Page 12 of My Fake Relationship With the Popular Boy
“Oh, yeah?” he asked.
“Mh-hm.” I nodded enthusiastically. “I, uh… I found a date to the prom!”
“That’s great, sweetie!” he said. “Who’s the lucky person?”
“I’m not sure if you know him,” I said. “His name’s Jaxon Andrews.”
“Jane and Laurel’s boy?” he said immediately. I shouldn’t have been surprised; most of the kids I knew had parents who either went to high school with dad or worked with him.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, that’s great, honey!” he said. “Isn’t he the captain of the track team?”
“Uh…” I blinked. Why did he just know that off the top of his head? “Yeah, I think so.”
He nodded. “I thought so. Good choice.”
I laughed a little. “Thanks?”
“Let’s get milkshakes,” he said. “To celebrate.”
“Weren’t we going to do that anyway?” Nobody went to Bev’s Diner and didn’t get a milkshake. That would just be wrong.
“Milkshakes and dessert,” he said with a grin. I smiled back.
“Deal.”
It was days like these, when he and I got to spend some quality time alone, that I almost managed to forget that my mom had left us. He worked so hard to give everything he could to my sister and I while still being there for us whenever we needed him, and I had no idea how I could ever thank him enough for it.
five
On Monday,I spent my morning terrified that I was going to run into Jaxon. How was I supposed to greet him if I saw him? We hadn’t laid any ground rules for how to fake this and I had never been in a relationship before, so I had nothing to go off.
Somehow, after a week of seeing him quite literally everywhere, I went an entire morning without seeing him. Once the lunch period started, I knew I was safe since he almost always drove to get fast food with Eli and Sabrina for lunch. After lunch, though, I knew there was no chance of me avoiding him, because he and I had French class together.
I made Madison wait to walk to class until the last moment so I could avoid having to see Jaxon for too long before the class officially started. Despite my best efforts, though, we still made it to the French hallway with minutes to spare. Up ahead, I saw Lewis come from the other direction and go into the classroom. I just managed to stop myself from groaning out loud — I had somehow completely forgotten that Lew was in this class too.
I stopped mid-stride as a thought occurred to me.
“Hey,” I said. Madison paused. She was a couple of feet ahead of me but she turned to look at me inquisitively. “Did you know that Lewis was into me for the past few years?”
“What?” Madison asked. She awkwardly avoided my gaze. “Of course I… didn’t.” She barely even got the words out. Madison was good at a lot of things but lying to me was not one of them. “That’s… That’s crazy.”
I rolled my eyes and kept walking, leaving Madison alone in the middle of the hallway. As I walked by, I saw her grimace like she knew she’d been caught. She waited for a minute before she ran to catch up with me.
“Okay, okay, I did know,” she said.
“No,” I said with a fake gasp. “Really?”
“I wasn’t trying to hide it from you!” she said. “I could always tell the you didn’t like him back and I assumed you just didn’t want to talk about it. I figured you would bring it up if you wanted to.”
What I’d learned in the past couple of weeks was that my friends really liked making assumptions and then never discussing them with me.
“Yeah, well…” I tried to think of a good comeback but fell short. In the end, I just pathetically said, “That wasn’t the case.”
“As I can now see,” Madison said. “But if you didn’t know before then how did you find out?”
“Eli told me about the stupid bet Jaxon and Lewis made in the ninth grade,” I said. My chest tightened with anger as I thought of it again.
