“Well, I do need to raise my grade,” I pointed out, my voice awkward and stilted. I wasn’t even sure why I was lying, given that we all knew the truth, but somehow this felt easier than saying that just pretending to be dating Tino like this was setting my skin on fire.
Tino stood too, picking up both our trays before I could.
“You don’t have to?—”
He cut me off with a small, easy shrug. “What kind of boyfriend would I be if I didn’t?”
I guess that was a good point. I reluctantly swung my bag over my shoulder and waited for him by the table, glancing around at the other students who were packing up their stuff as well. Was I imagining it or were people moving slower than usual and watching me?
In all the years of my brother’s fame, I’d never gotten used to the idea of anybody being so single-mindedly obsessed with one person and what they were up to. I still remembered the early days of his own relationship, as well as when my sister Nina started dating one of his bandmates—the news had been all over every social media platform and in every magazine about the band. I’d even seen some girls at school cry over their favorite boy band members getting into a relationship, as if they genuinely thought they’d had a chance with them. I didn’t know how he could handle that when even this was making me go insane.
When Tino returned to the table, he picked up his bag then slipped his hand into mine without missing a beat. He did it so smoothly that if I were a spectator who didn’t know this was fake, I wouldn’t have doubted that it was real. It felt so practiced,as if he’d done it a thousand times before. His fingers slid through mine, his thumb brushing over my knuckles once.
Just enough to sell it.
And apparently, sell it, it did. The room went weirdly quiet for a second, a ripple of awareness moving through the tables nearest us.
I tried to look unfazed, like holding hands with Michael Valentine at breakfast was just my regular morning routine. It wasn’t convincing. My heart was somewhere up near my throat.
But then the silence turned to whispering, filling the room with “I told you so” and money passing hands like people had genuinely been betting on whether we were together—or maybe, when we would “finally” admit the truth after denying it all week.
This was a terrible idea.
I took a deep breath and tried to remind myself of why this would work. Sure, it felt like everyone was staring at us now even more than they had been for the first few days, but the fire had to burn bright before it could die down. It would only be a few days of this before everyone moved on, and within a couple of weeks we could silently break up without anyone caring.
It will be over soon, I reassured myself again.
“Relax,” Tino murmured as we reached the exit.
“I am relaxed,” I said stiffly.
“You’re squeezing my hand like you’re trying to cut off circulation.”
“Oh,” I muttered, immediately loosening my grip. Now it was more like he was holding my limp hand but he didn’t complain. “Sorry.”
I expected him to split away from me as soon as we reached the academic building since his first class was in the opposite direction as mine but he walked along with me in the direction of my classroom. I kept glancing at him, trying to figure outwhat his plan was, but I couldn’t read his expression enough to make any sense of it. He grinned at anybody who looked our way as we walked by, paused for long enough to exchange a couple sentences with a boy from the hockey team without letting go of my hand, and made absolutely zero indication that he might need to turn back.
As we rounded a second corner, taking us almost as far away from the main entrance as possible and on the complete opposite side of school from his first period class, I’d had enough. I tightened my grip on his hand and stepped out of the stream of students into a small nook between two classrooms. We had to stand pressed up against a blue bulletin board announcing all the “Beginning of Winter Activities!” and Tino looked it over with interest.
“Hey, now that we’re dating, we should go to the winter carnival,” he said, pointing to the flyer for it. It was at the beginning of December. “Funny how life works out, huh?”
It took me a second to understand what he meant by that until I remembered last weekend when he’d suggested it as a good first date. I wasn’t even sure if we would still be keeping up this charade by then, but I ignored it for the time being.
“You’re not supposed to walk this way,” I said.
Tino frowned. “By the bulletin board?”
“No, toward these classrooms,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“I’m not?” he asked as if that was news to him, a twinkle of amusement in his eyes.
I felt like I was playing into one of his jokes but I still crossed my arms and said, “Not unless you’ve completely changed your schedule in the past twenty-four hours.”
“Keeping tabs on me, Turner?”
I scowled. “I know all my friends’ schedules. It’s easier this way.”
He looked around like he was checking if anyone was around then murmured, “I’m your friend?”
