Friends with Benefits Paperback - 2006

Excerpt

1



Kiley McCann



Dear Mom--

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, Mom--I'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 because--



Braagh-aah! Braagh-aah! Braagh--

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 girls--chinos, 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 house--

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."