Chapter 18
Julie
I was flying until I hit the wall.
I probably should have realized good things didn’t happen just like that, at least not to terrible people like me.
I got to kiss Helena Warrick, we had the best sex anyone had ever had, and she’d kept looking at me with that look that was enough to drive a woman out of her mind, like she was as fascinated with me as I was with her.
Linyue was as terrifying as I expected, but she warmed up quickly when I kept talking business with her, and she took a minute to look over my plans for event outreach and tore them to shreds, helping me build a stronger, more cohesive strategy with plenty of her own contacts involved to help it along.
When Helena and I met with the bigwig production lead Marion again with Linyue’s proposals in hand, I got to watch as she cracked slowly, nodding as she dashed things off on her tablet and, finally, agreed that she’d send her team.
I got in some time with my musicians, which I was increasingly, for some god-forsaken reason, finding that I had, and somehow things were…
working? I wasn’t even really thinking about it, but one night in a jazz bar I was just tapping along with the music and thinking Roxie would love this, and without overthinking it, I’d approached the musician after his show, a gentle giant of a Black guy named Vincent who was probably four hundred pounds and felt like he’d lose a fight with a puppy, and asked him if he had a label.
Only the next day, I had him in front of one of the labeling managers I’d met from one of the big studios, and sure enough, Roxie loved it.
Vincent teared up a little when Roxie said they’d talk more about what branding could look like, and I had to explain to Helena over drinks later that I genuinely felt worried when I clapped the guy on the back in congratulations that I might have knocked him over.
And she congratulated me by grabbing us food and taking me back to her place to scissor until I exploded, so all in all, that was a pretty good night.
My list on Jewel filled up with names that were starting to reflect real people who had actual potential, and the biggest problem, aside from the sleep deprivation that was only loosely managed by Helena making sure I occasionally did sleep, was that Kingmaker looked smug about it.
“A king doesn’t win a battle overnight,” he said over a slice of Tasty Slice one evening. “But he makes victory inevitable.”
“Okay, but I’m still living in a laundry closet,” I said. “I mean, you remember that part, right?”
He made a face that said he had forgotten that part. “Ah, nah, ‘course I remember. But a king’s battlefield ain’t always gonna be luxurious.”
“When is a battlefield ever luxurious?”
“Still gotta get you that supermodel girlfriend, too,” he said. “You meet any hot models?”
“Oh, uh… no…” I scratched my head, my voice awkward. “I mean, I’ve met a couple, but nobody I’ve been, uh…”
“You met some?” He had a marker and paper in his hand again. I swear he just conjured those things with magic.
“Dude, put those away. We’re not listing them down.”
“How’d you meet ‘em? We’ll lean into the situations where you meet hot models, leverage your action portfolio towards supermodel exposure. Pareto’s principle.”
“Who is Pareto?”
“Some kind of pea farmer.”
“What?” I shook my head. “No—you know—forget the pea farmer. It’s not a situation, it’s just… been working alongside Helena Warrick, and she’s got a lot of friends who are models…”
He threw the paper and markers aside. “You workin’ with that Warrick girl?”
“Jeez, dude, calm down. It’s just business.”
He leaned forwards. “You mindin’ each other’s business?”
I felt my face flare up. “Are you asking if I’m fucking Helena Warrick?”
He played his stupid fucking turntables. “I’m asking if you’re staying accountable, Julie.”
“About fucking her?”
“Yeah.”
“No, I’m not… we’re not doing anything.”
The girl from behind the counter came over to the counter with another Coke for Kingmaker, the stylish Black girl I’d only ever heard referred to as Mani because of her insistence on immaculate manicures, and we were in too deep now for me to ask her actual name.
“You say Helena Warrick?” she said. “I saw Kingmaker looking her up, and babe. If you’re hooking up with her, I’m gonna be mad jealous. ”
“No—I’m not hooking up with a hot supermodel!” Everyone in this pizza place must have thought I was insane by now, the number of times I came in here and shouted about hot supermodels. They were right, though.
Mani looked crestfallen. “What, why not? I wanted to hear the tea on what she’s like. I looked her up, and she is gay.”
“Yeah, I know that,” I shot back hotly. “I’m here to talk about next steps, Kingmaker, not who I’m sleeping with!”
He narrowed his eyes. “Gotta know I can trust you, Julie. A king don’t lie.”
