Let’s Make a Scene

Chapter 1 Cynthie

“Stop crying like a little baby and give me five more!” Petra yells.

“I’m not crying,” I pant, clinging to what little dignity I have left as I crawl across my exercise mat. “I am sweating . I think my eyeballs are sweating. Is that even possible?” I take a deep, shuddering breath. “Physiologically speaking, I mean.”

“I am not here for a science lesson about your sweaty body!” Petra snaps out. “I am here to make you strong! Right now you are not strong, you are weak and limp! Like a worm! Or the leaf of lettuce!”

Every sentence out of Petra’s mouth is punctuated so emphatically with an exclamation point that I can almost see them floating through the air toward me, though that could be the delirium brought on by how exhausted I am.

Standing over me in her hot-pink Lycra workout gear, she looks and sounds like the meanest cheerleader in the world.

Petra is small and blond, with a bouncing ponytail and perfect white teeth: a tiny Serbian prom queen with the dark, shriveled heart of Wednesday Addams. I love her.

At least, I do when she’s not actively trying to destroy me.

Over the speakers, Mary Poppins sings peppily about spoonfuls of sugar.

Petra’s obsessive love for Julie Andrews is extremely intense, and today it was her turn to choose the music.

While I would not previously have considered Julie’s oeuvre to be the obvious soundtrack to a workout, I have to admit she does have some bangers.

I attempt to curl my body into another of the impossible crunches Petra wants. “It hurts,” I whimper.

“Life is pain, princess.” Petra is unmoved.

“Hey,” I say, like a hostage trying to forge a human connection with their captor, “I love that film.”

She frowns. “What film?”

“?‘Life is pain, princess,’?” I repeat. “Isn’t that a quote from The Princess Bride ?”

“Oh.” Petra tilts her head to the side and nods. “Yes, I have seen that film. I like best the giant rat.”

Of course the woman is on the side of the rodents of unusual size.

“I suppose you were team Darth Vader, too,” I grumble, falling back against the floor, my jelly-like limbs splayed around me, refusing to move any further.

“His cape is excellent,” she says with approval, before nudging at my leg with her foot. “Now we will do the light weights.”

I groan, which only makes her smile widen—like a shark showing off all its teeth.

“We do the jabs and the uppercuts and you pretend you are punching that man in the face.”

I don’t need to ask her which man she means.

“Okay,” I agree, letting her drag me to my feet.

Once I’m standing with the weights in my hands, I mirror her stance and start moving my arms, putting some snap into the jab-cross movements.

“You can do better than this!” Petra is fired up, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “You hit him in the face! You hit him in the mouth! Go for the groin! You break that asshole’s nose!”

“Yeah,” I pant, arms flailing everywhere as “The Lonely Goatherd” blasts out at top volume. “Fuck him.”

“That’s right.” She nods. “Louder!”

“FUCK HIM!” I yell, twisting my fists, imagining the punches landing on Shawn Hardy’s stupid, handsome face.

Petra cheers and lets loose a string of Serbian profanities.

“What does that mean?” I ask when I come to rest with my hands on my hips, sucking in deep gulps of air.

Petra considers this for a moment. “It is like… I hope the thunder from the sky fucks you until you are dead.”

I blink.

“We Serbs are very good at cursing,” she adds proudly.

“Clearly.”

“We are done for today. Make sure you drink the water and stretch.” With a flick of her ponytail, Petra moves to stop the music, cutting Julie off mid-yodel.

“It is better,” Petra concedes, as I guzzle from my water bottle. “Maybe you will not be total embarrassment after all.”

I start to stretch my hamstrings. “I don’t know…” I feel a flutter of nervous energy. “I’ve never done proper combat training like this before. It’s going to be intense—so many classes in martial arts and weapons. I’m going to have an axe to wield.”

“Nice.” Petra takes a swig from her own bottle. “Will you also get to wear a cape?”

She looks so hopeful that I say, “Probably.” And now I know exactly what to get her for Christmas.

“But they want a more muscular look,” I continue, flexing my bicep, which is certainly more of an event than it was a few weeks ago. “I’ve still got a way to go.”

I’ve been putting in a lot of hours with Petra lately, which has been fine with me. Until this scandal blows over, there’s no way I’m voluntarily leaving the house, so my home gym has been a place to burn off some of my rage.

When I first bought my place in LA, I didn’t give much thought to the large exercise space in the basement, even though the Realtor had been in raptures about it. As Petra would be the first to point out, I am neither a natural nor an enthusiastic athlete.

