Heartless Few Box Set

by MV Ellis

  I had no real idea who I was anyhow. I mean, I knew things about myself: I was tall, I was a model, I used to be Arlo Jones’s fuck buddy, and I was in love with Luke Jones. But these were just facts. They didn’t define me, or who I was inside. Not really, anyway.

  The sad truth was that I’d spent my life trying to be what I needed to be to get by. Or worse, trying not to be the things other people didn’t want me to be. At home as a child, I was always trying not to be a burden to my parents or a drain on their mental or physical resources. At school I tried not to be what everyone thought I was, or should be—the junkies’ kid, the orphan, the pest. Spending so much time defining myself that way had set me on the path of forgetting who I was underneath it all. When I took away what I put out there for others, I had no idea what was left for me, or of me—the real me. I didn’t even know if there was real me, or if I lost that so long ago I could never find it again.

  I looked around my bedroom and suddenly felt like the walls were moving in on me. Like a scene from an adventure movie where the hero is going through hell and high water to get the hidden treasure or the kidnapped girl, or both, only this time there was no action hero or treasure. And the only girl who needed to be found was me.

  With that thought, my chest constricted painfully, and my breathing became shallow and labored. My heart beat so fast and so hard against my chest that I was sure it was going to break through my ribs at any moment. A thousand thoughts streamed through my mind like traffic on a freeway, but as I tried to focus in on any one specific idea or detail it would speed away like the others, only to be replaced by scores more moments later. The effect was dizzying and terrifying. I needed to get out of the apartment. Stat. As soon as I could stand without swooning and think straight enough to put one foot in front of the other, I hurried around the apartment like a crazy person, frantically stuffing items into a weekend bag.

  I was hardly aware of what I was packing and had no clue where I was going, so I didn’t know what I actually needed anyway. When the bag was full to bursting, much like my brain, I stopped and changed out of the previous night’s clothes—or what was left of them. Forgoing a shower, I threw on the first clothes at hand—a short denim skirt and a crumpled tank, shoving my feet into a pair of kicks without any socks. I wore no bra or panties either—at least I was consistent.

  I grabbed a baseball cap and yanked it down over my unkempt hair and headed out the door. I had no plan. I just knew that with the way I had been feeling, and things I’d been doing to myself over the previous few months, if I stayed in the apartment even a minute longer, I’d lose my fucking mind—more than I already had. I needed to break the destructive downward spiral I was in. Stat.

  As I headed down to ground level, an idea formed in my mind. I stood in the lobby and located the nearest car share vehicle—just two blocks away, which was perfect. I peered out of the tinted glass door of the building apprehensively. Thankfully there didn’t appear to be any photographers within stalking distance. Still, I put my sunglasses on and dragged my cap down even further.

  I pulled up to the curb outside the police station, thankful to the parking gods for gifting me the remaining space on the block. I took this good fortune as an omen and walked toward the entrance with an optimistic spring in my step. Moments later, I realized the error of my ways. I couldn’t recall ever having been inside a police station before, and I hoped never to again.

  Apparently, they were where dreams went to die. Mine certainly did as I surveyed the social collateral damage filling the waiting room. I took a ticket and waited my turn to be seen by one of the bored-looking officers behind the desk, trying not to stare at the people waiting around me. It was depressing. If I’d thought the group home was bad, this place made it look like the Ritz Carlton.

  Fifty-three minutes of my life that I would never get back later, and I exited the building feeling like I needed a shower in Lysol with wire wool as a loofa but with no progress in my attempt to report the hacking of my phone, which was what must have happened for the video of myself and Arlo to have reached the public domain.

  I wished I’d thought to consult Prof. Google on this matter before subjecting myself to that uber-depressing experience. Had I done so, I probably would have known that not only did the NYPD not deal with matters that could loosely be termed cyber-crime, as these came under the jurisdiction of the FBI, but also, all reports could, in fact, be filed online, initially, at least. Hindsight could bite me. I got into the car and swung into the New York traffic, putting part two of my newly formed plan into action. Onward and upward.

  I pulled the car into the driveway of Mia’s house and flopped forward with my forehead resting on the steering wheel. I’d managed to keep it together throughout the trip to Long Island, but now that I no longer needed my wits about me to navigate the busy New York streets, I let it all hang out right there in the driveway. I hoped none of Mia’s neighbors were watching.

  Mia was my Mom’s mom, but everybody had always called her Mia, even my mom. I had asked her why once, and she told me she had never felt old enough or sensible enough to be someone’s mother, let alone grandmother, so Mia it was. It was weird because her name was actually Greta, so I wasn’t even sure where the nickname had come from. However it had started, it had definitely stuck, and strange though it was to other people, it seemed normal to me—it was all I knew.

  I missed her so much it was painful. She had been one of the only people in my life who had wanted nothing more from me than for me to be me. She wanted nothing for me that I didn’t want for myself, and she would have walked barefoot to the four corners of the earth for me, had I needed her to. If she hadn’t taken me in after my parents’ deaths, I really didn’t know where I would have ended up, and as fucked up as I was now, I was certain things would have been a thousand times worse without having had Mia as a positive influence as I grew up.

