Page 18 of This Time It's Real
Caz arches a dark brow. “Are you trying to recruit me for a cult, Eliza?”
“What? No, I—”
“Because I’m not allowed to join,” he continues over me, leaning back against a vacuum cleaner and somehow managing to make it look cool. “Contractually speaking, I mean. My manager doesn’t want me to join any group or organization unless it’s the next big boy band.”
I don’t even know how to respond to that.
“No . . .” I finally manage. Shake my head. “No, this isn’t about a cult or a—a boy band, for that matter. It’s aboutthis.” I point to my laptop screen, where the first slide is now up and ready, the giant title glowing in the dim light of the closet.
I can sense, rather than see, Caz’s surprise.
“Before you say no or get weirded out,” I tell him, taking advantage of his silence, “just let me give you more details, okay?”
“Sure.” Now he sounds amused, which isn’t exactly what I was going for, but it’s better than impatience or outright contempt, I guess.
With a click, the PowerPoint changes to the next slide:A Very Brief Summary of My Current Predicament.Screenshots of my essay, the BuzzFeed article, and a couple of the most liked Twitter comments are pasted below.
“Are all your slides this wordy?” Caz muses.
I frown at him. “That’s obviously not the point.”
“Right,” he says. Cocks his head. “So enlighten me: Whatisthe point here?”
Faint irritation rises inside me, like the just-audible buzzing of a fly or the itch of a new clothing tag against your skin. Still, I force myself to smile. Keep my cool. “Well, you know how I said in my essay that I’ve been dating this guy since . . .” I trail off when I notice the blank look on Caz’s face. “You haven’t read my essay?”
He jerks a shoulder. “Honestly? No.”
Okay. This is going to be even harder than I thought.
“I can check it out now, if that helps,” he offers, reaching for his phone.
The idea of him reading my essay within such close proximity of me while I stand around and wait for his reaction kind of makes me want to bolt out the closet, but I wait silently as he searches for the right link, taking what feels like all the time in the world.
His eyebrows rise when he finally finds it. His lips twitch.
Then, to my absolute horror, he starts reading my essay aloud.
“It was the kind of small, subtle moment they rarely show in the movies or include in the novels. There was no dramatic orchestra playing in the background, no fireworks, nothing but the pale sum- mer sky simmering gently around us, the soft scratch of his sweater against—”
“Oh my god,” I say, mortified.
He keeps reading, louder.“—my cheek. I missed him. That must sound ridiculous, because he was already standing as close to me as the laws of physics would allow—”
“I hate this so much,” I tell him through gritted teeth. I can physicallyfeelmyself cringing. “Please stop.”
He flashes me a grin, and the rarity of it is enough to make me falter, if only for one second. Then he says, “Are you sure you don’t want to hear about how youlet him bury his face in the crook of my neck, almost like a tired child. I tried my best to stay completely still, to just be there for him, the way—”
“Caz,” I snap.
“Eliza,” he returns, but thankfully he stops torturing me with my own writing. “You know, I hate to break it to you, but if you can’t stand the idea ofmereading those few sentences, you’rereallynot going to like the fact that”—he consults his phone for a second—“over a million people have already read your essay.”
“That’s fine. I mean, that’s not the same thing. Those are strangers.”
I can tell he doesn’t understand my reasoning, and I’m not sure how to explain it to him, why I’d much rather show my work to random people on the internet than people who know me in real life, so I swiftly move the conversation along to more pressing issues.
“Here’s the thing, though,” I begin, gesturing back to my PowerPoint slide. “The essay you just read is . . . well, it’s fake.”
“Fake,” Caz repeats. His expression is unreadable. “Which part?”
