Page 73 of This Time It's Real
So I grab my phone and brace myself for some variation offraudorliarorI hate your fucking guts, but instead I see only a name flashing over my screen.
Sarah Diaz.
Weeks from now, when I look back on this particular morning, it’ll likely be nothing more a white-noise blur of panic, a gaping black hole in my memory.
I’m barely conscious of the day’s events even as they’re unfolding. One second I’m on the phone with Sarah, reassuring her that everything’s just a misunderstanding and I totally have a plan, when I in fact totally donothave a plan, and the next I’m texting Caz, who’s only just landed in Beijing and isn’t aware of this complete shitstorm yet, but soon will be.
And in between all this, I’m lying facedown on the couch, cursing myself and trying not to pull my hair out.
Still, by lunchtime, I’ve calmed down enough to start thinking. Hard. Ma has seen PR crises far worse than this—like the rat-in-the-coffee incident, and the toxic-masculinity incident, and the many Kevin-induced accidents—and she’s managed to smooth them all over. Sometimes her company’s reputation has even improved as a result.
So what would she do?
Issue an apology? A formal statement? No. That’s not her style; she never confesses to anything if she can help it. In fact, she’d probably do the opposite. Cover up one major event with another . . .
I close my eyes and think and think and finally, miraculously, like that day I saw Caz Song on my TV screen, an idea comes to me.
If the main issue is that people don’t believe Caz Song and I are really together, then I have just the thing to prove them wrong.
My phone lights up.
I flinch by instinct, dreading what I might see, but it’s a message from Caz. He’s caught up to everything.
What do we do?he asks.
I think I have a solution, I text back.but you’re probably not going to like it. oh, also—what’s your manager’s number? let me know asap.
I spend the next day making phone calls and writing frantic emails.
First, I get in touch with Caz’s publicity team. This part goes more smoothly than I could dare hope: We track down the IP address of the original poster who wrote up the article, only to find that it’s a sisheng fan, a stalker essentially, who’s already been given two warnings for lurking around Caz’s hotel room. It’s perfect. After all, the best way to get rid of an unwanted story is to attack it at its source, erode the credibility of the author. From there, all we have to do is spread the information online and wait for the narrative to write itself.Jealous fan makes up lies about Caz and his girlfriend. Fan comes up with wild conspiracy theories about her favorite star.
At the same time, the manager pulls a few strings behind the scenes and accidentally-deliberately leaks some photos from god knows where of a married actor from a rival company leading a brothel worker into his hotel room at night. Within hours, the news blows up and squeezes out the old article on me and Caz from the trending searches, until it’s all anyone can talk about.
Then it just comes down to Caz and me, and how well we can pull off the ultimate performance.
“You ready?”
I nod as I move to join Caz on the roof of one of our school buildings. This is my first time seeing him up close since before the holidays, and I’d forgotten how overwhelming it felt just to be in his presence, scandal or not. The buzzing in my stomach, the rush of blood in my veins, every nerve end on edge. His hair is a little longer now, his skin tanner, the lean muscles in his arms flexing as he leans over the glass railings.
He looks good.
Maybetoogood, in a distracting way. I can’t look at him without thinking about those nights with his voice pressed to my ear. It feels like my heart has missed a step.
“Are you?” I ask, quickly stuffing all unnecessary thoughts away. I need to focus. We only get this one chance to fix everything, and it has to be perfectly executed.
“When am I not?” He’s making this expression like,I got it, relax. I have no idea how he’s so chill about this. It’s almost irritating. “Let’s do this.”
I nod again. Exhale slowly and stare past the railings, stamping my feet to keep warm. As expected, the courtyard below and surrounding footpaths are already starting to fill up with students. The roof is the one spot everyone has a clear view of, no matter where they are in the school. The saying goes that people only believe what they see with their own eyes. So I’m just praying that if they see us together,really togethertogether, they’ll be sufficiently convinced of our relationship.
Okay, it’s not the most foolproof plan, and I have no idea if it’ll work or not—but it’s the best we can do for now.
When enough people have gathered to form a crowd, I twist around and pat Caz’s shoulder. “Okay. Start.”
He arches a brow, his lips twitching. “You’re not even going to let me get into the moment a bit?”
Is he kidding? “You’re anactor,” I hiss. I can feel everyone’s eyes on us, watching our exchange. “Be serious.”
“Fine,” he says, and though I’ve witnessed it more than a few times by now, it still startles me when he snaps easily into his role, the humor wiped clean from his face, his eyes deepening to black. The color of a moonless sky, charcoal ready to ignite, the earth after a storm. “Like this?”
