Page 71 of This Time It's Real
I close my eyes against the words. Of course they’re nice to hear. Of course. But this is Caz Song we’re talking about; he’s uttered a thousand romantic lines just like this on-screen, all with seeming sincerity. I can’t trust him to actuallymeanthem, can’t delude myself into thinking he might reciprocate my feelings, when nobody’s ever fallen for me before. When he’s Caz the Rising Star, and I’m . . .me.
Still, after we hang up, it takes me forever to fall asleep.
I’m so used to seeing Caz’s name flashing over my screen that when my phone buzzes on Saturday evening, I pick up without looking.
“Did you finally get to kill the general today?” I ask, referring to the scene he’d last told me he was preparing for. An unexpected benefit of fake-dating a C-drama actor: You get a bunch of spoilers for yet-to-be-released dramas.
There’s a long silence.
Then Zoe’s voice drifts through the line, confused and oddly distant. Or maybe the connection’s just not great today. “Uh . . . what?”
“Oh.” I jerk upright on my bed, pushing away the interview notes I’d been looking through earlier for that Beijing media company. For some reason, my muscles tense, as if bracing for something. “Oh, sorry. I thought—I thought you were someone else. Hi.”
“Who did you think I was?” she asks. When I don’t reply right away, she answers for herself: “Caz.”
I make a small, vague sound of assent.
“So you guys are still doing the thing, huh?” Again, there’s that weird edge to her voice.
“What thing?”
“The whole dating facade.”
“Well, yeah,” I say, my whole body going rigid now, defensiveness hardening my tone. And then a long, awkward beat passes where we both wait for the other person to say more. I can’t remember when it started being like this, when we weren’t shouting over each other to talk about everything even when nothing had happened. But we’ve been busy.
But we’ve been busy before, back when I was still in America, and it wasn’t this bad.
It’s happening, I think, and as soon as I have the thought, it becomes a permanent stain, seeping through everything and coloring every memory a rotten gray. The changed playlist name. The shortened calls. The unanswered texts. The forgotten bracelet.Just like all my best friends from the past.June from London. Eva from Singapore. Lisa from New Zealand. In the end, it’s all just the same.
We’re drifting apart.
No, we’vedriftedapart. Whatever is happening now is the aftermath.
My heart seizes in silent despair, but Zoe speaks up again, oblivious to it all. “What are you planning to do about it?”
“Doabout it?” I repeat, unable to shake the feeling that I’ve lost thread of this conversation.
“Well, I mean, you can’t just keep lying to the world, can you?” she pushes on. “Like, at first, I thought it’d only be this super-temporary thing. A joke. But it’s been entiremonths, and it’s just . . . It just seems like the kind of thing destined to blow up in your face.”
My jaw clenches, the tension now stretching like a wire all the way down to my toes. One of the reasons I’ve always admired Zoe is her ability to cut through all the bullshit, get to the very core of things. She’s brave like that, braver than I’ll ever be.
But that’s also precisely why this is the very last topic I want to talk about.
“It’ll work out,” I say, with all the false calm I can muster while wringing the corner of my pillow between clammy fingers. “Eventually. But I’ve already promised Sarah—everyone at Craneswift—that I’ll do this big interview after the break, and it’s meant to be great for my career, and—”
“And I’m all for opening yourself up to opportunities,” Zoe says. “Except when your career’s founded on aliteral lie.I mean, how do you expect to retain your readers or earn the respect of any publication out there if they find out—”
“So theycan’tfind out,” I cut in, gut roiling. “They won’t.”
“Yeah, well—” She starts to say something else, but a loud notification chimes on her end, and she pauses. “Sorry, the grades for my chem exam just came out . . .”
“Go check it,” I tell her.
“You sure?” She lets out a small laugh, but she doesn’t mean it. I would know. I used to know everything about her—which laughs she was faking and when she wanted to leave a conversation, a party, a room.
She wants to leave now.
And I don’t know how to make people stay; I never have. So I only say, “Yeah, of course. Um, bye.”
