My Fake Boyfriend is Better Than Yours (2 page)

“Oh,” I say, but still don't quite understand. The only extension I've ever had was when I needed extra time on a homework assignment. But her hair looks so real. I reach out to touch it and she laughs and moves away before I do.

“So how was your summer?” she asks.

A wave of emotions washes over me. Part anger at Sea
for dropping off the face of the earth in July, and part relief that she's actually here. She looks at me, waiting for an answer. “Well, uh . . . great,” I say, suddenly very self-conscious. There are all these girls still standing around us, listening to every word we say. We're not even friends with most of these girls. Heck, I don't think we've ever even talked to half of them before. They were always “too good” to associate with us. Not that we needed them or anything; Sea and I always had each other.

I want to ask what happened—why she stopped writing me. But I don't want to put her on the defensive by attacking her the first minute I talk to her. “And you?” I ask, bracing myself for the What I Did on My Summer Vacation essay to end all essays.

Sienna giggles. “Oh my god, Tori, it was
so
fabulous. I have to tell you all about it.”

Nice. Now she wants to tell me about it. I nod but I'm starting to get weirded out. The other girls still haven't left and in fact are staring at Sienna with big eyes and bigger smiles. Like she's a celebrity or something. And granted, she does look nice. She's got on a super cute navy blue baby-doll dress and she's tan everywhere—down to her perfectly pedicured toes. And dang, she's got on three-inch wedge sandals. For school. My mom still won't let me wear one-inch heels to weddings.

“To start with, the house we stayed in had eighteen bedrooms. Eighteen! I had three to myself alone. And it was right on the beach. I could open my patio doors and walk down to the water, day or night.” Hmm. I already know all of this. Sienna described the house in full detail—down to the bidet with the brass angel knob in her personal bathroom—in her very first vacation e-mail. I'm starting to feel like I'm in a play, only I wasn't provided with a script. She closes her eyes and sniffs the air. I take a quick sniff too. What is she smelling? Did the wind shift and we're getting the sewage plant breeze again? She opens her eyes and looks at me. “Sometimes I can almost still smell the ocean air,” she adds.

Oh. Ocean air. Right. “Wow. Well, it sounds amazing,” I say, hoping my intense jealousy won't leak out all over the place and make a mess.

Sienna nods. “Daddy rented a yacht for the entire summer too and he even let me drive it a couple of times. When we were far from shore, of course.”

“Of course,” I agree. Like I know. My dad still won't let me drive the grocery cart when we're shopping.

“And then—” she starts, but she's interrupted by Justin Timberlake. One of his songs, anyway. “Oh, hold on.” She slips one hand into a large leather purse, pulls out a pink-sleeved iPhone, and holds it to her ear.
“Hello?” she says, and then instantly dissolves into giggles. “Oh, hi, Antonio.”

Antonio? That's a boy's name, right? So, there's a boy named Antonio calling her.

Who is this girl and what did she do with my best friend?

I involuntarily take a step back. Involuntarily because the group of girls has edged in closer to Sienna and bumped me from the circle.

I survey the other students outside. The air is buzzing with first-day excitement. There are always so many possibilities at the start of each school year. Of course, each year usually ends up much like the previous one, and we fool ourselves into thinking the new one will be better. But not this year. This year is
definitely
different.

Sienna rejoins me outside the circle. “Sorry about that. Antonio wanted to see how school was going so far.” She drops her phone back into her purse.

“Who?” I ask.

Her face lights up and she puts one hand on my forearm. “Antonio,” she whispers. “I'm in love!” she says louder, obviously not for my benefit. My hearing is just fine.

The going-nowhere group of girls let out a chorus of
aww
s. Sienna nods, like she's confirming their
aww
s or something. “He's amazing. He's tall and handsome and so sweet and I met him in the Keys this summer.”

“So, you have a boyfriend now?” I notice the circle of girls has re-formed around the two of us. Looks like I'm back onstage.

Sienna smiles. “Well, yeah . . .”

The girls oooh and giggle.

