The Personal Assistant

by Kimberly Belle

“The Personal Assistant shows the consequences of living in an online world where nothing is as it seems, turning the glamour of an Insta-worthy life into a nightmare. Unputdownable and impossible to forget.”

The last time she asked him for a loan, he called her a whore and a devil child, and she wasn’t looking for a repeat scolding.

Oh, God. AC. My social media assistant and operations assistant and every other assistant role you can imagine, my work wife and right-hand gal.

“What are you selling? Some mantra about staying positive in a house with two hormonal girl-monsters? A motivational meme you pilfered from the internet and slapped your logo on? Don’t take this the wrong way, but why is that woman grinning like she just met Beyonce?”

After years of raising two girls on my own, without a penny or pat on the back from their father, the money is the best part.

A podcast series, sponsorships that pay with checks instead of boxes of merchandise that clog up my garage, a kick-ass book proposal that’s about to go to auction—these are just a few of the projects in the pipeline.

An age where they are all raging hormones and shitty attitudes and mortified by my very existence.

Good God, I love this man. Solid and stable and endlessly good-natured, an excellent protector and stepfather to my two girls. The kind of man who is the polar opposite of their deadbeat father. And Patrick has always been so generous, sharing this house and his bank account with me and the twins, never treating it as his money but ours.

“Last night you told me if I fussed, I could forget about getting another blow job. Ever. For the rest of my life. No way I’m risking that.”

An iffy word choice, a misinterpreted sentiment—you never know what people will latch on to and blow up big enough to knock you off your perch. That’s the thing about internet pedestals, they’re shaky. I’ve seen too many other influencers crash and burn.

I’m one to talk, I get that. But she also didn’t bother to hide the powder and pills on every horizontal surface or the threesome taking place in the corner. This is not someone we want our daughters to be looking up to, Patrick. She’s a bad influence.”

Somebody please tell me what’s so great about Krissie Kelly. She can’t act, she’s ass-ugly and she’s got the brains of a dodo bird, and the only talent that is even remotely relevant is her willingness to hang her bare ass out for all the world to see. Somebody get that girl a GED and some self-esteem, and while you’re at it maybe a nose job

The 1926 stone-and-stucco rambler that Patrick owned when we met, with original wood floors and carved crown molding and a kitchen that was once featured on the cover of Southern Living. Any crazy person with Google and a gun could find the place with very little effort.

AC calling back, telling me she knows just what to do. It’s one of the reasons I hired her, because she’s a millennial and when it comes to social media she always knows what to do. I could have never reached a million followers without her

Why do you think you’re better than everybody else bc your not fyi. Krissie is sixteen your the one who needs therapy.

And she’s so young. Like, where are her parents? It’s infuriating because the twins worship her. Penelope wants to be just like her one day.”

He hates the way she’s always there when he gets home from work, how she knows things, personal things about us and the twins.

First million by twenty-two, five more by the time I was thirty, coupled with an investment philosophy that promotes wealth not as having money but the financial flexibility to live your best life, however you want to define it. For me it meant never working for anyone else but me, a job I could do from anywhere—the study at home, the deck of a rental house on the shore, my phone while hiking up the Appalachian Trail.

“And Mister Fluffles is stating his opinion, which in this country is a God-given right even if they are crude and filled with typos. Until he says something, either explicitly or implicitly, that’s a provably false statement of fact, we have no grounds to stand on to deactivate his account.”

“Oh my God, finally. Listen to this. ‘What scandal-soaked influencer has been lying all this time about the father of her twins?’”

The camera feeds. The string of text messages my wife doesn’t know about. The hundreds of lies, stacked on top of one another like a shaky Jenga tower. Yet another lie to smother all the others.

Course I’m certain. I remember ’cause I asked if she was one of them sister wives. I was hoping for some drama like on that TV show, but she just mumbled that I must have seen it wrong. But I know what I saw. My eyes are working just fine.”

Men like that want women like her for one thing and one thing only. And though she certainly wouldn’t have minded seeing what was underneath that nice shirt of his, she didn’t need him for a good time. There were plenty of willing guys in this town.

My words about Krissie Kelly are long forgotten, and now the focus is squarely on me. My lips, my face, my house, my voice, my boobs, my clothes, my parenting skills, my skin, my flat forehead, my stupid laugh, my character, my husband and daughters, who must loathe me.

