Chapter Two TMZ Will Break Your Heart
Chapter Two
TMZ Will Break Your Heart
I shouldn’t be doing this.
I should not be doing this.
And I’m not just talking about the fact that I’ve just superglued two of my fingers together in an effort to close my cut
from earlier that definitely could have used a stitch or two. No, I’m talking about the other, worse thing: cyberstalking
my old life.
I can’t help it. Being almost recognized by that woman at the flower shop has sent my head spiraling six thousand miles, and
more than a couple years back, to the land of beauty and fame—or tabloids and garbage, to be more accurate. I get that all
this is going to do is toss my mental health in the toilet and then double flush, but I can’t stop.
(Even though I should absolutely stop and in fact paid a lot of money for Janet to teach me how to stop. TMZ will break your heart was a frequent mantra of ours once upon a time.)
But damn it, Janet, if even superglue won’t keep me away, I don’t know what will.
It starts as a small niggle in the back of my brain when I first walk into my silent apartment, having left Gouda downstairs to finish out her nap on the vent.
Just a gentle pressure to look, see, consume that grows into a gnawing headache I can’t escape from, no matter how hard I distract myself with the task of tending wounds.
It’s possible, I realize, that what happened to me, what Nikki did to me, what they all did to me, will always be the biggest wound, and that perhaps there is not enough superglue in the world to fix it.
So I scroll. I scroll as I fix my bleeding fingers or make them worse, because the truth is, the need to know has filled my
entire body up to the brim. I’m a live grenade so terrified someone’s gonna pull my pin that I just go ahead and do it myself.
It always starts with a simple google, having long since deleted the alerts on my name. I sigh and try to pry my fingers apart
while the results load, most of them old and outdated—I pretend that’s a relief and not a disappointment. Why would anyone
be posting an article about me now anyway? What would they even say? “Failed Actor Turned Recluse Still Reclusing”?
My parents long ago reassured everyone from NBC to TMZ that, despite my sudden disappearance and the deletion of all my social
media accounts, I was still alive and well and just “taking a break.” Pretty soon most people stopped caring. You stop commodifying
yourself, they all just move on to the next person who will.
Like I said, I should be relieved.
I should. But I’m not.
I click over to Google Images, just to see if there’s anything I should be “worried about.” That’s what I said last time Regan caught me checking—that I just needed to make sure everything was on the up-and-up.
A few years ago, I went grocery shopping with my dad during a holiday visit. One of the creeps I went to high school with
snapped a picture with their phone and sold it—suddenly an image of me weighing brussels sprouts with no makeup on and glaring
three-inch roots was everywhere.
Each headline was worse than the last. First there was “She Lives!” Then “From Major to Meijer” and, most embarrassingly,
in a nod to a running joke about my former character’s hatred of all things green, “Sprouting from the Dead: Kiddie Star Finally
Eats Her Veggies.”
Then it just got mean. The few people who still talk about me on social media started suggesting that I leaked the photo myself
to stay relevant—as if I purposely wanted to be associated with the most hated vegetable on earth for all eternity. (Okay,
so maybe that joke about not liking vegetables was based on a true story.) It was so insulting. If I was going to leak anything,
it would be a picture of me looking hot next to one of my kick-ass floral arrangements, thank you very much.
Giving up on both Google and ever getting my fingers unstuck from each other, I head over to Instagram. I have one heavily
locked down account that I only use to stalk my old “friends” as they live their most fabulous—read: manufactured—lives for
the cameras. I only very occasionally comment on their posts, and it’s never mean. (Okay, fine, sometimes I post a hundred
eyeball emojis when they post something obviously fake, but I’m only human.)
It’s just that I literally can’t believe no one has figured out Kendra’s “private plane” is a rental set.
The girl flew Southwest when I knew her, for god’s sake—a fact that I vowed to take to my grave after she threatened to shove her red-bottomed heel into my eye if I ever told.
(Honestly, if anyone was going to commit murder via extravagant apparel, it would be her.)
Then there’s Demarco, who pretends to be a perfectly vanilla hetero boy next door, the ideal ageless, sexless leading man
for Hallmark mothers to pine over . . . the same Demarco who is actually a darling bisexual like me and Nikki, and who’s so
deep in the kink scene that he’s a member of not one but two of the most elite dungeons in LA.