Okay. Really? This is beginning to feel a little too
High School Musical.
I halfway expect these girls to start synchronized dancing and singing in a circle around Sienna while she dishes about her new dude. And how does she even have a new dude? I mean, this
is
Sienna. Last year she would have turned bright red if a guy even asked to borrow a pencil. And now she's in love? No freaking way.

The first bell rings and Sienna links her arm in mine. “C'mon, Tor, I'll tell you all about him on the way to our lockers.” I briefly hesitate but then remind myself that this
is
Sienna. Sienna, my best friend since forever. She just looks a whole lot better so it's easy to forget that fact.

And apparently the sad-looking girls we're walking away from would agree. They were probably hoping
Sienna would stay and talk more about her trip. Personally, I don't get the sudden attention. Is it because of her new style, the boyfriend development, or her family's recent wealth? All I know is nobody hung on every word of the curly-haired, T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing, single, $1.75-in-her-pocket Sienna of last year. I'm hoping that girl is still in there somewhere.

We walk toward school and Daphne Mason, this girl who made fun of me for wearing knockoff Ugg boots last year, opens the door for us. “Hi, Sienna! Hi, Tori!” she greets us. I give Sienna a questioning look but she's staring straight ahead with a confident smile. A flash of hurt crosses Daphne's eyes, obviously because Sienna didn't respond. I could have girly-squealed and hugged Daphne and she'd have the same look, I'm sure.

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm totally freaking. What's the deal with Sienna? And why did she stop e-mailing me? Because of this Antonio? Maybe she was too busy making out in one of her three bedrooms to type a few words and hit Send.

Part of me wants to yell and demand to know why she stopped writing. Part of me wants to remind her that just because you get a shiny new friend, in this case a boy, you don't go and dump the old one. Like that song we learned in Girl Scouts when we were in second
grade about making new friends but keeping the old. How one is silver and the other gold.
I'm
the gold one.

I don't say any of this, however.

We walk through the crowded hallways until we reach the seventh-grade corridor and my new locker, number 142. Sienna leans her back against the locker next to mine and has a dreamy look on her face. I test my new locker combo. A moment later I pop open the door and hang my backpack inside.

“So, how did you meet this guy?” I ask, not sure I'm buying this whole I-have-a-boyfriend thing.

“Oh, it was really great. He was there with his parents for the summer too, staying down the beach a ways. And this one night there was this super lame luau that my parents dragged me to. I was standing near the guys who dig up the cooked pig from the ground and when I looked up Antonio was standing right next to me. He said, ‘That's pretty gross.' And I said, ‘Yeah. I may go vegetarian.' And he said, ‘I'll join you.' And that was it. We hung out every day after that.”

“That's, er, romantic. I guess,” I say.

“Isn't it though?”

“Did you guys kiss and stuff?”

“Tori!” she scolds, like she wouldn't talk about such things. Like we didn't spend hours in my bedroom last
year practice-kissing on our forearms. But then she nods. “We did. He's a great kisser.”

“Really? What was it like?”

She waves her hand in the air. “Oh, you know. Awesome.”

No. I don't know. She knows that
I
don't know. “Yeah. Sure,” I say instead.

Okay, now Sienna's had her first kiss too. If I'm to buy this whole story, that is. So let's review: she ditches me for the summer, doesn't call or write, gets a new boyfriend, has her first kiss, and comes back looking like she should have paparazzi following her. Wait.
Does
she have paparazzi following her? I look around the hallway, eyeing everyone. No. Of course not. I've been frequenting too many celebrity gossip blogs.

“I miss him,” Sienna pouts, pursing her pink lips.

“Who?” I ask, caught up in my own thoughts.

“Antonio, of course. Aren't you listening to me?”

“Oh yeah, your new
boyfriend
. Of course. I'm totally listening to you, Sienna. Sorry, I guess I was distracted. I think my jeans are too tight or something.” I wiggle my hips and pull at the knees of my jeans.

“Oh.” Sienna looks my jeans up and down and slightly wrinkles her nose. “Those are, uh, real cute, Tor.”

My jaw drops. No, she didn't. I look down at my jeans. They
are
cute. She totally just dissed my clothes.

