She's Faking It

by Kristin Rockaway

  This Rob looked suspiciously like he was trying to be an Instagram model.

  “What the fuck,” I muttered, and something like understanding dawned on Colton’s face.

  “Oh, shit.” He lowered his phone, eyes wide and fearful. “You guys broke up, didn’t you?”

  The light at the other end of the crosswalk flashed from a red hand to a white stick figure. Colton mumbled a halfhearted, “Sorry,” then ducked his head and bolted across the street. As eager as I was to get home and process this discovery in solitude, I couldn’t lift my feet off the ground. They felt nailed to the sidewalk.

  The light flashed red again and cars sped up and flew past, obscuring my already blurry vision. My head ached, straining to wrap itself around this new and bewildering information.

  Rob was back in California.

  And he was an Instagram model.

  Chapter 17

  @robmccrory_official.

  That was his Instagram name. Not sure why he felt the need to append an “official,” though. I doubt there was anyone trying to impersonate him. He did have a pretty big audience—over fifty thousand followers—but when I scrolled through the accounts, a bunch of them had the same profile picture. Seemed Rob knew how to pay for fake fans, too. And with his parents’ money, he could afford to buy a lot of them.

  I couldn’t get over how good he looked, though. He’d started styling his hair and wearing nice (and probably free) clothes, and that permanent paunch he’d had ever since I’d known him was miraculously gone. In fact, he had a six-pack now. Apparently, he’d been doing a lot of crunches in the Amazon. Or maybe that only started once he got to LA. His Instagram account was only a month old, but who knew how long before that he’d been stateside? Whatever he’d done, it was clear he’d turned his life around, at least in the physical sense.

  Other than his revamped appearance, it was hard to tell exactly what was going on, because the photos were typical curated Instagram perfection. Rob standing on Santa Monica Pier, modeling sunglasses. Rob hiking Runyon Canyon, modeling quick-dry shorts. Rob with his arm around a hot woman, both of them modeling swimsuits. Everything hashtagged #collab. A narrative crafted explicitly for likes.

  Any question of where he was living or why he was in LA was answered as soon as I saw the photo of him lounging beside a sun-drenched infinity pool. The geotag simply said Brentwood, Los Angeles, but I knew he must’ve been at his parents’ house. I’d never been there—I’d never even met his parents—but I’d seen pictures of and heard stories about that house, and specifically that pool. The endless, jobless summers he spent sunbathing there, possibly in that very same lounge chair. The booze-soaked parties he’d thrown in high school when his parents were away on yet another trip. I’d envied his carefree teenage experience, so different from my own.

  Looking back on it, I suppose that was part of what had drawn me to him in the first place. After all those years I’d spent stressed-out in the wake of my mother’s death, his blithe attitude was refreshing. Rob came from wealth, a degree of affluence I couldn’t properly wrap my head around, so he wasn’t tainted by those pervasive feelings of uncertainty and doubt, the fear that the rug could be pulled out from under you at any moment. His trust fund was more than a safety net; it was a crutch.

  Of course, he couldn’t get all of his money at once. It was doled out in monthly payments—his “stipend,” as he referred to it. The payments were generous, far more than I was making as a GrubGetter. They would’ve been even higher had he chosen to stay in college, but against his parents’ wishes, he’d dropped out of USC in the middle of his sophomore year and settled for a smaller payout so he could move down to PB and bum around aimlessly by the beach.

  When I met Rob, he was in the midst of this postadolescent rebellion, rejecting his parents’ posh lifestyle in favor of—as he called it—“slumming it,” which entailed many months of smoking weed and couch surfing in various acquaintances’ beach houses. Then, one night, he and I locked eyes across a crowded Garnet Street bar.

  Coincidentally, that was the same night I’d puked in the Jack in the Box parking lot. After I caught my breath and wiped my chin, he took me by the hand and kissed me, despite how horrible I must have tasted. I immediately took him back to my apartment above the garage, and he stayed there for the next three years.

