The Trouble with Faking

by Rachel Morgan

  “So I guess she’s only interested in you when you’re not available, huh?” I open a new browser window and type the Etsy address.

  “Looks like it.”

  “You know,” I say, sitting back as an idea slowly begins to form in my mind, “we could make it so that you’re once again not available.”

  His eyebrows pinch together. “What do you mean?”

  “We could …” Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. “Pretend.” No, Andi, that is SUCH a bad idea. STOP TALKING NOW! “We could pretend that we actually are together. We could act like the happiest, most in-love couple ever so that the girl you really like finally notices you, and the guy I really like finally notices me. Half of res already thinks there’s something going on between us, so it would be entirely believable.”

  A hesitant smile plays on Damien’s lips. “Wait. I can’t figure out if you’re joking or being serious.”

  I’m so surprised at myself for voicing this ridiculous idea that I start laughing. “I’m actually being serious. I mean, people do this in movies all the time. Why shouldn’t we?” I ignore the internal voice reminding me that those are the kind of movies that annoy the heck out of me.

  Damien narrows his eyes, but that half-smile is still there. “Don’t the people in those movies generally end up falling for the people they’re pretending to be with?”

  “Well, yes,” I admit, “but that’s because those are movies. This is real life, and we both know exactly who we want. That will keep us focused.”

  “Wait, so … who is it that you want?”

  You, I almost sigh out loud. But since I can’t admit that, I grab the first name that comes to mind. “Mike. The first-year guy who was here the other evening.”

  “Mike? The guy who’s barely been here a week and had to buy three padlocks already?”

  “Okay, so he’s a little forgetful when it comes to his room keys, but other than that he’s great.” That isn’t a lie. Mike is great. He sat with me on the hike near the end when it got too steep and all I could focus on was the sheer drop down the side of the mountain and my spinning head that made me want to fall over. “I really like him, but he seems to be interested in every other girl except me.” Now that’s a lie. I don’t really like him, and he doesn’t seem to be interested in every other girl. But if I can get Damien to fall for me at the end of all this, a few lies will be worth it.

  “If he’s interested in every other girl,” Damien says, “maybe he isn’t the right guy for you.”

  He isn’t. You are. “Hey, do you like my idea or not?”

  “I …” Damien chuckles to himself. “I think I actually do.”

  The dying embers inside me blaze to life. “So … are we really going to do this?”

  Damien’s eyes meet mine. “I think so. No, wait, wait. I don’t want us to be known as the couple that got together behind Charlotte’s back. We’ll always have that cheating label, and that’s horrible.”

  My heart sinks. “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

  “But we can still do this. We just don’t get together yet. We say we’re still friends, and then, uh … the Valentine’s Dance at the end of next week. Do you know about that?”

  “Yes, I think I saw it on our calendar. It says we’re having some kind of dinner thing with Smuts?”

  “Yes. It’s nothing fancy. Just a nice dinner and some pretty decor in the Fuller dining hall. It’s for freshers, but sub-wardens are allowed to attend. We can let everyone see us dancing together there, and then officially start dating after that. And if anyone asks, we can say we’ve always been good friends—which is true—and when Charlotte accused us of secretly dating, we first laughed it off as a ludicrous idea, but the more we thought about it, the more we realised it was meant to be.”

  Well, at least that’s all pretty much the truth from my side. “People probably won’t believe you, though. They’ll still think we got together before and you cheated on her.”

  He shrugs. “It’s never bothered you what other people think, has it?”

  “No. I’m just checking whether it bothers you.”

  He shakes his head. “No matter what the truth is, people will always think whatever they want to think.”

  “Okay. Great. So we’ll find ways to be head-over-heels for each other in front of Marie and Mike, and that way they’ll see what they’re missing out on.” Part of me is giddy at the thought that I’ll finally get to hold and hug and kiss him the way I’ve always wanted to, while another part of me feels sick knowing Damien will just be pretending.