Okay, the Sienna of three months ago, my best friend Sienna, the Sienna who wouldn't think twice about going to school in flannel pajama pants, would never make fun of my clothes. How could she have changed so much?

It's lunchtime and we (we being not only Sienna and me but
all
of the seventh-grade girls) have basically done nothing today but talk about the fab Sienna, her fab life, and her fab boyfriend. It's getting fabulously annoying.

Sea and I exit the lunch line and carry our full trays to the nearest empty table. It's not the table we sat at last year. Not even close. Last year we sat at one of the farthest tables along the back wall of the cafeteria. The closest ones are always reserved for the cool kids. I guess they can't be bothered to carry their trays too far.

The view is definitely different from up here. It's much brighter and not as cramped. And it's missing that strange smell that always lingered in the back part of the cafeteria—a mix of old dirty mops and the orange powder that janitors sprinkle all over when a kid yaks on the floor.

I look over at our old section of the cafeteria and see Tami and Jenna. We sat with them every day last year. They're both giving me a questioning look—probably wondering what the heck I'm doing up here—so I wave and shrug. Beats me what I'm doing up here. Sienna led the way and took a seat and no one said boo about it. I just followed, which is new in our relationship. Last year Sienna would follow me more. Not that I had great places to go or anything.

I look back at Sea, who is going on and on about something, her fork poised over her plain salad with light Italian dressing. A world of difference from her standard giant-cookie-and-chocolate-milk-shake lunches of the past.

“. . . and Antonio said, ‘I'll give you another ten if you put her name in the song,' ” Sienna is saying.

“That's
so
sweet!” Avery Andrews coos, and the others—Natalie Simmons, Talia Bordecki, and Maya Torreni—
aww
in chorus. “Isn't that the sweetest thing you've ever heard in your whole life, Tori?”

I nod absentmindedly. I've been trying to block out the Antonio-is-wonderful talk since third period. It's been story after nauseating story the entire morning.

I check out Sea's nails while she talks. She used to bite them to the nub but now she has a fancy French
manicure with a little rhinestone on each pinkie. She pushes a piece of her satiny hair behind her right ear and tugs the lobe between the knuckles of her index and middle fingers. The smoothness of her hair is a pretty amazing transformation, I must admit. I'd love to know what she's using on it. Probably an eighty-dollar-anounce conditioner composed of crushed pearls mixed with oils only found in flowers that grow on a Tibetan mountainside.

“And Antonio said the music was almost as pretty as my voice,” Sea continues, pulling on her right earlobe again.

“Wow,” Talia breathes, putting a hand over her heart.

Hmph. That's kind of strange. Sienna's been pulling on her ear an awful lot today. It reminds me of when we were kids and this older girl named Molly, who used to hang out at my neighborhood playground, was bragging about her expensive custom-made American Girl doll. Sienna told Molly that she too had an American Girl doll—Samantha was her doll's name, if I remember correctly. Well, there was no Samantha doll. At least, I never saw her. But Sienna would talk about her all the time whenever we were on the playground and Molly was around. Molly would tell Sea to
bring her doll along and Sienna would say that she couldn't because Samantha would get dirty. Back then whenever Sea mentioned Samantha she'd pull her right earlobe like that. I totally knew there was no doll, but I didn't want to hurt Sea's feelings so I never said anything.

“Antonio's always telling me to keep talking, just because he likes hearing my voice.” Sea giggles and pulls her earlobe again.

I sit bolt upright and stare at Sea, mouth hanging open. Oh my god.

Sea gives me a quizzical look. “What?”

Antonio is like Samantha, as in nonexistent. Ha ha, Sea's boyfriend is fake! Oh wow, this is too much. I have to keep it to myself. For now, anyway. “Um, nothing,” I say.

“Have you ever been serenaded?” Maya asks me.

“Oh sure, all the time,” I reply without thinking. Wait. What's serenaded?

“Really?” Sienna says, suddenly turning her attention to me.

“Um, yeah,” I say. I'm not liking the bit of attitude I'm hearing in her voice.

“Who?”

“Who, what?”

“
Who
serenades you all the time?” she asks.