  He didn’t need to live in that apartment with me. He could’ve easily afforded to live somewhere nicer, somewhere legal with a full kitchen and a functioning electrical system. There was a part of me that hoped he might eventually decide to upgrade us both to a legit apartment, one I couldn’t qualify for on my own with my shoddy credit score and irregular income. But he liked where we lived. He said it was “cool.” Which, to him, meant it would absolutely horrify his parents.

  I really liked having him around, though. A live-in boyfriend made me feel special, like I wasn’t a total failure if I could snag a guy who wanted to share my bed every night. Plus, splitting the bills with him every month allowed me to (finally) start making payments on my student loans. After he moved in, I stayed current on that debt. Until seven months ago, when he abruptly decided our apartment wasn’t “cool” after all and ditched me for the Divine Mother Shakti. Now he was back by his parents’ pool, looking finer than ever, and I was merely a footnote in that poorly planned and best-forgotten phase of his early twenties.

  Not to mention, I’d defaulted on my loans.

  I hated him.

  Though I really had no right to. He’d been honest with me about everything—who he was, where he came from, what he wanted, why he stayed. Deep down, I knew he was wrong for me, but in my desperation to be coupled up, I ignored all my misgivings. Instead, I imagined we were something that we weren’t.

  And where did that leave me? Standing on a street corner, scrolling through Rob’s new-and-improved Instagram account, wondering if an ayahuasca trip through the Amazon might help me turn my sinking ship around, too.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a stipend to pay for a flight to Peru. So I tucked my phone away and walked home through a fog of frustration. Because it figured: just when I thought I’d finally gotten over Rob, declared him irrelevant and placed him firmly in my past, he came bounding back into the present day, stunting my progress with memories of his inertia.

  When I reached the blue bungalow, I stopped, resting my hands on the white picket fence out of habit. On a normal day, I’d try to daydream away all my bad feelings by pretending this house was mine. But this wasn’t a normal day. And I didn’t want to pretend anymore.

  Trey’s wet suit hung from the eaves, swaying ever so slightly in the breeze. Through the sheer curtains hanging in the windows, I could see there was a light on, not in the front room, but somewhere in the back. Maybe the kitchen? I wasn’t sure of the floor plan, since I’d never actually been inside the house. The tours I’d taken had all been imaginary.

  In that moment, more than anything, I wanted something real.

  My body moved so fast, my brain could hardly keep up. Before I could register what was happening, I opened the gate, walked down the front path, and pressed my fingertip to the doorbell.

  Trey opened the door, and his smile flooded the front porch with light. “Hey there.”

  “Hey there.” Now that I was here, I had no idea why, or what to say. This was awkward, wasn’t it? Me, showing up unannounced and with no good reason.

  Trey didn’t seem to think it was awkward, though. He simply invited me in with a casual sweep of his arm. “Come on in.”

  This was it. My chance to see the inside of the home I’d lusted after for so many years. How many times had I refreshed the Airbnb page to study the photographs, or stood at the curb creating a fictional life for myself within these walls? In my fantasies, I’d crossed the threshold a thousand times. I didn’t think it would ever happen in the real world.

  And now it was.
/>   In a way, I’d manifested my dreams.

  I stepped into the foyer, and Trey closed the door behind me, asking simple questions I couldn’t properly comprehend. Not because he wasn’t being clear, but because I was too distracted. This foyer...it hadn’t been part of the photo gallery. I didn’t even know it was here. Cute hall tree, though.

  “You okay?” Trey’s look of concern snapped me back to reality.

  “Yeah, totally fine. Sorry, I was just...” I waved my hand in the air, gesturing to the ceiling, the walls, the floor. “Taking it all in. I’ve only ever seen the inside of this place on Airbnb.”

  “Oh. Well, let me show you around.” He stepped into the living room and I followed close behind. “It’s nothing special, really. It’s actually pretty small.”