I still remember when we bumped into him at one of them. Nikki had taken me there to “research” the latest spicy fanfic-turned-industry-smash
that was in the studio’s pipeline . . . she never booked the job, but at least we got a lot of great new ideas from it. We
also got an eyeful of Demarco we were not expecting.
I click to his profile first. Of all the friends I had back then—or thought I had—he’s the only one I’ve actually missed.
I take a deep breath and a swig of cheap beer, almost snorting it out my nose when I see Demarco’s latest post. He’s gushing
about getting the starring role in a Christmas movie on the new ultraconservative holiday channel. You know, the one that
thought Hallmark was too progressive. Yikes. Second thought, maybe I don’t miss him all that much.
I shake my head and steel my nerves when I see who Insta is suggesting I follow next.
A name that still makes my stomach swoop even after all these years and a face that makes my blood turn to cold fury.
Because suddenly there she is, in all her blue-check-verified, hot-shit, 18.
3M-followers-and-counting celebrity glory: Nikki Colletti.
Nikki wasn’t just the costar of The Nikki and Andy Show, but also of my entire former freaking life—the very ex I had to fling myself across the entire country to finally be rid
of. I guess you could say it was a pretty bad breakup—well, for me, at least. Nikki didn’t waste much time scooping up an
Oscar and, if TMZ is to be believed, an entire cast of lovers to go along with it.
I don’t dare click on her stories, scared that she’ll somehow figure out that my “Mallory Malbone” account is really me, even
if I did use a picture of one of my best clients as the profile pic—a sweet little horse rancher a state over with a propensity
for event planning and flowers. That rancher probably single-handedly saved In Bloom this year, finding us after one of my
floral arrangements went viral on TikTok.
Sorry, Molly, but I had to.
(Do I feel guilty for using her picture to spy on my old friends? Yes. Am I going to stop? Probably not. Did I at least change
her name? Sort of? Besides, everybody has a doppelg?nger, right? Hers just happens to be . . . well, my fake Instagram profile.
Besides, from what I know of her, she’d get it. Probably even support it.)
I click over and scroll down Nikki’s grid, looking at all the artful selfies and random blurry shots that are just enough
of an enigma to leave her fans commenting guesses as to where she is and what she’s doing—gaming the algorithms, always.
Jealousy stirs deep in my belly as I keep scrolling—who’s taking the faraway shots? I know she doesn’t know how to use a timer—but then swiftly swirls into something else, something we’re not going to talk about, or even think about, as my scrolling finger stutter-stops on a close-up of her skin.
You can’t see her face, but I don’t need to. There was a time when my fingertips had felt every inch of her; when I knew her
bones as well as I knew my own, could map her pores and freckles from memory—and while our fingerprints have long since washed
off each other’s bodies, they haven’t washed out of my mind.
I’d know that collarbone anywhere.
I stare at the way the beads of water and sand trail down her skin in the picture, dipping lower and lower until they disappear
beneath the fabric of her tiny bikini—the same bikini I’ve tied and untied for her a thousand times, with the taste of sea
salt on our tongues and our laughter giving way to sandy kisses.
I shift in my seat and swallow hard, trying to forget that I once knew every bit of her, inside and out, and now I don’t know
her at all. I may have been the one who ultimately cut the line and ran, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to. That doesn’t mean
her hooks aren’t still in me.
I take another swig from the bottle, and then another, picking at stray bits of glue on my fingers even though it hurts, trying
to distract myself from all the questions I shouldn’t be thinking. Does she ever miss my laugh the way I do hers? Or the taste
of my skin on her tongue?
God, this is embarrassing.
I hate her, I remind myself, a lot. A lot a lot.
Everything I’m feeling right now? Everything I’m thinking?
It’s just chemicals, brain chemistry, crossed lines from past lives, because now, in this one, I.
Hate. Her. She’s the devil, the evil empire, Kylo Ren pre–redemption arc but worse.
She’s the Wicked Witch of the West, and I’d do well to remember it.
I huff out a breath, polish off the beer in record time, and click over to TikTok, switching from the In Bloom store account
I manage to my “super-secret, very bad, do not use” account that I only let myself pull up on the worst of brain days. The
evil algorithm instantly rewards me with clip after clip of my old show. I pick one, slumping in my seat as I watch the younger