I came to apologize.
Reece replied,I’ll be ok. Thanks for caring.
I rolled my eyes.I wasn’t worried about you.
I could see the bubbles as Reece texted. Finally, it came through.Bri will be okay. It was all fake anyway. Right?
Right?
Right.
If I said “yeah,” I’d be lying. And wasn’t that what got us into this mess in the first place? But if I admitted that some of it—no, most of it—hadn’t been fake at all, then that was a can of worms that would quickly squirm all over the place.
I opted for the safe route.
Sure.
When Reece didn’t respond, I took that as my cue to go. Finally, I got my feet to move, and I headed back to the car I’d borrowed from Mom.
Tomorrow was a new day.
No girlfriend.
Just baseball.
And a whole lot of feeling like crap.
Chapter 30
Brielle
Dad had been right when he told me it’d eventually all blow over and people would move on. It was like Hollywood, he’d said. One day, the news was bursting with the recent break-up of so-and-so and so-and-so, and then the next week, no one cared anymore.
“The most important thing,” Dad had said, “is that you rebuild trust with your mom and me.”
I was surprised Dad hadn’t grounded me. Or taken away my phone. I was weirded out when he put my doorknob back on my bedroom door, and even more confused when he took Reece’s Nerf gun away and told him he’d lost the privilege of shooting his sister.
It did come out that Reece had known about the fake dating scheme. Maybe that’s why Dad took the Nerf gun away. Or maybe that’s why Dad didn’t get super tough on me.
I don’t know.
All I know is that my mom said that Dad had told her sometimes the best consequences were having to livewiththe consequences of our actions.
What were my consequences?
Well, Jenessa for one. She refused to talk to me anymore because I’d—and I quote— “ruined my dreams of the perfect romance.”
One could argue that having Jenessa not talk to me wasn’t too awful a consequence, but the weird thing was, now that I didn’t have Brooks hanging with me every spare second of my day, I actually missed Jenessa’s nonstop chatter.
Then there was Claire. She seemed to understand, but she admitted she was hurt I hadn’t trusted her with the truth—and she meant, all the way back at the beginning.
“You know, if you’d just told me that I was getting on your nerves, pressuring you about guys, I would’ve backed off.”
I suppose I could’ve been more honest way back before I’d ever typed my dream guy’s description into AI.
Aunt Elle and Aunt Tracy? They were another matter. So were the twin aunts. All four of them descended on me at different times and through different avenues. Aunt Tracy texted me that she was “disappointed you weren’t honest.” Dad happened to see the text and called Aunt Tracy, telling her not to put so much pressure on me to be something I wasn’t. Aunt Elle actually stopped by, and for whatever reason, was so enamored with the drama of it all, I think she looked at the whole situation as Part 2 of my romantic adventures. At least she didn’t ask for her fifty dollars back. Brooks had never taken me to dinner, and I didn’t know what he had done with it.
I did get a text from my cousin Jake.
