Chapter 5
Brielle
Had I just said that out loud? I pretended to be very interested in my geometry homework, but I knew Brooks had heard me.
Too good to be true? Yeah. This day was going from bad to worse.
It was one thing to have Brooks Mason show up in school and now have to figure out what to do about my very-much-alive fake boyfriend.
But he had to even take a shot at One Direction?
Let alone, if he was a Cubs fan, I was going to die.
There was no theorem in the world that could solve this puzzle.
This wasn’t mathematical at all! How had today even happened?
I needed an iced caramel latte, like five minutes ago.
I needed to think. I needed to pray. Yes.
Praying was a good thing. I know not everyone prays anymore, but I do.
I believe God takes a special interest in me, but right now?
Yeah. I could imagine even God rolling His eyes at me.
That’s what you get for lying.
Ok, so maybe He didn’t say that, but he did say the truth will set you free.
I gave Brooks the side-eye. He was looking at me with a lopsided smile, his eyes narrowed in some unspoken challenge.
I looked away.
There would be no setting me free today. There was no way I could tell him the truth—or anyone else, for that matter. I could just picture it. The conversation.
Sooooooo….like, I sorta pretended you into existence. Now that you’re real and here, everyone thinks we’re dating.
He’d stare at me like I’d had one too many espressos. I probably had. Then he’d reply, “You didn’t pretend me into existence. I’ve existed since I was born.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t know that. So I made you up—or I thought I did—to get people off my back about needing a boyfriend. But now you’re here, and this is a mess.”
“Not really,” he’d say, if he were one of those fictional nice guys I read about.
“I got your back. Let’s just date. No one needs to know it’s not for real.
That’ll keep girls from being annoying with me so I can focus on baseball, and you can .
. . read books or watch me play or whatever it is you like to do. ”
Yeah. In my dreams, it’d go that simply. Only it wouldn’t be simple.
“It won’t work,” I mumbled to myself.
“What won’t work?” Brooks whispered.
Darn. I needed to stop talking to myself. It was a terrible habit.
“Nothing,” I retorted.
I was walking a tight rope, and any minute now, I could fall off. I just needed a plan. I needed to figure this out. I needed to talk to Lia. There’d be a resolution. She would know what to do. If Reece didn’t blow it before someone else did.
The anxiety I’d felt in the hall when I met Brooks was coming back. I’d lost it out of sheer indignation that anyone would pit anyone against One Direction. But now it was coming back. This was going to be like a baseball to the face if I didn’t think my way out of this and fast.
There just wasn’t a way to explain to Brooks what he’d accidentally walked into.
There wasn’t.
It was embarrassing, and my perfect plan was going to dissolve, and then everyone would know.
I looked down at my notebook. I’d managed to draw one straight line, and it had nothing to do with my geometry homework.
No. Breathe in. Breathe out. There was a solution, somewhere in all of this. I could make it work. I could explain it. I could—
“I thought you said your boyfriend lived in North Carolina?”
Oh no. No, no, no, no.
If it were the most popular girl in school, I could have figured out what to say.
But it wasn’t. It was Mrs. Templeton. The study hall teacher.
She was also my Sunday school teacher. Small towns work that way, you know?
You can’t get away from school at church or church at school.
Unless your science teacher is Mr. Newton, who is convinced the earth is flat, we never landed on the moon, and I evolved from an ape.
How is that even complimentary? Like, I wouldn’t actually be proud of that if I believed it.
Nope. There was no coming back from this.
Mrs. Templeton was grinning, her smile so wide, her wrinkles at her eyes crinkly, and a dab of maroon lipstick stuck to her front tooth. She looked between Brooks and me.
I didn’t dare look at Brooks.
“You’re from Minnesota, aren’t you?” She pressed for more explanation. “Not North Carolina.”
Brooks cleared his throat, evidently confused. “Right. I’ve never been to North Carolina.”
“I must’ve gotten that fact confused.” Mrs. Templeton turned her attention to me. “But, how amazing it is that your boyfriend was able to move here to be near you! Now you can be together.” Her smile was warm, but her eyes were sharp.
Mrs. Templeton knew something was up.
I offered a wobbly smile in return.
“Boyfriend?” I heard Brooks say.
I didn’t dare look at him.
A low chuckle. “That’s not possible,” he concluded. “She thinks I’m a Cubs fan, and she said we can’t even be friends.”
It had been the longest study hall ever.
As soon as the bell rang, I shot out of my seat, avoiding Mrs. Templeton’s knowing gaze and definitely avoiding Brooks.
I needed to find a place to hide so I could think.
I had one more class before school was out.
Just one. If I could make it through, then I’d be free and I could call Lia and we could figure out what to do about this.
I hurried down the hall, my Converse shoes slipping on the linoleum floor.
I knew what I had to do, without talking to Lia.
I mean, the fix was simple. I fessed up to everyone I’d told about Brooks—which was mainly Jenessa and Claire and some of the other girls who were always hassling me about boys.
I needed to fess up to my aunts too—although that didn’t seem as pressing at the moment.
But how did I do any of that? How did I explain myself?
The process of AI images and using my imagination was easy to explain, but the why behind faking Brooks Mason?
Just saying that I wanted people off my back about me being sixteen and boyfriendless seemed .
. . weak. Even to myself. It wasn’t a strong motivation to do something so .
. . dumb. What had seemed like a stroke of innocent brilliance even twenty-four hours ago now seemed like middle school drama.
Fine. I skidded to a halt in front of the water fountain and bent to take a drink of the cold water.
I’d just come clean. It was that simple.
Really, everyone would probably just laugh.
I’d go back to being pestered about loving books and baseball over boys, but I could own that!
I could! I didn’t need to be like every other girl.
