Member-only story
Girl Crush
Sometimes I imagined she was no one else’s but mine.
Being the assistant to a star like Hayden Rainier wasn’t easy. I didn’t get paid for the overtime hours when I managed all her social media profiles. Her manager had even made sure I had another phone with all the same apps so her accounts were always easily accessible.
“You’re such a sweetheart, Mina,” Hayden would say right before she went off on another weekend blitz with her friends from her days as a Disney starlet. Sometimes I went with her — I could have been paid extra as security detail from time to time too — but she didn’t really need me as much when she wasn’t actively working on a film set or in a recording studio.
Hayden loved to play above all. I’d seen her through two break-ups (one with a boy-band alum, the other a secret affair with a K-pop idol who wasn’t willing to risk her career by going public), one overseas incident involving someone else’s misplaced bag of weed, and two bombs at the box office. But the success wasn’t her aim — I realized that the second week I was working for her.
She was just another girl who liked the adrenaline rush of attention.
And if I could help her get what she wanted — well, I was willing to do that. It wasn’t about the money, of course. I would have made more just slinking back to my…
