Chapter 3
Brielle
I made it a point to try to slip past Jenessa when I spotted her down the hall by the lockers.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. I did.
We were just . . . really different, and some days I just didn’t have the patience for our peculiar friendship.
On again and off again, that was Jenessa and me.
Jenessa had a way of inserting herself into everyone’s business under the guise that somehow they needed her to be there.
She was the one who started rooting for me to get a boyfriend.
She was so persistent, I thought she might have a long-term future in matchmaking, only she was a horrible matchmaker.
Still, she got all sorts of girls at school to agree that I was the last holdout.
The boyfriendless loser girl whose biggest show of excitement was when a special edition volume of a latest release showed up in her mailbox from the bookstore in the UK.
“Here’s my philosophy,” I had told Lia ages ago.
“I don’t plan to get married when I’m sixteen, so why date anyone?
It’s a waste of time and a complete guarantee of a broken heart.
I’d rather be friends, you know? Then someday, when I’m older, I’ll meet that one guy and I’ll know God was thinking of me when He created him.
” I held my hand over my heart because, I will admit, it did start beating a lot faster than usual. “He will be so freaking amazing.”
Lia had squealed then.
So had I.
No one could claim we weren’t romantics at heart. I had my bulleted list of fictional heroes that I could feel myself get all swoony over. But that’s just it. They were fictional. Thus, they were also safe.
“What if he’s like Gray?” Lia had gushed about our mutual most recent bookish crush.
I imagined the fictional guy. His neat blond hair, his blue eyes, his square jaw.
He was so stinkin’ adorable in the books we’d read, I could only imagine what he’d be like if he were real.
So that’s what I did. I imagined him. With a few tweaks to suit me.
Like, being a baseball player. That was the only outdoor anything I liked that could possibly steal me away from a book.
He was kind. Funny. Easygoing to my admittedly neurotic personality.
I mean, I stored my colored pens in order of the Pantone color chart.
Crap.
I’d let my mind wander again, and this time, I ran into Melanie. She was in my chemistry class, and I seemed to get paired with her often. Probably because I was terrible at math, and she was scared to even live without it.
Melanie’s blue eyes were the size of paper plates. Oh my gosh! She mouthed the words, but instead of stopping to chatter like she normally did, Melanie breezed past me.
I steered to the right to avoid running into a couple of guys from the football team.
“Brielle!” Another voice sliced through my nerves. Jenessa’s BFF, Claire, gave me a look that made me feel like I was totally missing something really important.
“Wait.” I reached for Claire’s sleeve.
She paused.
Students passed on either side of us, all heading to classes or their lockers.
“What?” Claire waited.
“Why the look?” I asked. I had to ask. Because just as I’d grabbed for Claire’s sleeve, another girl from our Wednesday night church youth group had hurried past but took the time to blow me kisses.
Kisses?
That was beyond weird.
“What’s going on?” I pressed.
Claire laughed, and her smile reached her eyes. Eyes that communicated that she knew. She knew everything.
I only wished I knew everything too.
“I had no idea.” Claire gave me such a look of sheer astonishment and if she wasn’t holding onto a pile of books, I could picture her holding up her hands, palms toward me, to emphasize her amazement.
“No idea? Of what?” I asked.
Claire tipped her head to the side and gave me a tolerant smile. “Ohhhhh, you know.”
“No. I really don’t.”
“When I saw those pictures, I didn’t believe you. I have to admit it. I thought you’d deep faked him or something.” Claire’s laugh echoed in the hall.
A cold, solid ball of guilt started to form in my stomach. She knew that? Claire knew I’d created Brooks Mason, my fake boyfriend, using a combination of fictional characters and AI?
“But holy crap, Brielle.” Claire shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know how you did it.”
“Did what?” I felt like all I could do was ask questions. Which was true. Because if I made any statements at all, I’d risk incriminating myself, or securing my position of the biggest loser—and liar—in the history of girls who tried to fit in but couldn’t.
And I wasn’t even the kind of girl that really worried about fitting in. I wasn’t, I tried to convince myself.
“I gotta go,” Claire flung the words at me and hurried away down the hall.
“But—” I stood there, my mouth gaping, like a fish that just realized it was out of water and had been for a lot longer than they’d realized.
Being out of water could kill them. Would kill them.
What had I been thinking? Creating a fake boyfriend using computer-generated art and a healthy dose of imagination.
And what was Claire smirking about? And Jenessa and—
“Swing and a miss, Bri, swing and a miss.”
I whirled to match the voice to the face of my brother. Reece was about two inches taller than me, and with the hood of his gray sweatshirt up over his head, his brown hair stuck out haphazardly and made me want to yank it as though the act would make him explain himself faster.
“What?” I almost shrieked. I lowered my voice. “Why is everyone acting so weird? And what do you mean, ‘swing and a miss’? What’d I do?”
“Your boyfriend?” Reece responded.
“Yes? Brooks?” I tried to squelch the sense of foreboding that was making it hard to breathe. Reece was the only person—the only person—besides Lia who knew I’d fabricated Brooks Mason.
“He’s here.” Reece dropped those two words with an expression that seemed to anticipate a bigger reaction than I gave him.
“What do you mean?” If I asked one more question, I was going to start annoying myself.
“Brooks. Your deepfake boyfriend from North Carolina.” A crooked grin tilted my brother’s mouth. He was enjoying this. Whatever this was. “He’s here. At school. I met him about twenty minutes ago. Nice guy.”
I hugged the books I was carrying to my chest. “W-what do you mean?” There. I’d done it. I’d asked one more question, only I wasn’t even annoyed at myself. I was too petrified to do anything other than stare at my brother. “Reece, what are you talking about?”
“You got one fact wrong,” he continued as though educating me on my imaginary, made-up boyfriend was the entertainment of his day. “He’s from Minnesota, not North Carolina. So, you’ll have to figure out how to explain that little detail.”
“Reece—” I started. Stopped. I didn’t entirely understand what was going on, except Jenessa had suddenly appeared at my elbow, all perky and satisfied that she was in on whatever was going on.
“You’re right,” she oozed approval. “He’s to die for.”
“Jenessa.” Reece rolled his eyes. Jenessa could fall off the face of the earth, and Reece wouldn’t miss her.
“I sit next to him in physics.”
“Oh.” I squeaked. “N-nice.” I shot Reece a look of frantic desperation. If he didn’t rescue me from whatever this horror was, I’d—I’d—I’d—
“Hey.”
I recognized the voice the instant I heard it.
I shouldn’t have recognized it, because the voice shouldn’t have existed.
I’d made it up. In my dreams. In my beautifully curated little fictional world, with the innocent intent of making my aunts chill out and my friends get off my back about dating someone.
It was harmless. It was artificial intelligence at its finest.
Only no one bothered to tell me that something had to train artificial intelligence.
Apparently, someone somewhere had fed every single photograph of the real Brooks Mason to AI’s voracious appetite and left me with deep faked photos that were so like the real thing that now I was whipping around to face him.
The guy of my dreams.
The best book boyfriend ever.
The baseball-catching, blue-eyed, lopsided-grinning Brooks Mason from North Carolina.
No. What was it Reece had said? Minnesota.
Brooks Mason was from Minnesota, not from down south or my imagination. He was real. He was very, very real. And everyone at school knew I was dating him.
Everyone, that is, except for Brooks Mason.