  “Maybe we can try—”

  A pounding on the door interrupts whatever plan Damien was about to suggest. The door opens before Damien can get there, and a well-built guy with a closely shaved head enters. “Dude, someone just fell out of a window into A quad.”

  “What?”

  “Yip. Real idiot. I think his arm’s broken.”

  Damien grabs his keys. “Disaster number one for the night. Andi, I’ll be back just now.”

  He heads out while the other guy turns back to look at me. From this angle, I can see the decorative tattoo of a cross on his upper left arm. “Hey, you’re Andi,” he says. “Andi … Clark?”

  “Um, yes.” He must be a friend of Damien’s if he knows who I am. “And you’re the salt flicker,” I add, realising I recognise him from the dining hall.

  He raises an eyebrow. “The what?”

  “You flicked a salt sachet at us the other night. You have pretty good aim, by the way. You hit my friend on the cheek.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember that. Tall, scary girl.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Well, no offence intended. We flick salt at everyone. And my official name is actually Noah Ferreira, not Salt Flicker.”

  “Right. Noah. Hey, you don’t sound … I mean … nothing.” I press my lips together as I realise I was probably about to say something inappropriate.

  Noah frowns. “Sound what?”

  “Nothing. Sorry. Sometimes I say things without thinking about them first. The words seem to bypass my internal filter. So … never mind.”

  He sits on Damien’s wheeled desk chair and scoots closer. “Now you have to tell me.”

  I lean back on the couch “Fine. I was going to comment on your accent. It’s … not what I expected.”

  “You mean because I’m a coloured guy living in the Cape, but I don’t sound like a Cape Coloured?”

  “Um … yes. The unfiltered version of my thoughts went something like that.”

  “And you were worried I’d be offended by your unfiltered thoughts?”

  I nod. “People generally are.”

  “Well, you can add one more person to the list. It’s highly offensive that you think all coloured guys should sound the same.”

  “Uh—”

  “How would you like it if I said all white girls sound the same?”

  “That’s different,” I say before I can stop myself.

  “Oh, is that so?” Noah’s eyebrows rise.

  “Well, yes,” I say, hoping I can explain this rationally without causing any more offence. “You get Afrikaans white people and English white people and white people who are from Europe or America or Australia or—”

  “But coloured people are all the same. You’re right. That’s not offensive at all.”

  I cross my arms. “You know, sarcasm really doesn’t help.”

  “Who says I’m being sarcastic? Maybe I’m agreeing with you. Perhaps I see the logic in what you’re saying.”

  I hesitate, trying to figure out from his expression if he’s telling the truth. All I can see in his dark eyes, though, is a challenge. I shake my head. “Liar. You don’t agree with anything I’ve said.”

  “Oh, so I’m a liar now, am I?” Noah slides away from me on the chair. “Next thing I’ll be a gangster and a thug too.”

  I shrug. “Your words, not mine.” Shut up, Andi! Will Damien really appreciate you making h
is friends angry? “I’m sorry.” I lower my eyes to the scuffed wooden floor. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Right.” Noah stands. “Just like I don’t mean it when I say self-righteous, overprivileged white girl.”

  I breathe in sharply and bite back the urge to tell him he’s got thug written all over him. I uncross my arms and stand up. “Well. At least now we know exactly what we think of each other.”

  I pull open Damien’s door and hurry down the stairs before I can do any more damage to the first impression I just made on his friend. I pass a crowd of guys in A quad as I walk briskly along the corridor and wonder if Damien’s in the middle of it, dealing with the idiot window jumper. Instead, I find him at reception, talking to someone on the phone.

  I sign out and wave goodbye to him, then head outside. Seconds later, I hear hurried footsteps behind me. “Hey, Andi, you’re leaving?”

  “Yes, sorry, it’s getting late.” And your friend and I have exchanged enough rude words for one night. “Is that guy okay? The one who fell out the window?”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s all taken care of.”

