“I don’t know. His plan made sense. We needed a dress rehearsal.”
“Did you, though? Or is the guy using you?”
He wasn’t, was he? “Cooper isn’t like that. He just wants his parents to get back together.”
“Fine. Then let him come up with a plan that doesn’t involve ruining your reputation or batting your heart around like a cat toy.”
Selena knew me too well. Even without me telling her, she knew my heart was taking a beating.
“Dump him as a fake boyfriend,” she went on. “You need to find someone who’s interested in dating you for real.”
She wasn’t wrong. She said a few more things, all trying to cheer me up—a fruitless task. I’d been away from rehearsal for too long. I said goodbye, hung up with her, and trudged back into the theater.
As soon as I slumped down in a corner, Claire came over and sat beside me. “What’s wrong?”
She’d know soon enough. I explained what had happened and showed her Dahlia’s message. “She’ll tell everybody. Maybe she already has.”
Claire checked her phone. “Hasn’t reached my friend group yet. Although maybe no one has said anything to me because I’m Cooper’s sister.” She set her phone down and gave me a sympathetic look. “Cooper is the one who’ll lose his homecoming date over this. In some ways that makes things easier for both of you. And on the bright side, I won’t have to put up with Dahliacoming over to my house after Cooper’s ungrounded. I guess that’s only a bright side for me, but I’m still counting it.”
I glanced around the room at my friends onstage and the people sprawled everywhere on their phones. “Harper and Kinsley are going to find out about this. What reason can I give for kissing him? We agreed not to tell people we were fake dating, so he might have come up with another excuse. I don’t want to give people a different answer.”
“You’ll just have to avoid talking to anyone after rehearsal. Don’t even look at your messages until you get your story with him straight.”
She was right. I needed to talk to Cooper, but at the same time, I dreaded doing it. When his friends caught us kissing, he’d jolted away from me, and I’d seen the look of horrified regret on his face, of pure embarrassment. I couldn’t erase that look from my mind.
He hadn’t minded kissing me when he thought no one else would know about it. He seemed to enjoy it. Or at least he’d enjoyed turning my insides into a pile of quivering nerves.
I’d been the eager fangirl during that kiss.
But he didn’t want a relationship with me. He didn’t want his friends to think he liked me. The look on his face made that clear enough. So I could never reveal how I felt. If I did, I would see that same look, and then he would avoid me for the rest of my life—which would be especially hard if our parents ended up getting married.
Yeah, I could never let him know how I felt.
I had the acting skills to hide my feelings. I would have to rely on them.
And avoid everyone I knew until I talked to Cooper.
“Do you want a ride home after rehearsal?” I asked Claire.
“Cooper won’t be there,” she said. “He goes to work after practice.”
“I know. But there’s less chance anyone will come up and talk to me about Cooper if you’re with me. Message Davika that I’ll take you and we’ll make a beeline out of here the second rehearsal ends.”
“My house is in the opposite direction from yours,” Claire said. “I’ll just walk with you to the parking lot and then wait for Davika.”
“I want to drive you.” I meant it. I liked talking to Claire. “I can help you with your lines on the way.”
Maybe she realized I didn’t want to be alone. She let me drive her home. We ran a few lines and then I ended up giving her a lesson on what to do while she waited for the next actor to deliver his lines. Acting is about reacting. Even after rehearsing a scene a hundred times, an actress has to stay in the moment and pretend it’s the first time she’s experiencing the scene.
Helping her made me forget about everything else. Even after we reached her house, we stayed in my car for a few more minutes working on the piece she’d chosen for regionals. When we finished, I said, “If I just came off as a bossy, know-it-all, I’m sorry.” I had, after all, trapped her into this impromptu lesson.
She shrugged and smiled. “It’s nice that you want to help your competition. Who knows, I might win at regionals.”
“You might,” I said. It would be nice if she won.
We said our goodbyes and I pulled away from her house. Instead of going home, I drove to the drugstore where Cooper worked. I could have texted him. That would be the easiest thing, but I wanted to see his face and judge his reaction while we spoke. I wanted to see how upset he was about everything. And maybe I was a glutton for punishment because I wanted tosee if there was a part of him that wasn’t upset that his friends had caught us together.
My dad would never let me go to Cooper’s house to talk to him. This was the only way.