  “It’s lovely,” I said.

  But he wasn’t lying. It was pretty small. A lot smaller than it looked in the photos. All the furnishings were there as I remembered them, but they were closer together than I had envisioned. The whole place was cramped.

  Lovely, but cramped.

  And now that I took a closer look, perhaps not quite as lovely as I initially thought. The couches were flat, not fluffy, and one of the cushions was stained with something that looked kind of like guacamole. The ash-wood floors were scuffed and scratched. There was a huge dust bunny under the coffee table, the top of which was covered in boxes of surf wax and what appeared to be a broken longboard fin.

  “Ah, it’s a bit of a mess right now.” Trey followed my gaze and his cheeks went red. If he considered this messy, I was never letting him see my apartment. He might have had it condemned.

  “Not at all,” I said. “It looks a little different from the pictures on the website, though.”

  “Yeah, I hired a real estate photographer, some friend of a friend who knew how to angle the shots so the rooms looked nice and big.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s kind of deceptive, but no one ever complained the place was too small or anything.”

  “It’s not too small, it’s perfect. It’s a hell of a lot bigger than my apartment, that’s for sure.” Of course, that wasn’t saying much.

  I crossed the room, peeking across the breakfast bar into the kitchen, checking out the stainless steel appliances, the rustic wood dining nook. All the details I’d seen online were accounted for.

  So why did I feel like something was missing? It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on, either. It was abstract and indiscernible, like a coat of shellac had been peeled away from every surface, every cabinet, every piece of furniture.

  “Did you go swimming again?” Trey asked, eyes glinting. He remained lustrous, despite it all.

  “No, why?”

  He pointed to my legs, where grains of sand clung to my skin. “Looks like you came from the beach.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t go swimming.” No way was I going to tell him what I’d really been doing: standing on a rock in fugly shoes, posing with a bottle of kombucha, picking a stupid fight with my best friend over buying fake followers. How ridiculous. I was embarrassed to even admit it to myself.

  You know what my problem was? I spent too much time in my head. Wanting, wishing, dreaming, visualizing. I lived in worlds that didn’t really exist, worlds I’d crafted from Instagram feeds or Airbnb listings or articles I read on SurfBuzz.com. I needed to spend more time in the real world, having real conversations with real people.

  “I googled you.”

  Oh, shit. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.

  There was no unsaying it, though, and now I had to elaborate, since Trey was giving me major side-eye.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” I said. “I told you, this is a normal part of human interaction.”

  Trey breathed deeply, blew it out slowly. “Okay, then. What did you find?”

  “Lots of pictures of you and Shayla.”

  He cocked a brow, as if to say, What else did you expect?

  “I also found an article. About what happened in Sydney.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed on a swallow. “‘Cantu Can’t Do.’ That the one you’re talking about?”

  I nodded. “Look, I don’t mean to pry, and I know this competition was in the past, but—”

  “You are prying.” His voice was suddenly cold. “And you’re right, the competition was in the past. I’d like to leave it there.”

  This was a frosty side of Trey I’d never seen before. “There were some things in that article I found concerning. It raised some larger questions and—”

  “It has nothing to do with you.”

  The temperature seemed to have plummeted all of a sudden. The air was so sharp, every breath stung my nostrils. Trey’s ears were a shocking pink, his jaw muscles tensed. We were alone in a house together, and that article had everything to do with me.

  “Are you a rageaholic?”

  Instantly, his expression went from stony to stunned. “No. Geez. Is that what you—” He scrubbed a hand through his hair and winced like he was in pain. “It’s that quote from Shayla, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I mean, look, if you need help and you’re getting it, that’s great. I just want to know the truth about what happened before and what’s happening now.” And if I should be worried about anything happening in the future.

  With a heavy sigh, he collapsed on the couch, head in hands. I sat beside him, at arm’s length. The guac stain sullied the space between us.