“What the fuck do you mean, a king don’t—do you know how often you’ve had me—” I threw my hands up. “Forget it! A king don’t lie. I’m not lying. Let’s move on.”
He dropped it, and I managed to avoid the subject with him a while longer still, focusing on work.
Krysten was delighted with how things were moving along too, and I was a regular enough now at their coworking office that the receptionist greeted me by name when I came in.
I spent a lot of time with her events manager Liv working out the details, and of course, most importantly, now that Helena wasn’t worrying every minute about Linyue appearing over her shoulder, we got to work together more openly, showing up to Krysten’s office together or meeting Liv or Krysten somewhere for coffee.
And of course, Krysten laid into me on more than one occasion, including when she and I both stayed long after office closing hours with her compiling a backlog of project reports and me handling correspondence for a million different people, which, I was still confused about how I was in professional contact with this many people.
“You and Helena do work very closely together these days,” she said.
I knew what she was getting at, and I didn’t want to address it. “I told you she’s good.”
“You will drown in an ocean of denial.”
I hunched my shoulders, still focusing on the shitty beat-up laptop I’d gotten secondhand online. “I’d say I won’t, but that feels like it proves your point.”
“Do you intend to ever tell her the truth?”
“Yeah, I will. I will. Just… once… once this is settled,” I mumbled, looking away up at the ceiling. “I don’t want to mess up this event with my whole…”
“You carry a smoldering powder keg and promise it will wait for a good time to go up in flames.”
“Look, just go ahead and call me stupid.”
“You are stupid.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I thought that would be more cathartic than it was.”
“But for being stupid, you are quite a smart one. I believe you can work this out.” She closed her laptop, standing up. “You must make sure to sleep tonight, or you will keel over and die.”
“I know. I will. Home sweet home before long.” Back to see Harold, my OG guy, the one who had been there since the beginning.
Or at least I thought so, because I got back to the complex at eleven, texting Helena on the way there and wondering what was bothering her since her tone felt a little off when she replied, but my Helena-related anxieties disappeared when I got to the door and my key wouldn’t turn in the lock.
“The fuck?” I rattled my key a bit more, and it was only then that I realized there was a different door handle than usual, shiny and polished and new.
They changed the locks. My stomach dropped.
“Shit,” I said, quietly, to the night air here in this smelly back road, and I rested my forehead against the door as I texted my landlord.
JULIE
Hey, someone changed the locks, and my key won’t fit. Can you come get me a new key?
The fucker responded immediately. Like he’d been waiting but didn’t want to reach out first.
LANDLORD
Sorry, you’re not in my tenants list. I think you have the wrong number.
Jesus fucking Christ. I felt a cold flush in my face, standing there clutching the phone with no sensation in my fingertips.
Shit. The authorities must have caught him leasing the place out, and… and what? If he was pretending he didn’t know me, he must have played it off as a squatter.
Which meant I was out of luck.
JULIE
Dude, don’t play dumb. I’ve got payment records to you, text logs.
I’ll bring this to the housing authority
Are you just going to ignore me?
He was just going to ignore me. Shit. All of the messages marked as read, no reply.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I groaned, banging my head on the door. All my fucking stuff was in there.
That fucking suit I’d paid so fucking much for. I was fucked. I was so far beyond fucked.
I pounded on the door, banging on it in hopes someone would at least come by and open it and I could see if the interior door lock was the same, anything, but no luck. Nothing. Just the night air clinging to the back of my neck, the weight of the world coming down heavier on my shoulders.
∞∞∞
Police didn’t do shit, obviously. Guy at the desk looked annoyed that I’d even brought it up, telling me that’s civil, not criminal and that Housing Court handled that, and when I insisted the landlord was keeping all my belongings, he just shrugged and told me that unless I had proof they were mine, they couldn’t do anything.
My head was spinning as I sat down on the window ledge of a shuttered-down shop not far from the police station, my head in my hands, looking down at the ground, tears prickling my eyes.
I’d never known as many people in my entire life as I did now, but I’d never felt so alone—not a single person who could actually help me, nobody I could tell hey my slumlord got caught and I’m on the street now.
Homeless, in debt, and robbed of almost all my belongings. Here was everything I’d ever been afraid of as the worst-case outcome.
And I never got to say goodbye to Harold.