  “Okay, good. Well …”

  “Before you go, I just wanted to check that you’re okay with this,” Damien says. “This plan of ours. It’s not going to get in the way of our friendship, right? You’re happy to do this?”

  I give him a smile I hope he doesn’t realise is fake. “One hundred percent happy.”

  What am I doing? I can’t lie like this. Sure, I’ve never been one to share deeply personal matters, but I don’t lie to people. I simply choose not to tell them things I don’t think they need to know. My friends at school knew I was an only child raised by a single mother, but I never let them know she refused to tell me anything about my father. Damien was aware that I didn’t know who my father was, but he never knew how deeply I longed to discover the truth about the man my mother wouldn’t speak of. And I was okay with keeping information from those people. That’s allowed, right, as long as I’m not lying?

  But now this? This great big deception? Fooling everyone into thinking we’re together? Fooling Damien into thinking I’m helping him get Marie when I’m actually hoping he’ll fall for me instead? This is not me.

  My body starts to remember that I’m exhausted from too little sleep and too much sun, and my steps slow before I’m even halfway across the parking lot. I stop at the rectangular block of stone at the top of the steps leading down to Rugby Road. I climb onto it, tuck my legs beneath me, and stare at the sparkling city lights. I’m lucky enough to have this view from my bedroom window in Fuller. Sometimes I open the window wide and lean out of it, but it isn’t the same as being outside and feeling the fresh air all around me.

  Don’t do this, a quiet voice whispers within me. Tell him the truth.

  I know my internal voice is right. But I still don’t know if there’s any point in telling Damien a truth he doesn’t want to hear. A truth that will mean the end of our comfortable friendship.

  The pretend relationship is still a bad idea, the voice whispers.

  I hold my hand over my mouth and yawn a never-ending yawn. I know the voice is right. Faking a relationship isn’t the right way to get Damien to notice me. And that’s why I’ll be telling him to forget about it the next time I see him.

  ***

  “Wow. This is AMAZING.” Livi, the half-sister I found out about last year when I accidentally discovered my real father, steps into my res room with wide eyes and her mouth hanging open. She stands in the middle of the room and stares at all the things I managed to fit in here.

  A mound of colourful cushions covers my bed, and since the curtains are so dull, I hung colourful shawls up to cover them. I keep the shawls tied open with ribbons during the day, but now, in the evening, they’re drawn closed with fairy lights hanging behind them. More fairy lights are strung across three of the walls, and paper bunting decorates the fourth. The bookcase that was here when I moved in has been filled with my favourite books, and beside it stands a tall plastic storage cabinet, the drawers of which are filled with craft supplies. A second, smaller bookcase houses files—empty at the moment—a kettle, and some mugs and glasses. On the desk stands my laptop, several jars of stationery, a lamp, and a few more piles of books. The last item of furniture is an old armchair, and that, too, is covered by a colourful shawl.

  “Did your mom help you do all this?” Livi asks.

  “Oh, gosh, no. This isn’t her style at all. She’s all about the clean, fresh, modern look. This is way more …”

  “Cosy.”

  “Yes.” I smile at her. “Exactly.”

  “And just a little bit magical.” She walks to one side of the room and examines the bunting. “Are these triangles cut from the pages of books?”

  “Yes. My mom was cleaning out her shelves one day and discovered she had three copies of Romeo and Juliet. She threw out two of them, so I rescued them from the bin and made bunting.”

  “So cool,” Livi murmurs, standing on tiptoe to read some of the words. “How did you get all this stuff to Cape Town?”

  “Well, you know, that car I got for Christmas has been pretty useful.”

  “Oh, of course.” She turns to me with a grin. “How’s it going with the new car? I mean, the second-hand-but-new-to-you car.”

  “I love it. How’s it going with your second-hand-but-new-to-you car?”

  “It’s amazing.” She holds her hand up so I can high-five her. “Thank you, Dad, for the guilt gift.”

