My heart jumped in my chest as understanding dawned on me. I couldn’t help but return his smile. “You mean, for real?”
“For real.” He reached up to tuck a stray curl behind my ear. “No more faking.”
I sighed happily. “Yes. So much yes.”
He leaned in to kiss me one last time. It was the kind of sweet kiss that would linger on my lips for hours later. And with that, I floated behind him as he stashed the article and flash drive in his pocket and led us back toward the dance.
Everything in the world had settled into place tonight. It didn’t matter if Lindsey Beck was still on my case, or that my dad was probably finishing off his sixth beer at home, or anything else that crossed our path. Jimmy had fallen for me. He’d kissed me. If my heart filled any more, it’d burst.
As we turned the last corner on our way back to the gymnasium, we nearly collided with a woman in jeans and a sweater. Muttering apologies, I didn’t realize until she’d nearly walked away that it was Mrs. Drake.
“Mrs. Drake, what are you doing here?”
I held tight to Jimmy’s hand, feeling all sorts of proud to be showing him off as my official real boyfriend.
“I’m so sorry for bumping into you guys,” she said, running a hand through her straight hair. “But I left my grading rubric at school this morning and popped back in to grab it. Got to have those test grades posted by Monday morning. A teacher’s job never ends.”
I nodded, although I was too caught up with the way Jimmy was stroking the inside of my forearm lightly with his free hand to think. The guy gave me massive goosebumps.
“I’ll let you guys get back to your dance,” she said with a yawn. As she began to walk away, she paused and looked back over her shoulder. “Oh, and Mia? I saw you forgot to post your blog from this morning. It was still in draft mode. Since I already proofed it for you, I went ahead and hit publish. Didn’t want you to fall behind.”
Wait. What?
Horror burst inside my chest as I watched her walk away. She couldn’t have done what I thought she just said. It wasn’t possible. Not the article about Lindsey. It was my worst nightmare come to life, just when everything else had become a dream.
Dear Mia had just gone rogue.
18
Jimmy
There was nothing I wanted more than to walk Mia into the gym and take her into my arms again on the dance floor. This time—as a real couple. But as soon as we reentered the gymnasium, I could tell something was off. Everyone had their phones out. They were scrolling through them and covering their mouths as if something hilarious had just been mass-texted out to the entirety of Sweet Mountain High. I subconsciously stuck my hand in my pocket to grip my own phone, which hadn’t vibrated with a missed message.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“This isn’t good.” Mia dragged her fingers down her face. “This isn’t good at all.”
Dread worked its way into my gut, pushing aside the happy feelings I’d just been having with Mia on that couch. It made me want to retreat. To grab Mia’s hands and head back to that room, where we could forget the rest of the world existed.
“Have you seen this?” Raquel came bustling over in a purple dress, her eyes wide. She held out a phone so that Mia could read the screen. The only thing I could see from my point of view was the heading, “Dear Mia,” in bold purple.
Over the last few weeks, I’d come to know Raquel as Mia’s closest friend, but we had yet to say one word to each other. She seemed to have a habit of skittering away like a mouse any time I so much as looked at her. Even now, she avoided eye contact.
“No, no, no.” Mia’s knees buckled, and I had to grab her arm to keep her upright. She looked up at me with horror reflecting in her eyes. “Jimmy, I messed up. I messed up big time.”
“What happened?”
“I wrote a blog post that was never supposed to be released.” She pressed her lips together in a tight line and scanned over the gymnasium. “But Mrs. Drake published it, and now I’m in so much trouble.”
“It can’t be all that bad,” I said, rubbing a hand over her back. “I’m sure it’ll all blow over soon.”
But as soon as the words left my mouth, Lindsey Beck burst through the crowded dance floor and headed toward us like a missile aimed for destruction. Her face said it all. Her eyes were slits, her nostrils flared, and her lips curled into a nasty snarl that bared her bleached-white teeth. I’d never seen her so angry and out of control. Raquel turned and fled, leaving us to face the raging monster alone. Lindsey stomped in her heels so close to Mia that I put my hand between them for fear of a fight starting.