  People said that flippantly about other people all the time, but for me, it was genuinely true. There were rarely happy endings for kids like me once we were sucked into the system for good. One foster home after another, group homes, being treated like a number on a balance sheet rather than an actual person, then spat back out of the system as soon as possible at the other end once we came “of age,” a broken shell of a person. Though, as I sat crying like a baby in the car, I was hardly the poster child for a well-adjusted life post-trauma, inside or outside of the public child welfare system.

  I cried until I felt as wrung out as a used Kleenex but had actually run out of them myself. I had arguably hit rock bottom, but I wasn’t so low that I was prepared to sit in full public view sobbing like a preschooler while snot ran down my face. We all had limits, and that was mine. I got out of the car and hefted my bag onto my shoulder, hoping nobody had witnessed the meltdown. There was only so much public humiliation one person could handle, and I had just about reached saturation point.

  Twenty-Three

  Marnie

  As I walked into Mia's place, I immediately felt calmer. Even amidst the dust of a house that was shut up for months on end like some kind of mausoleum—I had never quite mustered the courage or energy to change anything, let alone pack up all her things and do Lord-knows-what with them—I found myself able to breathe more easily.

  It was almost as though a weight had been physically lifted from my chest. I took a few large gulps of musty air and looked around—not that I needed to. The layout of the place was ingrained in my memory. I knew the place like the back of my hand. Every trinket and ornament had sat in place for as long as I could remember.

  I flopped down onto the ancient couch, raising a cloud of dust motes, which set me off on a massive sneezing fit. So much for breathing more easily. I decided that there was no time like the present, pulled out my phone, and began the process of filing the report of my phone hacking on the local area FBI website. In stark contrast to my earlier station visit, it was a surprisingly easy and pain-free experience. Especially given the s
cant information I had at hand to populate the report with.

  It was over in minutes. Once I received an email confirming that my report had been successfully lodged and citing a reference number for future correspondence—apparently an officer would call to follow up once they’d reviewed my submission—I reviewed my call log, knowing it was going to be a shitshow. Sure enough, there were missed calls in abundance, most of which were from Luke. He was nothing if not persistent. I ignored them all, but one number stood out. Milla.

  Camilla Caine was my best friend from back in Michigan. Even before I was the orphan Annie outcast I became when I moved to New York, I had never had many friends. My home situation had hardly facilitated playdates, sleepovers, carpooling, slumber parties, and comparing new clothes and toys.

  That hadn’t stopped Milla from taking me under her wing in junior high, though. She'd shared her lunch with me one day when she realized I had none, and we'd been friends ever since. We probably spoke to each other three or four times a year now, max, though we messaged back and forth a little more frequently and kept vaguely aware of what the other was doing via social media.

  We lived such different lives. But then, we always had. Growing up, Milla had had the perfect little suburban family life: Mom, Dad, two-point-four children, dog, and a white picket fence to boot. Her parents had given a fuck about her and her sister—they attended PTA meetings and parent-teacher conferences. Hell, her mom had baked fresh cookies and cakes for lunchboxes. They were a regular real-life Brady Bunch kind of a family.

  Then as we grew older and I got into modeling, our paths diverged even further. While I was strutting my way down catwalks all across the world, Milla was busting her ass working her way through law school. While I was having meaningless, detached sex with Arlo, she’d met and married a fellow lawyer, and they now had two of the most adorable kids on the planet.

  She still worked, so as well as being an accomplished attorney, she was also a soccer and dance mom extraordinaire, and the perfect wife to her catalog-model-gorgeous husband. They said you couldn’t have it all, but then Milla was a testament to the fact that you could, and some people actually did. If I didn’t know her, I’d probably hate her wholesome, all-American guts purely on principle. As it was, I loved her to her very bones.

  The phone barely rang on my end, and there she was.

  “Hello, Trouble. I would ask how you are, but given that video all over the media, I think I can guess.”

  “Hi, Mills. Ummm... you’d think you could guess, but it’s actually worse than you might think. Quite a lot worse.”

  “It can’t be worse than a super-graphic sex tape of you and the hottest man alive doing the rounds for all to see. It can’t.”

  “Oh, trust me, that’s the tip of the iceberg. I got fired. Arlo dumped me. I slept with Luke. I crashed Arlo’s girlfriend’s photography launch and made a total fool of myself in front of just about everybody who's anybody, then the sex tape came out. It’s a total train wreck.”

  “Jesus, Marnie... wha...? I don’t even know where to start with all that. Why didn’t you come to me with any of this sooner? I had literally no idea what was going on in your life until I read about it on a gossip site. How are you coping?”

  “I’m not…” The words were barely out of my mouth before I was crying like a baby. Poor Milla was so patient with me, waiting with nothing but soothing words until I could string a sentence together again. That was why I hadn’t called her months ago. I had been a blubbering mess, and her life was so far removed from this kind of clusterfuck that I didn’t think she could even begin to understand, nor did I want her to have to.

  “Deep breaths, just try and focus on getting air in and out of your lungs. In through your nose, and out through your mouth.”

  Oh, and if all that other shit she excelled at wasn’t enough, Milla was also a qualified yoga teacher. Of course.

