where she
would
be, if she hadn't auditioned a month ago for a new reality TV show,
Platinum
Nanny.
When she and her best friend, Nina, heard that
Platinum
Nanny
would be doing interviews in Milwaukee, they'd primped and polished Kiley into the kind of bodacious babe they hoped would please the show's producers.
Normally, Kiley was the most natural of girlsâchinos, T-shirts, and Converse All Star basketball shoes, her reddish brown hair in a ponytail. But for the interview, Nina had glammed Kiley out in a microminiskirt and stiletto boots, plus more makeup than Kiley had ever worn in her life.
Their scheme had worked. Kiley had been brought to Los Angeles to compete in the finals, the only under-eighteen-year-old in the bunch. It was insane: TV cameras had followed her everywhere. But in the end,
Platinum Nanny
was shut down by its network before any of the episodes aired; something about a bad reaction from a focus group at Warner Bros.
That was the bad news. The good news was that Kiley had managed to snare the gig anyway. She didn't even have to pile on the makeup to do it. She'd been working for Platinum for two weeks; long enough to know that there was a good chance the hotline would shriek again before she left to go to the main houseâ
Braagh-aah!
There it was. Kiley grabbed the receiver. “Yes, Platinum?”
“It's Sunday, Kiley,” Platinum said, her tone accusing.
“True.”
“Sunday is your day off. You think I don't know?”
“I thought maybe you forgot,” Kiley said politely. It was entirely possible. When Platinum got drunk and/or stoned, she often didn't track what day it was, or even if it was day at all. At least her boss wasn't slurring her words. Yet.
“I didn't forget,” Platinum snapped. “My anal accountant is here so I'm stuck doing this boring crap with him. Sid is in the meditation room with Persimmon.”
Kiley frowned. “Persimmon?”
“Sid's new male mentor. That asshole Jeff Greenberg? I fired him yesterday. He ratted on Sid for taking a beer from the fridge.”
Jeff Greenberg was a psych grad student from UCLA who Platinum had hired at the same time she'd hired Kiley. Platinum insisted that Sid have a male mentor because she was a single parent, so her son needed to “like, inhale testosterone.”
“But . . . isn't it good that Jeff said something?” Kiley ventured. “I mean, Sid is only nine.”
“If you keep a kid away from this shit, they'll just want it all the more,” Platinum insisted. “Plus, nobody likes a tattletale. Especially me. Remember that, Kiley.”
All-righty, then. Kiley sat down at the kitchen table and rested her head in the palm of one hand. “Okay, Platinum, I will.”
“You'll like Percy,” Platinum continued. “He's a lot more spiritual than that asshole Greenberg. Percy taught yoga at the Kripalu Center in western Massachusetts; totally balanced yin and yang, amazing third eye.”
Kiley hadn't a clue what a “yin” or a “yang” or a “third eye” was.
“In case you're wondering,” Platinum went on, blithely ignoring the ongoing interruption of Kiley's day off, “Serenity is at Courtney's house. She's working on this T-shirt project with Frances Bean.”
Kiley did a quick mental translation. Courtney was Courtney Love, another aging druggie rock star whom Kiley had never heard of until she came to Los Angeles. Frances Bean was Courtney Love's daughter by Kurt Cobainâanother rock star, albeit now a dead one.
“So I've got it all completely covered. I know exactly where the kids are and what they're doing,” Platinum concluded. “Everything's cool.”
“Uh-huh,” Kiley agreed. Of course, the truth was that Platinum most definitely did
not
have it completely covered. Experience had taught Kiley that when Platinum did a detailed and unsolicited infomercial on the goings-on of her two younger kids, it meant she was already semi-high and trying to pass as fully sober. Kiley thought of this as the Green Zone. Slurred words meant Platinum was in the Yellow Zone, which almost inevitably led to the Orange Zone, where Platinum went up to her room, locked the door, and didn't appear again for a good sixteen hours. There was also a Red Zone, where the rock star was rushed by ambulance to the UCLA Medical Center while the paramedics performed CPR, but thankfully this was still theoretical.
Kiley tried to be around the kids whenever Platinum ventured into the Yellow Zone; she hated the thought of them having to deal with their mother in that condition. It was ironic, really. Platinum made a big point of not bringing her lovers to the house, but thought nothing of passing out in her own vomit while her kids played with their Xboxes.
“So have a great Sunday. Go get laid or something,” Platinum concluded, and then hung up.
Kiley hung up too. Apparently she was going to get to enjoy her day off with her friends after all. With Platinum, you just never knew. Working for her was crucial to Kiley's master plan. But did the gods have to make the plan quite so difficult?