“Look, I know things look bad right now, but it’s only a matter of time before a Kardashian does something scandalous again. Makes a sex tape, maybe, or...or dry humps her boyfriend at a friend’s wedding.”

That’s the thing about the country club set. The women here operate like a sorority, a tight clique looking for a common enemy.

All those Karens harping about how social media addiction is ruining an entire generation of kids are only partially right. It’s ruining me, too.

I’m just wondering if this is worth it, you know? You, being an influencer. I know you like making your own money, but it’s not like we need it. And as much as I support you having a career that you love...do you? Love it, I mean.”

My pictures became content, my Instagram a lifestyle magazine of pretty squares and peppy captions.

“Don’t you find that strange? That she knows all these things about you, private, personal things you don’t want revealed on these gossip sites, and yet you know very little about her and her life.”

If my wife has her way, these girls will stay innocent as long as possible, taping posters to their bedroom walls and spending weekends practicing back dives with their girlfriends.

Only they don’t really disappear, Gigi. They get taken. Sold into sex slavery or worse.” Penny frowns. “What’s worse than sex slavery?” “Death, Penelope. Death is worse.” “Than sex slavery?” She makes a face. “Not in my book, it’s not.”

I asked this a lot in the beginning, back before there was money, good money, involved, back when it felt like she was sending out all that content purely for likes and shares and comments. Back when the feedback was almost exclusively positive.

“Only a million times. She looks at us like we’re crazy. She says something like ‘Every kid wants to be Insta-famous. You’re welcome.’ But, like, I never asked for this. Why can’t she have a normal job?”

“So if your husband did go into the carriage house sometime this past weekend... Without security cameras tracking who comes through your backyard, without any sort of system monitoring the door, how would you even know?” For a moment I’m stunned speechless.

“No offense to your investigative skills, Detective, but I can assure you she exists. It’s why my brother drove all the way over here, because AC still has a key. I asked him to change out all the locks.”

went to therapy for years because of that gun, and all that time Patrick looked in my eyes and lied. A lie of omission, but still. My husband owns a gun.

“So what is it you do? When you’re not rescuing damsels from the side of the road, I mean. Who pays your salary?”

“Guns are part of living in the South, and as much as you try not to think about it, part of living in a city like Atlanta.

It’s not really a question. Owen has known me long enough to know I only have to hear a number once to remember it. It’s the curse of my mathematical brain, assigning a meaning to every string of numbers, noticing a pattern within the digits that will stamp them onto my memory without even trying.

Owen had everything I wanted at the time, the wealth and the confidence and the name. It made it easy to ignore the fact he was an entitled dick. If not for our shared history, I would have outgrown him ages ago.

She wanted out. Out of this town, out of her job, out of this sad, sorry life she was living. Unskilled. Uneducated. Unmoneyed. What if this man next to her was temporary? What if when he left she’d go back to being the same old Anna Claire Davis she’d always been? The idea made her hot and itchy.

“Yeah, but Patrick hates Florida. He says it’s a sauna filled with tourists and little old ladies from Ohio who can’t drive. Our girls can’t even get him to go to Seaside, no matter how much they cry and beg. We vacation pretty much anywhere but Florida.”

“I one hundred percent agree. What I’m not buying is that my girls would be stupid enough to sneak a drink in front of all their friends at a party when there are cell phone cameras and a parent right upstairs. I mean...give them some credit. And even if they were drinking, which I’m not saying they were, they certainly wouldn’t have been the only ones doing it.”

Actually, I’m sugarcoating. What she said is she never would have allowed my daughters in her house if she’d known they were smuggling in contraband. She said the twins are mini Krissie Kellys in the making, and that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. She said she doesn’t want her precious Jenni anywhere near the twins, and that she’s praying for all of us.

“Oh my God, Mom, really? Fake lashes. Fake lips. Fake boobs. Fake smile as soon as the cameras are on. Fake dye in your hair and fake paint on your nails and fake bleach on your teeth, and newsflash: everybody knows that a deviated septum is code for nose job. There’s literally nothing about you that’s real.”

can’t just Instagram us out of this problem.”

That day when he’d rescued her from the side of the road and gave her a ride here, all those questions about occupancy rates and prices... He was making plans. He was grooming her for exactly this.

Finally the police will understand that something real and terrible is happening here. Finally they’ll believe me when I say the threats are more than just words.

I think of Nina, surrendered to strangers by an anonymous mother, and my heart squeezes with understanding, with sympathy. She knows how it feels to be abandoned, too.