  “I’m sorry. I’m a fucking mess. Just ignore me. I shouldn’t have called.”

  “What do you mean you shouldn’t have called? I'm your oldest fucking friend. If you can’t cry to me when shit hits the fan—and let's face it, a whole sewer has hit the aircon—who can you cry to?” She had a point. There was literally nobody else. Two of the small handful of people I’d thought were in my corner had let me down badly. At that point she was pretty much the only person I could rely on not to screw me over.

  “Start from the beginning and take it slow. I have all the time in the world.” As I went into the kitchen to grab a glass of water, I glanced at the time on Mia's microwave. That was patently a lie. It was midafternoon on a weekday. She must surely have work to do and kids’ stuff to be getting on with. I loved that she was prepared to lie to me to make me feel better. Hers were the good kind of lies.

  I recounted the whole sorry tale, from puking in the gutter after lunch with Sandra, and how horrified I was at everything that had happened with Arlo since he told me he was in love with someone else, to how devastated I was at Luke's reaction after we slept together.

  “Okay, so while clearly none of this is great, none of it is unfixable. You got this. There’s a saying in business that feels applicable now: you need to eat the frog.”

  “What? That sounds utterly gross.”

  Milla laughed, and my heart panged. We hadn’t been in the same room together for years, but somehow I really missed her.

  “Hahahaha, well, luckily it doesn’t involve actual frogs, or any of the euphemisms you might be conjuring up. It just means that you need to tackle the thing you're least looking forward to first. So, of all the shit on your plate rate now, which is the most hideous?"

  “That’s like asking what is worse out of syphilis and gonorrhea, or mullets and perms. These are all bad things.”

  I heard a muffled chuckle down the line.

  “Sorry, I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that those analogies are pure gold!”

  “It’s okay. You can laugh. If I wasn’t front and center of this whole debacle, I’d be laughing too.”

  “Okay, I’m glad you can still have a sense of humor about it all. So what's your frog?”

  “Luke.”

  There was a small pause on the other end of the line.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “From what you’d told me before, I’d always thought he was Prince Charming, while his douchebag, sociopathic brother was the frog.”

  “Yeah, me too. Now I’m not so sure, but I do know that of everything that’s happened, that hurts the most. I mean, I knew that Arlo and I were a means to an end for each other, nothing more. We’d had an expiration date from day one. I guess the shock plot twist in that scenario was that I always envisaged I’d be the one to end it. I never figured either of us for the falling in love and settling down type, least of all him. I regret disgracing myself at the gallery, of course I do. It was never my intention to ruin the evening or shift the spotlight onto me. I owe them both a big apology, but I feel like this is the kind of thing that gets forgotten pretty quickly the next time someone else makes a complete boob of themselves.

  “Likewise with the video. It’s hideous, sure it is, and I would give anything to change the fact that it was made, let alone distributed far and wide. But again, so many people have had sex tapes leaked, and eventually, life goes on. With Luke, I just don’t see how we can move past this. He broke my heart and has no fucking idea. There’s no way out.”

  “That’s not quite true. There’s one way, but it involves eating the frog in the worst possible way.”

  “I’m not following. What do you mean?”

  “I mean you need to tell him the truth."

  “Nope.” My tone was definitive. There was absolutely no way.

  “Why not? We’re not kids anymore, Marnie. All these years, and he still has no idea that you’re in love with him? It’s crazy. You need to tell him.”

  “There’s nothing crazy about it, and I don’t need to do any such thing. He alr
eady thinks I’m nuts. Telling him I’ve been harboring feelings for him since the dawn of time without a word would just confirm that fact. Besides, the feelings are obviously not reciprocated, so I’d just be revealing myself as a psycho stalker for a decade and a half. Nope. That’s a hard pass from me.”

  “How do you know the feelings aren’t reciprocated? It takes two to tango. You slept with each other. What evidence do you have that he’s not into you the way you are him?” Wow. Lawyers were something else.

  “Ummm... I know this would never happen to you because... you, but if a guy tells a girl that sleeping with her was a mistake, I think it’s safe to assume he hasn’t been in love with her since he was a teenager."

  “I beg to differ.” Of course she did. It was literally in her job description. I rolled my eyes and waited for the lawyerly explanation I knew was headed my way.

  “I’ll admit that it was an incredibly poor and insensitive choice of words, but you don’t know exactly what he meant when he said he regretted going to bed with you. He could have meant he regretted it because it was so soon after the ‘split’ with Arlo, or because you were upset about Mia, or possibly drunk, or any number of other things. You need to talk to him about it rather than letting your insecurities cause you to assume the worst.”

  “Look, I love you for your eternal optimism, but it comes from living a life where everything always goes your way. Back in the real world, I’m not prepared to add another serving of humiliation to the steaming pile of shame I’m already wallowing in up to my neck right now, if you don’t mind."

  “Not everything goes my way all the time. Case in point, Daniel has been fucking another woman for two years. A friend of ours.”

  “What?” I choked on the dusty air in disbelief. “What the hell are you talking about? I hope you’re not making up stories to help me feel like less of a giant fuckup.”