I was much more interested in the bright, sunny kitchen, and in the rooms that weren’t just big empty glass boxes but felt a little familiar, given the 1920s English-Revival style of the building.

An LA mansion was hardly a two-bedroom semi in Wiltshire, but it felt a lot closer to home than some of the properties I’d been looking at.

After spending over twenty years plotting to get as far away from the place as possible, it was a real kick in the teeth to find myself feeling homesick.

Anyway, it turned out the Realtor had been right all along and I was extremely grateful for the slick, kitted-out room that I had once referred to as “the dungeon.” Preparing for my next role in a big comic-book-hero franchise has been the perfect distraction from the disaster that is my life.

Perhaps disaster is the wrong word. Catastrophe ? No, what’s worse than a catastrophe? It sounds like the Serbs could just about do justice to the absolute bin fire of the past month.

It’s been four weeks now since the news of my affair with Shawn Hardy hit the tabloids.

Four weeks of relentless attention, of paparazzi camped outside the door, of increasingly hysterical headlines, of earnest think-pieces, of tweets and letters and emails ranging from “I’m very disappointed in you” to “I wish you were dead.” I’ve been called a slut, a whore, a scarlet woman (a fun throwback).

There’s even been an SNL skit about it—so I hear, anyway.

I haven’t seen it because Hannah confiscated all my devices after I spent the first week curled up under a blanket, crying and subsisting entirely on ice cream.

“If you leave it to melt, you can just drink it straight from the carton,” I had told her, wild-eyed and sugar-drunk. “The tub is already cup shaped, and there’s no washing up. It’s the perfect method. Do you think people know about this?”

“You don’t even do your own washing up,” Hannah had replied sharply, wrenching my phone from the birdlike claw my hand had formed around it thanks to hours of doom-scrolling.

As if the memory has summoned her, Hannah hustles into the room.

“Oh, good, you’re done,” she says. “Gayle is here, and she wants a word.”

My agent turning up unannounced… This can’t be good.

“Do I have time to grab a quick shower first?” I ask.

Petra may be able to work out and develop a delicate, aesthetic glow, but I am tomato red and my hair is scrunched into a sweaty ball.

This is in stark contrast to Hannah, who looks chic in a drapey black linen jumpsuit.

She’s all perfect flicks of black eyeliner, glowing golden skin, and cut-glass cheekbones, courtesy of her Bangladeshi mum and her Italian dad—a genetic combination so winning that she absolutely could have made it as a model if she wasn’t—and I quote—“unable to be in a photo without blinking, and deeply dedicated to carbohydrates.”

“Of course,” Hannah replies hastily, because, as I said, the picture is not a pretty one. “I’ll set Gayle up with a coffee.”

“I’ll be quick,” I promise, and bidding goodbye to Petra I run upstairs, shower, and change into a pair of yoga pants and a stretchy cashmere sweater.

(It seems to me that when you’re heartbroken and your reputation is circling the drain, you can’t be expected to wear anything that doesn’t have an elasticized waistband. The fact that I bother with a bra at all is an indication of my innate professionalism.)

“There she is!” Gayle greets me when I make my way back down to the living room. “Darling, you look gorgeous.”

Considering the last time Gayle saw me I was hyperventilating into an empty crisp packet (Who has paper bags in the house these days?), I’m sure my current appearance is indeed an improvement.

Hannah and Gayle sit side by side on the horseshoe-shaped, pink velvet sofa that has been my cozy little depression-themed, trash-panda nest in recent weeks—probably not the vision my interior designer had in mind—but that is currently respectably tidy.

There are barely any chocolate bar wrappers and crumpled tissues stuffed down the sides of the cushions.

Gayle Salt is one of the most formidable agents in the world, representing a whole roster of movie stars both in the UK and here in the States.

When she took me on thirteen years ago it felt like a miracle, and most days it still does.

She looks and dresses like Iris Apfel but with improbably red hair, commands any room she walks into, and has a career that has spanned over fifty years (though she remains extremely vague about her age beyond telling me “Darling, I was the merest child when I started out! Practically a fetus!”).

She drops names through conversation like confetti but does so without affectation: she simply knows everyone .

“There’s good news and bad news,” she says now, direct as always.

My eyes flicker over to Hannah. The woman has been my best friend since we were in diapers, and I can usually read her like a book. Now, however, her expression is a strange mixture of anxiety and excitement.