Chapter Two
I’M NOT PEYTON TURNER.
I’m only pretending to be her.
This isn’t the first time, though. I’ve been doing it ever since she and I were both five.
It started out as a fun trick with both of us dressing up like Ariel for Halloween one year and having people confuse us as twins and graduated to me going to her cello lessons because she hated the cello and I loved it, or attending detention at school in her stead so I had a place to go when things at home became too much to bear.
We’re not, though.
Twins, I mean.
We’re not even sisters.
Just best friends that somehow look very similar to each other.
We both have the same shade of golden blond hair and blue eyes. We are the same height, and growing up, we had the same build too. If we kept our heads down and didn’t make too much eye contact with the other person, we could usually fool them into thinking we were the other.
But then around the age of seventeen or so, things changed.
Puberty that I thought had passed me by caught up to me, making my body bloom differently than hers. It made my hips become rounder and my thighs all pudgy. My boobs went from a B cup to a full D, and my belly developed rolls. But Peyton remained as svelte and slender as ever.
So these days I pretend to be her in other ways.
I fool her boyfriends on the phone for fun because our voices are still freakishly similar and because pretend-flirting is the only kind of flirting I’ll let myself do and she knows that; I take her big brother’s calls when she isn’t in the mood to hear him lecture her about her low grades and partying.
And sometimes when guys call me or send me their dick pics because somehow I always attract creeps, Peyton is the one to fend them off because I have zero experience with them.
Oh, and I also do her extra-credit assignments—which I think are kinda fun—that include writing letters to inmates in prison. Or just one inmate.
She in turn goes shopping with me, and she did my hair and makeup today before I went to see said inmate. Nothing crazy, though; I wouldn’t let her, but still.
“Are you seriously not going to tell me what happened today?”
That’s her.
Peyton. The real Peyton Turner.
Cross-legged and with a determined look on her face, she sits in the middle of my bed among her scattered clothes and an open suitcase. Usually when she has that look, it’s very hard to deter her from the path she’s chosen.
But I still try.
I hold a bikini in each hand and wave them at her. “Which one?”
She keeps her focus on me, though. “Seriously?”
“Yes.” I nod and wave the bikinis again. “If you don’t tell me which bikini you want, there’s a very high chance that I’ll pack the wrong one and then you’ll be the one regretting it. Because you’re the one who has to wear them.”
She gives me a look before asking again, “Tell me what happened at the café today.”
There’s a pinch in my chest that I ignore and forge ahead. “Fine. The red one it is.”
I throw the other one aside—the one that I definitely know she’d pick; we’ve been friends forever, so I know what she likes—and I make a show of folding the little strings on the red one before reaching out to dump it in her suitcase.
As expected, she gasps and scoots over to me on her knees, then snatches the bikini away.
“Are you insane?” she exclaims, putting her hands on her hips. “The red one makes me look like a lobster.”
I purse my lips in response, trying to hold back a chuckle.
Narrowing her eyes, she extends one hand, palm up. “Give me the gold one.”
I dutifully hand it to her, still trying to control my mirth.
She shakes her head as she grumbles and dumps the bikini on top of the neatly folded clothes in her luggage.
“I’m going on a vacation with my boyfriend and even if I plan to break up with him when I get back, I still want to look my best. It’s the Bahamas, okay?
Who knows when I’ll get the chance again to go to the Bahamas and get away from here? ”
Yes, she is going on a vacation; and yes, she plans to break up with Ben.
I don’t blame her; he’s kind of an asshole who thinks the whole world revolves around him and his father’s ranch.
I told her to break up with him the first time I talked to him on the phone.
But she kept it going because she needed a date to the New Year’s party a few months ago, and because she knew it pissed off her brother.
Peyton has a difficult relationship with her brother, with her whole family, actually.
Well, the truth is that she hates her family. And she has reasons. Reasons I fully understand because I have a difficult relationship with my family too.
“Told you to make your choice,” I say in a singsong voice.
Her response is to poke her tongue out at me.
I chuckle, and together we finish packing for tomorrow.
She leaves early morning, and gosh, I’m going to miss her.
She asked me to go with her now that our finals are over and the summer is upon us.