  I scrunch up my nose. “I try not to think of it as a guilt gift and more of an eighteen-years-worth-of-birthdays-and-Christmases gift.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Livi plops onto the bed. “I think mine was more of a guilt gift. He couldn’t very well give you a car and not me.”

  I sit next to her and kick my shoes off. “Well, thanks for coming to visit. It’s nice to see you again. Skype is cool, of course, but in person is always better.”

  “Definitely.” She nudges my arm. “So how’s it going here? Orientation and friend-making and all that?”

  “Pretty good. I like being away from home. I would have gone crazy if I’d stayed there much longer. And friends … well, I made friends with the girl whose room is opposite mine. Carmen. I’d introduce you, but she’s out visiting one of her five hundred family members.”

  “Right. Big family. Not something I’m familiar with.”

  I push myself back against the cushions. “Me neither.” It was only ever my mom and me, and sometimes a distant relative or two on special occasions.

  “Are you aware that you have two different socks on?” Livi asks, tilting her head to the side.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. And are you still madly in love with The Boy Next Door?”

  My skin heats up, and butterflies come to life inside me. Livi’s the only one who knows how I feel about Damien. I kept that secret from everyone for so long, but I was starting to feel like I might burst, and as both an outsider and a sister, I figured it was safe to tell Livi. “I am.” I drop my head back onto the cushions and sigh. “And now that he lives only a parking lot away, I’m dreaming of him even more.”

  “You know it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, right?” Livi says, wiggling her eyebrows.

  “Yes.” I’m very aware of the fact that tomorrow is the night Damien and I are supposed to kick off our fake relationship plan. I haven’t seen him since the night I came up with this terrible idea, which means I haven’t had a chance to tell him we shouldn’t do it. For some reason, I feel like I can’t say it in a text message.

  “Well,” Livi says, forming a heart shape with her thumbs and forefingers and peering through it at me, “perhaps tomorrow’s the day your dreams will come true.”

  Laughing, I push her hands away and sit up. “Okay. Help me decide what to wear for the Valentine’s Dance tomorrow night. Maybe if I wear something amazing, Damien will finally see me as potential girlfriend material.”

  Here’s h
ow the Valentine’s Dance works: The Smuts freshmen randomly draw room numbers of Fuller freshmen, and that’s the door they show up at just before the dance begins. No one knows beforehand who their ‘date’ will be. The other girls on my floor have spent all day discussing the possibility of fate sending them their soul mate. I don’t blame them. If I wasn’t already certain that Damien’s the one for me, I’d probably be just as excited as they are.

  Since Livi was useless at helping me plan an outfit—all her ideas were far too boring—I spend the afternoon putting my Valentine’s Look together. I pick a dress pretty enough to be considered worthy of a not-particularly-formal dance event. It’s green with a white paisley pattern, tight at the waist, loose and floaty around my legs, and ends just above my knees. I print out Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, use my flower-shaped punch on it, and stick the resulting flowers to several hair pins. I leave my hair loose, but stick a few pins in here and there. Then, since I have a few flowers left over, I stick one over the front of each of my peep-toe heels. I doubt anyone will notice, but I like knowing my accessories match. Lastly, I dig around in the drawers containing jewellery items I’ve already made and pull out a long chain with a circular pendant hanging from it. Domed glass covers the pendant, and beneath the glass is a hand drawn heart. Within the heart are the words i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart).

  I slip the chain around my neck just as someone knocks on my door. I check myself in the mirror one last time, then cross the room mumbling, “Not a weird guy please, not a weird guy.” I pause with my hand on the doorknob, instructing myself to smile no matter who’s standing on the other side. I pull the door open, already saying, “Hi!” My face falls at the sight of Noah the Salt Flicker in jeans and a button-up shirt. “Oh. Why are you here?”

  “Ah. It’s you.” He looks about as happy as I feel. “Okay, let’s try this again.” He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, then says with a big smile, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Andi!” He hands me a paper heart with the words Be my valentine written on it.

  Hesitantly, I take the heart from him. “Um … I still don’t get why you’re here.”