“You little—”
“I am so sorry, Lindsey.” Mia held up her hands and made a pained expression. “That wasn’t supposed to be published. It was just me blowing off some steam. It wasn’t supposed to see the light of day.”
Lindsey pointed a finger at her. “I don’t believe a word coming out of your mouth. You’re a liar!”
“I’m not lying—”
“You’re jealous of my position on the newspaper, and you always have been. Well, you got what you wanted, Mia. Are you happy? Because I quit. I quit the newspaper. I quit this school. I quit Sweet Mountain.”
I honestly didn’t know what was going on, but it looked like Mia was in danger of having her eyes clawed out by Lindsey. I stepped between them, keeping Mia behind me. Lindsey practically snarled at me, her mascara starting to run down her face.
“I don’t know what she’s got on you to make you so whipped, but don’t trust this girl any further than you can pitch her,” she said, her eyes shooting daggers my way. “She’ll throw you under the bus the first moment she can if that’s what it takes for her to become a journalist. Watch yourself, Jimmy.”
She stormed away as quickly as she’d come, leaving a line of startled students in her wake.
Mia’s hand shook in mine. Her face was pale, her eyes wide. She put her free hand up to her throat, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “I have to get out of here. I need some air.”
I still didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I saved my questions for later. Mia needed me. I pulled her toward the back exit for the parking lot and into the cool December air. She dropped my hand, pacing back and forth in her heels, rubbing her hands up and down her arms.
“That was bad,” she muttered, more to herself than to me. “I thought she was going to rip my arms off.”
“What’s going on, Mia?” I’d been patient, but all of this drama was starting to stress me out. I just wanted to go back to ten minutes ago when everything in the world had been perfect. “What happened in there?”
She shot me a guilty look and crossed her arms over her stomach. “This morning, I ran into Lindsey crying in the bathroom. Dale had dumped her, and I wanted to help. Really, I did. But she lashed out at me. Called my dad a drunk and basically said I was garbage.”
Sympathy washed over me. After what I’d witnessed last night with Mia and her dad, I could only image how much that had hurt her. I wanted to take her in my arms and keep out all the bad.
“I was so flaming angry I couldn’t think straight,” she continued, tearing her gaze away to stare at the concrete. “So I did what I do best: I wrote. It was supposed to be a blog post on the Dear Mia site, but by the time I got to the end, I realized I could never publish it.”
I nodded. “And that’s what Mrs. Drake published tonight?”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “Yes. It wasn’t supposed to go out.”
I put my arms around her and pulled her in tight. She wrapped her arms around my waist, burying her face in the front of my dress shirt.
“It’s just, with everything that Lindsey’s done to me, I couldn’t help myself. I’ve tried for the last two years to get published in The Prowler. She refused to publish anything I wrote.”
I rubbed my hand across her back. “But now you write the ‘Dear Mia’ column.”
“Yes, but no
thanks to her. You should’ve seen her reaction right before Mrs. Drake gave the position to me. It was probably the millionth time I’d tried to talk Lindsey into reading my articles, but this one was so good, so newsworthy, it would’ve blown every other story out of the water. Guaranteed! But she wouldn’t even look at it. I might as well have been handing in blank pages. She’s awful. She hates me.”
A thought occurred to me then. I frowned, feeling a blip of anxiety deep inside my chest. “Was that the article about me and the fire?”
Mia sighed into my shirt. “Yes. I guess it’s the one time I can be glad she refused to put me in the newspaper. Imagine if it had been published. None of this would’ve ever happened between us.”
My grip loosened on her, and I took a step back, looking down at her face. “You tried to have the article published?”
Her eyebrows wrinkled in concern. “Well, yeah, but that was before we made the deal.”
I ran a hand over my chin and thought back to our meeting in the library—to the very first time she’d offered this quid pro quo. That scene had been emblazoned in my memory.
