Down the Rabbit Hole - Holly Madison

the Easter event wearing jeans and bored looks on their faces.
When we got back to the mansion, I went out to the room in the guesthouse where Kendra was
staying, holding the new blue dress. I told her it was hers to wear if she wanted and that Bridget was
wearing a pink one and I had a pale orange version.
“Oh my god, girl!” she said, I could see the relief on her face as a big toothy grin emerged. “You
have no idea. I was going nuts.” She thanked me profusely. For the first time in a long time, I felt as
though I could relax. I had a good feeling about this one. Just because Hef didn’t want another Bridget
or Holly didn’t mean we couldn’t all be friends. I wanted her to feel welcome.
Realizing that the opportunity might soon present itself, Kendra began asking questions about life
as a girlfriend as she changed into the dress. She had already hooked up with Hef, so that part was no
mystery.
“Can I bring my dogs when I move in? I have to bring my dogs,” she stated. “I have two dogs. I
need a really big room.”
“I don’t know what room you will get if you move in,” I said. “That’s up to Hef.”
I have to admit, I envied Kendra’s sense of entitlement. I had felt so lucky just to scrape by when
I moved into the mansion, and here was a rookie who had just gone all the way with an old dude and
her only concern was how big her room was going to be.
Though she wasn’t as cunning or sophisticated as the other girlfriends who had inhabited the
mansion in recent years, she seemed to have that same hustler mentality. Kendra was a stripper but
had told Hef she was a college student, because the body painter gave her the heads-up that Hef didn’t
like strippers and preferred college girls. When Hef put a caption under one of the first photos of her
that entered his scrapbook, he referred to her as “Hef’s new sweetheart: a 19-year-old coed from San
Diego.”
“I need a car, too, if I’m gonna live here,” she barked. “I don’t have one. And I want to get my
teeth fixed. They are the only thing about me that I don’t like.”
The balls on this girl, I thought.
“Oh, you’ll have to talk to Hef about that,” I responded, shrugging my shoulders. I barely had the
nerve to ask for anything for myself—I certainly wasn’t going to ask for her.
The Easter ensembles worked. About a month after Hef’s birthday, the Mean Girls were finally
given the boot and Kendra was officially asked to be a girlfriend. After three years of misery, which
at the time I felt was largely due to those bullies, it was over. They were gone—and I’d never have to
see or hear from them again! It didn’t really feel real. I actually went down the hall and peeked into
each of their former bedrooms to make sure they were really gone.
“What did you say to them?” I asked Hef when he told me the girlfriends were leaving. I
couldn’t be certain that my prompting actually had anything to do with Hef’s decision, but I silently
congratulated myself either way.
“I told them that Kendra’s moving in and Kendra had confided to me that she used to have a drug
problem,” he said, nonchalantly thumbing through a file folder he had in his hand. “Kendra told me
they took her out to a club and offered her drugs. I told them I couldn’t have that around her.”
Of course, I thought. I wasn’t sure how they managed to sneak out of the house with Kendra, but