Following Faux’s guidelines, I tell my clients nothing about myself—not my full name, not my day job, not my true opinions on cilantro (excellent, if you enjoy eating soap). And that, in a nutshell, is what fake-girlfriending is about. It initially seemed sketchy that people would pay for a fake date in the age of Tinder and Pornhub, and that they’d pay me—unremarkable Elsie Hannaway of the medium everything. Medium height. Medium-brown hair and eyes. Medium nose, butt, feet, legs, breasts. Pretty, yeah, sure, but in a medium, nondescript way. And yet, my medium mediumness is the perfect blank slate to fill. An empty canvas to paint on. A mirror, reflecting only what others care to project. A bolt of fabric that can be custom tailored to—well. I’m sure everyone’s tracking the metaphor.
The Elsie that Caroline Smith wants is someone able to fit in with people who use summer as a verb, not flashy enough to attract a better catch than Greg, and with the nurturing instincts to take care of the son she might love but cannot be bothered to know. Children’s librarian seemed like a great fake profession. It’s been fun scouring online forums in search of charming anecdotes.
“Today I found three Goldfish crackers in our best copy of Matilda,” I say with a smile. Or at least, Reddit user iluvbigbooks did.
“That is hilarious,” Caroline says without laughing, smiling, or otherwise displaying amusement. Then she leans closer, whispering as though her son, who’s a foot away, cannot hear us. “We are so glad that you’re here, Elsie.” We, I believe, includes Greg’s dad, who stands silently next to her, popping three cubes of colby jack into his mouth with the vacant smile of someone who’s been dissociating since 1999. “We were so worried about Gregory. But now he’s with you, and he’s never been happier.” Has he, though? “Gregory, make sure to spend lots of quality time with your grandmother tonight. Izzy is taking pics with her Polaroid to give her at the end of the night—make sure you’re in all of them.”
“I’ll make sure he is, Mrs. Smith,” I promise, weaving my arm through Greg’s. I break that promise fifteen seconds later, at the end of the glitzy hallway. He downs what’s left of his wine, steals two large gulps of mine, and then stage-whispers “See you in ten minutes” before locking himself inside the bathroom.
I laugh and let him be. I feel protective of him—enough to break Faux standard protocol and agree to repeat fake dates, enough to want to defend him from muggers and pirates and his extended family. Maybe it’s that his first sentence to me was a panicky “My mother won’t stop asking why I don’t date,” followed by a hesitant, frazzled explanation of why that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon—an explanation that hit too close to home. Maybe it’s that he always looks like how I feel: tired and overwhelmed. In another timeline we’d be best friends, bonding over the unavoidable stress ulcers that will soon ravage the linings of our stomachs.
I find the empty kitchen, duck inside, and watch the red swirl down the drain as I pour what’s left of my glass into the sink. A waste. I should have just refused it, but that would lead to questions, and I don’t want to explain that alcohol is a dangerous, glycemic terrorist and that my struggling pancreas does not negotiate with—
“Not to your taste?”
I jump. And yelp. And almost drop the glass, which probably costs more than my graduate education.
I thought I was alone. Wasn’t I alone? I was alone. But Greg’s older brother is in the room, leaning against the marble counter, arms crossed over his chest. Those unique multicolored eyes of his are staring at me with the usual inscrutable expression. I’m standing between him and the only entrance—either I overlooked him, or he bent the space-time continuum.
Or I mixed him up with the refrigerator. They are similarly sized, after all.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I—yes. Yes, sorry. I just . . .” I force a smile. “Hi, Jack.”
“Hi, Elsie.” He says my name like it’s familiar to him. The first word he ever learned. Second nature, and not just a bunch of vowels and consonants he’s barely had reason to use before.
He doesn’t smile, of course. Well, he does smile, but never at me. Whenever we’re in the same room, he’s an imposing, sky-soaring, stern presence whose main pastime appears to be judging me unworthy of Greg.
“Don’t like the wine?”
“That’s not it.” I blink, flustered. There’s a tattoo on his forearm, just peeking out of the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. Because of course he’s wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, even though the Evite specifically asked for semiformal.