“What I remember is that you said you had a journalistic code to follow. And that making a deal would be the nobler thing to do. But, it turns out, all this time, that wasn’t true at all. You couldn’t publish that article. Lindsey wouldn’t let you. It was dead in the water. But you let me believe that at any moment, you could destroy my future with just the click of your mouse.”
“No, Jimmy…” Horror filled her eyes. She reached for my hands, but I took another step back.
Everything was starting to click for me. Lindsey’s words echoed in my mind. She’ll throw you under the bus the first moment she can if that’s what it takes for her to become a journalist.
I’d admired Mia’s courage to go after her goals with such fearlessness, but I hadn’t stopped to realize that I could also become a victim of her ability to trample over people. Sure, I could believe that this article about Lindsey had been a mistake, but maybe somewhere deep down, Mia had wanted it to be published. After all, she could’ve just deleted it. But no, she’d used it to do damage, just like she’d used her words against me.
Here we were, her lies coming to the surface.
And yet, I still wanted her.
What was wrong with me?
“Jimmy, please.” Mia held out her hands to me. She looked so deceivingly beautiful in the moonlight, her cheeks flushed and her lips a deep red. “Please understand—”
“I just can’t, Mia.” I dragged my hands through my hair and breathed in deep. I couldn’t even look at her. I’d been right. She was a siren. A beautiful creature that used others and then discarded them. The deception was so painful I couldn’t think straight. “This isn’t okay. None of what you did was okay.”
“I know—”
“You should’ve done better.” I shook my head, fury punctuating my words. “You can’t go around lying to people like that. It isn’t right.”
“I really didn’t mean for things to happen like this. If Lindsey would’ve just—”
“No.” I cut through the air with my hand and shook my head. “Lindsey has nothing to do with this. With us. You did this. Own up to it, for once in your life.”
The panic and sadness in her eyes quickly turned to anger. She clenched her fists tight and dropped them to her sides as she glared at me. “You know, that’s rich coming from someone who’s refusing to take responsibility for burning down the school shed. Pretty sure you haven’t told your dad the truth, have you? He trusts you, and you lied to him. You lie to him every day.”
Her words cut a path right to my heart. It stung so bad I wasn’t sure I would be able to breathe again. She had no right to go there. I was done with this conversation.
I threw my hands up in the air. “I don’t know why I’m even still here. You got what you wanted. Lindsey’s off the school paper, and you’re in. Congratulations. You don’t need a boyfriend anymore. Fake or not. So here’s me, leaving. For real.”
Her eyes shone with tears as she crossed her arms and stared at me for a long, heart-stopping moment. My chest flickered with pain as I thought about storming away. Everything inside me begged to stay and reconsider. To talk things through with the girl who’d I fallen so badly for. But I couldn’t. Not with this incredibly awful feeling inside my chest. So I walked away, leaving her standing in the parking lot alone.
How could a single night have gone so right, and then so wrong?
Nothing made sense anymore.
19
Mia
Great. It had happened again.
I sighed as I stood in front of my locker before last period. A piece of paper had been taped to the front. It was mostly blank, except for a crudely drawn picture of me with crazy, curly hair drawn in purple marker and a banner across my chest that said BIG FAT LIAR in big, bold letters.
So original. Eye roll.
This wasn’t the first nasty surprise of the week. It was official—everyone in Sweet Mountain High hated me. Or at least, everyone who bowed to the power of the MGs. Because of that accidental article release, I had toppled from the top of the mountain to the bottom in just a matter of days.
According to the gossip on the street, I was responsible for permanently breaking up Sweet Mountain High’s power couple, Lindsey and Dale. While that probably wasn’t true, what was even worse was that Mrs. Drake had gotten caught in the crossfire. She’d been seriously reprimanded by the administration, to the point that they’d threatened to shut down the entire newspaper. Thankfully, she’d talked them out of it, but she was still feeling the heat. I’d sent her a huge email Monday morning with my apology, but it didn’t feel like anything had gotten better.