When Kiley was ten years old, she'd fallen in love with the ocean on a family trip to San Diego. Her family didn't do family trips, didn't do family . . . well, pretty much anything. Her dad, Al, worked at the brewery in La Crosse and was way too fond of the product he helped make. Her mom, Jeanne, was a waitress at a diner on the road up to Eau Claire. Though Kiley loved her mother dearly, she had a lot of problems. Fears. Anxieties. Panic attacks. She wouldn't take medication for it either, having been raised a Christian Scientist. On that family trip to San Diego, Mom had been frozen by just such an attack at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, just as she and Kiley were about to go on a tour. Kiley went on the tour by herself, blending into a throng of tourists so that the tour guide wouldn't notice her.
That was where, seven years ago, Kiley had come up with the plan. Finish high school, go to Scripps, and become a marine biologist. Side benefit of the plan: leave all things landlocked and La Crosse far, far behind. This dream had seemed entirely doable, until she actually read the Scripps catalog at the guidance office in her high school and took a good look at the tuition. There were zeros. A lot of zeros. It took Kiley but a millisecond to realize that her blue-collar parents could not afford the very white-collar out-of-state bill. Scripps wasn't anywhere close to cheap even if you were a resident of California, but at least that number was within the realm of the possible, especially with a night job and financial aid.
There was one problem. Kiley wasn't a resident of California and didn't have a chance of becoming one, absent a miracle or two. Nor did Kiley believe in miracles. Then they just started to happen to her.
The first miracle was
Platinum Nanny.
The second had been Platinum offering her the nanny job even after the show died in vitro. If she could survive in the job, she could attend high school here in Los Angeles and apply to Scripps as a California resident.
Big if. Platinum loved the words “you're fired” more than Donald Trump. Kiley had in fact been fired twice, but immediately thereafter Platinum had retracted the edict, mostly because it wasn't easy to find someone competent to take care of Siddhartha and Serenity (also known as the Children from Hell) and tolerate Platinum at the same time.
SiddharthaâSid for shortâwas a blond, angelic-looking nine-year-old brat with a belligerent attitude and a severe case of ADD, complete with bedwetting. He careened from one thing to the next and hated everyone. His only passion in life was the card game Yu-Gi-Oh!, which he played and talked about constantly.
His little sister, Serenityâno nickname, thank you very muchâwas more than a year younger, but bossed him around mercilessly. In fact, she bossed everyone around and got away with it. Her knowledge of the ins and outs of Hollywood was frightening. On more than one occasion, Kiley had caught her reading the trade magazine
Variety.
She was a cherubic miniature of her mother, with the same long platinum hair. Unlike her mother, Serenity had an aversion to cleanliness, and had only recently begun to take regular baths and showers.
Both kids had foul mouths well tolerated by their mother, who insisted the children were simply expressing themselves freely.
Kiley looked at the clock. Ten in the morning. Her day off had been salvaged.
There were two bedrooms in the guesthouse, both of them with twin beds covered by floral quilts. Kiley had chosen the sunnier of them and went there now to dig her swimsuit from the bottom drawer of an antique oak dresser. A plain one-piece navy Speedo; the producers at
Platinum Nanny
had provided it for one of the contest challenges.
Kiley didn't mind that the suit was more functional than sexy. In fact, she decided that she'd swim some laps at the country club. She loved to swim; it was actually the only form of exercise she did love. As she slipped the suit into her battered backpack with its EAST LA CROSSE HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF '07 button pinned to the ratty flap, she realized that in any case she wasn't about to stuff her pear-shaped curves into some itsy-bitsy bikini at a ritzy country club where wearing a two-digit size was practically a felony.
She reached for the cell phone on her nightstand to call Lydia, but stopped long enough to check out her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. Kiley had to admit that she was happy with the lighter streaks that had been added to her hair at the Joseph Martin salon during the TV show makeover. Other than that, though, she was back to her old makeup-free self. People sometimes told her she looked like Lindsay Lohan before she went blond, anorexic, and crazy. But what Kiley saw in the mirror was just an average-looking girl, nothing special. Her middle school gym teacher back in La Crosse, Ms. Plant, had once described her as “sturdy”âabout as far from “sexy” as an adjective could get.
“Screw Ms. Plant,” she told her reflection. “She's not dating a supermodel. I am.”
Well, that was a slight exaggeration. Maybe she wasn't exactly dating one, but she had gone out on
a
date with one. Well, okay, not exactly a date, but close to it.
His name was Tom Chappelle. They'd met when
Platinum
Nanny
had put Kiley and her mother up in a lavish suite at the Hotel Bel-Air, and then it seemed like everywhere Kiley went in Los Angeles, there he was . . . both in the flesh and on billboards and bus shelters. Tom was a model; the chief model, in fact, for a Ralph Lauren underwear campaign that left little to the imagination. He was six feet tall, with golden rippling muscles, an open face with piercing gray eyes, and a pouty lower lip. They'd run into each other at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood at a midnight showing of
The Ten,
the summer blockbuster movie in which Tom had his first real, albeit small, role.