But I refused. I didn’t want to be the third wheel, even though their relationship is going to expire soon.
Plus, this summer I was planning on doing something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time now.
Usually I always have extra classes or extra shifts at the library or whatever job I’m working, but this year I told myself that I’d put on my big-girl panties and do it.
Plus, I also wanted to… write to him.
I wanted to be here so I could get his letter every Friday and write him back that very day. So it gets to him in time on Tuesday. But then he said he was getting out early and asked to meet me and…
My heart twists.
It twists and twists until I think my heart is becoming a tight and throbbing fist rather than just an organ.
I try to ignore the pain in my chest because tonight was supposed to be all about spending time together, watching movies and eating popcorn and ice cream and anything else with too much salt or sugar in it.
But I guess I’ve been doing a poor job of it because as soon as we zip up her suitcase and put it aside, Peyton grabs my hand, pulls me to sit on the bed beside her, and gives me a grave look.
“Okay, on a scale of 1 to 10, just tell me, how bad was it? With 1 being excruciatingly bad. The worst ever.”
I meet her gaze and sigh in defeat. “Minus 394.”
She opens her mouth before closing it and frowning. “Very random. Is that—”
“Bad,” I explain. “That’s bad, Pey. It’s less than 1. It’s less than 0 even. It’s a negative integer.”
She rolls her eyes. “You know how much I hate geometry, Riri. Why would you put me through that?”
Riri.
That’s my name, or the shortened version of it.
My actual name is Reverie.
Reverie Bell.
“It’s algebra. You… Never mind.” I shake my head. “It was bad. Really bad; that’s it.”
She narrows her eyes. “What did he do?”
I open and close my fists in my lap. “Nothing. He did nothing. It’s just…”
“It’s just what?”
This time when I close my fists, I do it hard. I do it in a way that my nails, even though they’re short and blunt, dig into my skin and make it sting. “It’s just that I don’t think he was expecting me. Or rather someone like me.”
Peyton’s spine straightens and her eyes grow angry. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Crap.
I shouldn’t have said that. Definitely not to Peyton.
Peyton and I, we’re more sisters to each other than best friends. We grew up together, see. In Black Rock, Montana.
Peyton’s family owns a ranch called Wildfire—the second-biggest ranch in Montana—and my family worked for her.
My mom was her nanny and my father was one of the ranch hands.
Growing up, we were inseparable. We went to the same schools; we played together, studied together, spent all our time together.
And when she and her mother moved away from Black Rock to Bozeman, my mom and I went with them.
Peyton and I have gone through everything together: difficult families that are more absorbed in their own affairs than us; school and classes; periods and teenage hormones; boyfriend drama—hers, not mine; and now college.
While I excel inside a classroom, Peyton is more outgoing.
She loves to party and live large, and I try to do everything I can to live as small as possible.
I’m the rule-follower, and Peyton is a rebel.
Despite our differences, though, we’re two peas in a pod.
I love her to pieces and would do anything for her.
Just as she’d do anything for me.
Including pranking boys who would call me fat in high school and teaching them a lesson.
“You know what,” I say, trying to put her at ease, “just forget it.”
She turns to face me, her features still set in anger. “Did he say something to you? Did he say something rude to you? Because I swear to God, I’m going to—”
I grab her arms and stop her. “Look, it doesn’t matter, okay?
It doesn’t… He probably was expecting someone else.
Someone who, I don’t know, looked different than me.
” She takes a breath to say something, but I keep speaking: “Which is fine. I don’t care.
I’m happy with the way I look, with the way I am.
I just don’t need people to remind me and… I guess that’s what threw me today.”
That and the fact that I let myself do it.
I let myself go on an adventure. When I’m not the kind of girl who ever does that. I’m smart. I’m practical. I’m very, very careful. And there’s a reason for that.
A very good reason.
But I ignored all of that, and for the first time in my life, I let myself go.
I let myself be reckless. Like any other college freshman, I let myself flirt with boys—and not just pretend-flirting on the phone by impersonating my best friend.
Granted, I was flirting with a convicted felon via letters while using my best friend’s name, but still.
I just… I wanted to live for once.