  “She said it to make me look bad. Like I deserved what she did to me, cheating on me all those months.” He looked up, out the front window, then in my eyes. “It wasn’t true. I don’t need ‘help.’ Not any more than anyone else needs it, anyway.”

  “Then what was up with the unsportsmanlike conduct and the screaming at the judges and the tweetstorm?”

  “The unsportsmanlike conduct was an unfair call. When you’re surfing in a tournament, you’re at the mercy of the judges. What they say goes. But it’s all subjective, and even though they say they don’t play favorites, they do.

  “Anyway, in this heat, they said I interfered with Zander’s wave, but I didn’t. He screwed up and made it look like it was my fault. This wasn’t the first time he’d pulled something like that, either, and I could’ve contested it, but...I guess I’d just had enough.”

  His eyes drooped, all iciness gone, replaced with lukewarm detachment. Obviously, there was more to the situation than a couple of biased judges. Zander and Shayla were still dating, and as far as I knew, Zander was still competing in the tournament, still traveling the world, with Trey’s ex-girlfriend on his arm.

  Those were details I wasn’t going to ask about, though, because in that sense, he was right, it had nothing to do with me. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Do you regret it? Now that you’ve been suspended from the competition.”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “Yes and no. I regret losing my cool, but I don’t regret speaking the truth, even if the truth wound up getting twisted for clickbait.” He shot me another quick side-eye, and my stomach clenched with guilt.

  Suddenly, I realized my phone was still in my hand, my fingers locked around it as if it was a lifeline. I loosened my grip and tossed it on the coffee table, eager to distance myself from all these virtual worlds that didn’t really exist.

  “And,” he continued, “I don’t care about being disqualified since I was gonna quit anyway. My scores had been tanking all season, and it wasn’t always because of favoritism. My head wasn’t in the game. I needed...a break.”

  I slid a couple of inches closer to him, covering the guac stain. “You must’ve been under a lot of pressure. The competition at the pro level, I can’t imagine how fierce it is.”

  “It wasn’t the pressure that broke me. It was the posturing. Suddenly, my whole world was about maintaining an image. I wanted to live my life without every little movement
being scrutinized. That’s something Shayla never understood.

  “So when they made the call to disqualify me, I didn’t bother to fight it. I just packed up my board and came home.” Trey’s eyes danced around the room, surveying the exposed ceiling beams and pale blue walls. “It’s weird calling this home, though. I’ve never actually lived here.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “Nah. Back when I won my first tournament, about four years ago, I used the money to buy this house as an investment property. As soon as I got the keys, I hired a decorator to make it look nice and popped it up on Airbnb. I figured I’d make a nice chunk of change renting it out and then come live here when I retired. Or maybe sell it for a profit. Never thought I’d be here now.” Regret flashed in his eyes.

  “Well, I’m glad you are.” It was a bold move saying something that unabashedly earnest, but Trey rewarded my bravery with a smile.

  “I’m glad I’m here, too.”

  The space between us on the couch grew smaller. We were maybe a thigh’s width apart by now. “You know, this is my dream home.”

  Trey looked predictably confused. “It is?”

  “It is. Sometimes, when I’m feeling really bummed out, I like to stand outside by the fence and fantasize about what it would be like to live here. It always makes me feel better.”

  Uh-oh. From the expression on Trey’s face, I had clearly gone too far in the oversharing department. His mouth opened, slowly, like he wasn’t quite sure what to say next.

  “Bree.” My name on his breath was golden. “You’re one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met.”

  I guffawed. That was the last thing I’d expected him to say. “I assure you, I’m the opposite of interesting. In fact, a well-respected professor once told me I was ‘acutely mediocre.’”

  “That professor’s an asshole. Mediocre people don’t conquer a lifelong fear of the ocean by wading right into the oncoming waves. They don’t ask difficult, uncomfortable questions to get at the truths they need to hear. They’re more concerned with looking cool than being real. You’re the furthest thing from mediocre, Bree. You’re extraordinary.”