I didn’t need to date. I wasn’t defined by a guy.
I was Brielle Walters, bookworm, Brewers fan, lover of One Direction, and devoted to my faith. I didn’t need to be anything else.
I would tell the truth.
I would come clean.
I would—
“Brielle!” Jenessa’s squeal startled me and I spit water back into the fountain. Straightening, I wiped my mouth on my sweatshirt sleeve as Jenessa came bobbing toward me waving her phone in her hand. “Omigoshyou’reblowingup!”
It all came out in one word, and I had no idea what Jenessa was talking about.
“Brielle!” Another squeal behind me.
Claire.
I was sandwiched between both of my pseudo-friends who both had their phones out and were both thumbing their screens.
“You’re going Driftwood High viral!” Claire gasped.
“I’m what?” You know that hollow pit you get in your stomach when what you thought was going to be an easy fix suddenly becomes ominous? Like a zombie flying at you with drooling teeth, followed by Frankenstein’s monster? And you know you’re doomed, and you’re not even sure why yet?
“Look!” Jenessa shoved her phone in my face.
I saw it then. Post after post after post. Someone had taken my AI likeness of Brooks Mason, which I’d texted to my small group of friends two weeks ago, and stitched a video montage of pictures of me taken throughout the school year.
It was set to a trending song—not One Direction, unfortunately—and had been shared. Over one hundred and twenty times.
Book girl gets a swing and a hit!
The catch of the year!
Another of Driftwood High’s single ladies is taken!
Those were three of the comments I could see before Jenessa snatched her phone back from my face. She swiped with her finger, practically doing a hip-hop dance in front of me.
“Okay, okay, so I wrote, ‘Reece Walter’s bookish babe of a sister who may have her head turned by a baseball but not by a boy, has snatched the new boy from every hopefully single lady at Driftwood High. Who would’ve expected?
Brielle Walters said it, she showed us the pictures, but Brooks Mason is here to stay, and he’s already spoken for.
Back off, babes, Brielle with the catch! ’”
I exchanged looks with Claire and then stared at Jenessa. “Wait. Pause!”
Jenessa looked up from her phone, brown eyes wide with pleasure. “Yeah?”
“You posted that?” I didn’t even know what to think.
“Yeah!” Jenessa was cluelessly proud of herself.
Of course, I really couldn’t blame her on one hand.
I mean, I did make a big deal of my pretend boyfriend, Brooks Mason, and she had no clue that he actually existed and would show up at school.
But then—neither had I. On the other hand, why on earth would she think I’d appreciate her blasting out my photo to the school, let alone announcing my dating status?
The idea of even having a fake boyfriend was to get my friends to tone down all the guy-stuff, not amp it up with posts on social media.
And why did everyone care anyway?
Oh wait.
I looked up as my brother came toward me.
That was why. Reece Walters. Okay, high school football captains are the stereotypical popular guys of every romance ever written or filmed.
But in our high school, my brother—the starting pitcher of our baseball team—had the same level of status.
It was nauseating how girls turned into piles of goo around him, and Reece was totally oblivious to them.
He was in love with his baseball and glove.
So it was like a school thing—who would finally get to date a Walters?
Of course, let’s be honest, it wasn’t me most people were interested in.
But apparently, Driftwood High took what they could get, and what they’d gotten was Jenessa’s totally inappropriate, butting-into-my-life social media post.
And, it helped that Brooks Mason was soooooo good-looking. I mean, that’s why I made him up that way. To be a distraction so I could go about my life.
Why, God, why did you have to give me an imagination that thought up someone you’d already made?
I often found myself whining to God.
I don’t think He minded.
At least I hoped not.
“Well?” Reece approached us, only this time his casual grin was missing. “Who did it?”
I snapped out of my stunned silence and looked between Jenessa and Claire.
“Did what?” Jenessa faked ignorance.
Reece cocked his head to the side. He opened his mouth to say something, but then a few more girls hurried over to our little circle. A couple of guys, too.
“How on earth did you snag him?” one of them asked.
“Is he going to try out for the team?” A guy directed that question to Reece.
“He plays baseball?” Another girl.
“How did you two meet before he ever came to school?”
“What position does he play?”
“Does he have a brother?
The questions! They kept coming! I wanted to scream.
To run away. How was I ever going to get out of this mess now?
I mean, confessing my deceitful sins to a few friends and my all-forgiving aunts was one thing, but to my entire school?
Heck, no! That would be mortifying! I’d have to move.
To like—Iceland, or something. And there was no way—absolutely no way—that Brooks Mason wasn’t going to hear about this.
If he hadn’t already.
“I—I—” Yep. I was stuttering. I shot Reece a desperate save me look, and he just shrugged.
I could feel them. The betrayal of tears welling up in my eyes.
I was screwed. I was in such trouble. I was a liar and a fake, and I was going to be found out.
Brooks would hate me—I wouldn’t blame him—but worse than that, I’d probably ruin his entire entry into Driftwood High as the new guy.
I’d put a complete stranger in the middle of high school drama, which was exactly what I’d been trying to avoid in the first place!
I was a mess up.
I was—
Freeze. What was happening?
I felt an arm drape lazily over my shoulders, and I smelled that tangy, spicy smell of a guy’s deodorant. I saw the expressions on Jenessa and Claire’s faces get all googly-eyed. I saw Reece frown in confusion. The expressions of all the other bystanders were blurry, but they all looked impressed.
Then I turned my head.
Blue eyes.
Blond hair.
Nice jawline.
Great mouth.
Brooks Mason. His arm was around my shoulders. And good grief, he winked at me. Winked at me.
“So,” he stated loud enough for everyone to hear, “You ready to go, Shortstop?”