I was a pariah. It didn’t matter what the truth was or that the paper had retracted the blog article. Nope. Everyone hated me.
There was exactly one day left until winter break, and it couldn’t come soon enough.
I tore the drawing off the locker and balled it up in disgust. Honestly, it wasn’t even this stuff that was bothering me. I was used to being a loner. I could handle being a social outcast. But I’d hurt Jimmy. That was worse than anything else I’d done.
As I watched him storm away from the dance Saturday night, a pit had grown in my stomach. And every day, as he avoided my gaze in the hallways and ignored my texts and calls, that pit grew bigger. He’d been right. I’d used him. I’d manipulated him. And I deserved to feel like my insides were dying. I deserved nasty pictures taped to the front of my locker.
“You okay?” Raquel leaned against my locker, her blonde hair falling into her face.
She’d been my one constant through all of this. Maybe she didn’t do confrontation, but Raquel was a friend who I could always count on, even when everyone else thought I was the scum of the earth.
“I’ll survive.” I gritted my teeth and glared at my innocent locker. “But I can’t wait to get out of here. Everybody hates me.”
“You know, Elphaba ran away from her problems, too.” Raquel crossed her arms and gave me a knowing look. “Everybody had ganged up against her, but running only made things worse.”
I rolled my eyes. “Now is not the time for one of your life lessons from Wicked. I’m not some green-skinned wicked witch. I’m a real person. And I just had my heart broken.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. You and Elphaba have a lot in common. Maybe you were blessed with a better complexion, but you’re both too strong-willed for your own good.”
“Yeah, yeah, Glinda.” I sighed, giving in to the weary feeling in my chest. “What’s the alternative?”
“You could just talk to him.”
I knew she meant Jimmy. We’d been avoiding saying the name since I called her bawling Saturday night after the dance.
“Yeah, but that would require him to actually be in the same room with me for longer than ten seconds.”
She shrugged and tucked her hair behind her ear. “He’s the Fiyero
to your Elphaba. I’m sure he’ll come around. And look, here’s your chance.”
My heart thumped loudly as I glanced over to see Jimmy stop at the water fountain on the other end of the hall. He wore a deep frown, his jaw hard. The way he bent down to take a drink, his arm muscles flexing in his skin-tight Under Armor shirt, made me desperately miss when he’d last wrapped his arms around me. It had been the best twenty minutes of my life. Jimmy had been mine, and I had been his. And I’d ruined it. I’d ruined it before any of it even began.
When he finished taking a drink, he straightened and glanced down the hall in my direction. Our gazes met, and immediately my cheeks heated up. The angry words he last said to me flashed through my mind, making me wince.
You did this. Own up to it, for once in your life.
Raquel was wrong. There were no more surprises left. He probably hated me, just like the rest of the school. I’d lost him.
Jimmy tore his gaze away and walked in the opposite direction, leaving me with that pit in my stomach that pretty much confirmed my suspicions.
Yep—so not having that conversation.
Raquel shifted the weight of her backpack and shot me a concerned look. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
I smiled at her through the tears that pricked at the corners of my eyes. “Yeah. Eventually. But at least one good thing came out of all of this.”
She sucked in her cheeks. “You talked to your parents?”
Nodding, I closed my locker. After leaving the dance in tears on Saturday night and coming home an emotional mess, I just couldn’t handle finding Dad passed out on the couch again. And so I’d made the difficult call. The one I’d been avoiding. And when Mom answered, I broke down and explained everything. The late night runs to the bar, the empty cans filling our recycling, the way Dad was spiraling. All of it.
Surprisingly, she hadn’t been furious about it. She’d actually been the opposite. She’d apologized for not knowing what was going on and for not keeping a better tab on me. And when she arrived home early the next morning, she’d had a long and quiet discussion with Dad in the kitchen. Things were still kind of in the air, but at least the door to healing had been opened.
My Fake Boyfriend Page 11