But he’s Jack Smith. He can do whatever he wants. He probably has a permit carved in those ridiculous biceps of his. Stamped on the blue quarter of his right eye, the one that sticks out like a sore thumb in the chestnut of his irises.
“The wine was great,” I say, collecting myself. “But there was a fly in it.”
“Was there?”
He doesn’t believe me. I don’t know how I know, but I know. And he knows that I know. I can see it, no—I can feel it. There’s a tingle at the base of my spine, liquid and sparkly and warm. Careful, Elsie, it says. He’ll have you arrested for crimes against grapes. You’ll spend the rest of your life in federal prison. He’ll visit once a week to stare through the plexiglass and make you uncomfortable.
“Izzy must be looking for you,” I say, hoping to get rid of him. “She’s upstairs.”
“I know,” he replies, not heading upstairs. He just studies me—attentive, calm, like he knows something secret about me. That I floss once a week, tops. That I can’t figure out what the Dow Jones is, even after reading the Wikipedia entry. Other, scarier, darker things.
“Is your girlfriend here?” I ask to fill the silence. He once brought someone to a family thing. A geologist. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Nice. Funny, too. I wish I could say she was out of his league.
“No.”
Silence, again. More staring. I smile to hide how aggressively I’m grinding my teeth. “It’s been a while.”
“Since Labor Day.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
I did not forget. Before today, I’ve met Jack twice, as in two times, one and then another, and they’re both stubbornly wedged in my brain, as pleasant as spinach leaves stuck between molars.
The first was Greg’s birthday dinner, when Jack and I shook hands and he nodded back at me tightly, when he spent the night giving me long, searching glances, when I overheard him ask Greg, “Where did you meet her?” and “How long has it been?” and “How serious is this?” with an inquisitive, deceptively casual tone that sent an odd shiver down my spine.
So Jack Smith wasn’t a fan. Okay. Fine. Whatever.
And then there was the second. Late in the summer, at the Smiths’ Labor Day pool party, where I didn’t swim. Because there’s no way to hide my pod in a bikini.
I’m not embarrassed to be diabetic. I’ve had nearly two decades to make peace with my overactive immune system, which has way too much fun destroying necessary cells. But people’s reactions to the knowledge that I must pump insulin into my body on the reg can be unpredictable. When I was diagnosed (at ten, after a seizure in the school gym that earned me the cruel but uncreative nickname of Shaky Elsie), I overheard my parents chat, low whispers behind the hospital room’s divider curtains.
“Not this, too.” Mom sounded exhausted.
“I know.” Dad sounded the same. “It’s gotta be on us. Lance is flunking out of high school. Lucas is going to be arrested for fist-fighting in the Walmart parking lot any day now. Of course the one easygoing kid we got turns out to have something.”
“It’s not her fault.”
“No.”
“But it’s going to be expensive.”
“Yeah.”
I don’t blame my parents: my brother Lance did eventually flunk out of school (and now makes an excellent living as an electrician), just like Lucas did end up being arrested (albeit behind a Shake Shack, and for possession of drugs that are now legal). Mom and Dad were tired, overwhelmed. A little poor. They’d hoped for a break, something easy for once, and I was truly sorry I wasn’t it. To make it up to them, I’ve tried to make my health issues—and any other subsequent issues—as ignorable as possible.
I find that people like me better if they don’t have to expend emotional energy on me.
That’s why I didn’t swim at the Smith Labor Day party, opting to sit on a blanket and eat a slice of cake, an artfully arranged smile on my face. Why I miscalculated the carbs I ate and the insulin I’d need. And why I stumbled across the lawn of the Smiths’ Manchester-by-the-Sea vacation home high on glucose, vision blurry, head pounding, trying to remember where I’d put my phone so that I could adjust my bolus, and—
I walked right into Jack.
Literally. I didn’t see him and stepped into his chest like it was a supermassive black hole. Which it wasn’t. A black hole, that is. Plenty supermassive, though.
“Elsie?” Ugh. His voice. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I . . .” Am going to puke.
He cupped my cheek, scanning my face. “Should I call Greg?”
“No nee—” Pain knifed through my head.
“I’m calling Greg.”
“No—don’t call Greg, please.”
He scowled. “Why?”