I flinch. “About what?”
“About coming today,” Ellie says. “And, well, playing pretend.”
I roll my lips over my teeth and fidget with the zipper on my coat as I weigh out a portion of the truth. “Well, it’s like you said. I want to pass accounting, you want your mom to pay for grad school.”
Ellie nods, and I pause to watch as she lifts a thumb to herlips, wets it with the tip of her tongue, and rubs a blotch of powdered sugar out of her T-shirt, all while seemingly oblivious to the way it has me hypnotized.
What I don’t say is the acting isn’t going to be nearly as hard as I thought.
nine
It’s an eight-minute drive from my house to Ellie’s—at least that’s about how long it took this morning. It’s all residential roads, too, so we don’t hit any holiday traffic. We’re running behind schedule, so this should be good news, and under normal circumstances, it would be. Too bad today is anything but normal. I would need about eight hours to gather the amount of information on Ellie that would make me a convincing girlfriend, but we can only work with what we have, and what we have is eight minutes. Maybe ten at the snail’s pace Ellie is driving to buy us a little more time.
“Okay, your favorite color is navy, your favorite movie isBack to the Future, and you don’t have a favorite book because you don’t really read.” Ellie recites my own information back to me with the flat apathy of a doctor’s office confirming your appointment details. Hand over hand, she turns the wheel in slow motion, pulling into her neighborhood at a crawl.
“Perfect. And for you, favorite color red, favorite movie27 Dresses, and favorite book is some poetry collection.”
“Which poetry collection?”
I bite my cheek and hazard a guess. “Something by…Mary Anderson?”
“Mary Oliver,” she corrects me. “But not bad.”
“One more question.” I just barely raise a hand, feeling like I’m back in Professor Meyers’s class. “Are we going to Thanksgiving or a taping ofThe Newlywed Game?”
Ellie glosses over my joke, which was honestly too dated for either of us. Clearly my audience has been my parents for too long. “I’m just trying to be safe. Mary and I were together for almost a year, remember? You never know what will come up.”
I picture Ellie and me seated at a kitchen counter with a panel of her entire family on the other side, grilling us on the sort of questions we put on our elementary school “About Me” posters to determine whether our relationship passes the reality check. “I feel like there are more reasonable things I would know about you after a year of dating. Like…” I pause to think, unsure if the car is even moving at this point. “Like what’s your roommate’s name?”
“Rachel,” Ellie says. “What’s yours?”
“Um.” I pick at a loose hangnail. “Mom and Dad?”
“Oh right.” She rolls her lips over her teeth. “Sorry.”
We spend the last few seconds of the car ride wading out of an awkward silence, and by the time we’re turning onto her street, I have three fun facts and a roommate’s name. With that amount of basic info, I wouldn’t even believe I was this girl’s dental hygienist, but here we go anyway. As her house comesinto view, so does the dusty-blue Subaru. It’s been joined in the driveway by an olive-green Jeep, bringing another obvious question to mind. “Who all am I meeting?”
“Just my dad and my mom’s sister, Carol,” Ellie says.
“Right, because Marcus is with his fiancée’s family.” I wait for my verbal gold star for remembering, but instead all I get is:
“Right.”
The car jostles beneath us, trading asphalt for concrete as we pull into the driveway. A closer view of Carol’s Jeep gives me a half dozen more questions I don’t have time to ask. While the geometric mountain design plastered on the back wheel cover is an odd choice for the famously flat Chicago suburbs, the bright pinknasty womansticker on the bumper is a nice touch. I’m still trying to count exactly how many crystals are lined up on the back windshield when Ellie kills the ignition and hops out of the car, jogging over to the passenger side to get my door.
“Quite the gentleman,” I murmur, handing off the puppy chow while I unbuckle. “You think your mom’s watching from the window or something?”
She lifts a shoulder, drumming her fingers on the Tupperware lid. “Could be. Mostly I just don’t want you spilling the muddy buddies.”
“Puppy chow,” I correct her, motioning for her to hand the Tupperware back. “We’re gonna need to be a united front on that.”
We trudge up the limestone pavers to the front porch, where the flower pots bookending the door have been given a festive makeover with craft maple leaves and tiny plastic pumpkins.Ellie pauses, her fingers hovering just over the doorknob. “You ready?”
My stomach tucks into itself. There’s no such thing as ready. Even if the drive over had been ten times longer, if we had known each other twice as many days—even if Ellie was actually my girlfriend, there’s still no version of me that’s prepared to spend Thanksgiving angling for a passing grade via my professor’s daughter. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I admit. One final bit of honesty before the performance starts.
“All right.” Ellie pushes a sigh through the tight circle of her lips. “Let’s do this.” She cranks the doorknob to the right, releasing the thick, buttery smell of midstage dinner preparations as we step inside and into character.
“We’re back,” Ellie shouts to no one in particular, then kicks off her Docs and ditches her coat over the banister. I try to follow suit, but I’m still battling a stuck zipper when a scraggly looking dog with an impressive underbite trots toward me. With wispy white whiskers and crusted-over eye boogers lining his big black eyes, he’s adorable in a nasty way. He yaps twice, then jumps up on my leg, his little paws barely reaching the tops of my shins.
