Faking Faith (2 page)

“When I need your advice, I’ll ask for it!” I said, crossing my arms tightly over my chest, irrational anger building in my throat at the sight of Amanda’s stricken face.

“Dylan—”

“I’m sick of being your tag-along ugly friend! You just keep me around to feel better about yourselves,” I burst out, then turned my back on Amanda’s shocked expression. “Just go. Go back to the party and leave me alone. You guys suck.”

Even as I said it, I knew I was wrong. And I hated myself.

“But Dylan … ” I heard Amanda say tearfully as I stalked away toward my house.

“Just let her go,” snapped Kelsey from down the street, where she’d been watching us. “She’s out of her mind.”

And that was the last time I talked to either of them. I was That Girl who let a stupid guy get between her and her best friends.

TWO

B
lake and I lasted for two months.

At the beginning, it was awesome. For the first time in my life, I was a tangential member of the truly popular crowd. I wasn’t actual friends with anyone else in that circle, but as Blake’s girlfriend I got to sit at the big kids’ table and was invited to the smaller and more exclusive drunken gatherings. Even though the girls in the group barely tolerated my sudden presence and sometimes said catty things right to my face, at least I wasn’t outright ignored.

And then Blake would twine his arm around my waist and put his face in my hair as we walked through the crowded halls, and it was perfection. I felt desired and whole by his side, like I had found my one true place in the world and that was all that mattered.

Everything else in my life swiftly fell away. I quit my dance classes, which I had been taking since I was five. I stopped showing up to piano lessons. National Honor Society meetings and volunteering seemed like a waste of time now that I had a boyfriend to make out with after school. My grades slowly started sinking. I got my first-ever C on an English essay.

“Nerd,” Blake said when I told him.

My parents fought me for a while, harping on discipline and my future and college applications in that clueless, tone-deaf way old people have. But they were both partners at a big law firm in the city and it’s not like they had time to monitor exactly what I was doing every minute of the day. Eventually, with huge sighs of deep disappointment, they stopped bringing it up. I was happily lost in Blake.

Whenever I saw Kelsey or Amanda in the hall, I looked pointedly away and pretended like they didn’t exist.

Of course, they didn’t try to talk to me either. I sometimes caught Amanda giving me one of her wide-eyed, wounded-animal looks, but she never actually tried to talk to me. And I got the distinct impression that Kelsey wouldn’t even stop to spit on me if I were on fire.

Sometimes I wished we could all just get over it and be friends again, because deep down, below my pride and hurt feelings and Blake bliss, I really missed them. And I had questions. I didn’t realize relationships could move as fast as mine and Blake’s seemed to be moving. But every time I thought seriously about trying to make up with them and admit I’d been irrational, I got pissed off at what they’d said the night of the party. At how unsupportive and doubtful and dismissive they’d been.

And shouldn’t my awesomely hot and devoted boyfriend be enough for me? Hadn’t he proven that he wasn’t just using me, that this was something good and real?

My friends had been wrong, and they were still refusing to admit to it.

“You don’t need those jealous bitches,” Blake said after I told him the story, wrapping my ponytail around his wrist and pulling gently. “You’re better off without them anyway.”

And I’d agreed.

Blake was my first everything.

After we had been dating for only two weeks, he yanked me close and told me he couldn’t stand it anymore, that it was cruel and unusual punishment to make him wait. He wanted to make love to me so bad it physically hurt. That’s exactly what he said—“make love.” It sounded lovely and romantic to me. Just like what a first time should be.

And I was flattered and thrilled, and tried to pretend I wasn’t freaked out by the fact that it had only been a few weeks since he’d first talked to me. I decided that I
must
love him, because I wanted him too. It had to be love, right? This whirlwind feeling of wanting to be as close to him as possible? Wanting to make him happy in any way that I could?

So he snuck into my room—well, technically, he just walked into it on a night when both my parents were working late—with a bottle of vodka and a condom from his wallet.

It was awkward and kind of painful and much quicker than I thought it would be. It didn’t feel particularly like love. More like something perfunctory and unexciting and biological.

Though he seemed to enjoy it enough.

After Blake kissed my cheek and left, I curled up in my bed and stared at my phone, which was sitting on the pillow next to me. I wished more than anything I could talk to someone about what had happened and get some perspective on my experience. But there wasn’t one person in the whole world I felt like I could call.

One weekend when Blake was in Colorado skiing with his brother, he drunk-dialed me. He was flirting hard and things got a little heated up. Eventually he started trying to talk me into taking a couple of topless pictures of myself with my webcam and emailing them to his phone. And I wanted him to love me so much that I did it, even though I felt ridiculous and kind of gross.

It took me fifteen attempts to get the angle right.

“You’d never share these with anyone, right?” I said, hesitating for a moment before I hit send. “I mean, this is just between us?”

“ ’Course! Who do you think I am?” he said, a smile in his slurred voice. “Now I’ll never be away from you, baby. You’re so good to me.”

Obviously, I should have known.

. . .

My relationship with Blake ended horrifically, of course, as anyone other than me could have predicted.

In November, Blake started acting chilly and distant. He wouldn’t return my texts for hours and mostly ignored me at lunch, angling away at the cafeteria table so I’d have to make conversation with the girls who didn’t like me. He’d give me improbable excuses about why he couldn’t come over to my house, even on the opportune nights when both my parents were gone. He stopped walking with me through the halls.

I ignored the ache in my stomach and excused Blake’s behavior away for as long as possible. It was just a weird boy phase, I rationalized, trying not to give in to the panic. He’d get over whatever his problem was and things would go back to how they were before. We’d date until we graduated, and then go to the same college and get married when we were twenty-four before he started business school, and live happily ever after.

And then one day after school, I caught Blake making out with Caitlin Merriweather up against his Range Rover.

He always gave me a ride home, so clearly he’d meant for me to find them together. He just didn’t care anymore.

I stopped for a moment, watching how his hand moved up her arm to cup her shoulder. Observing, in a distant and almost academic sort of way, how his mouth moved over her lips in a gross swallowing motion that reminded me of a snake devouring its prey. I idly wondered if it looked ugly like that when we kissed.

When we used to kiss … when I used to have a boyfriend …

Then my vision started throbbing red, like every cell in my body was about to explode. I completely lost my sanity right on the spot.

“You cheating asshole!” I’d screamed, and they stopped kissing and looked at me. I threw my messenger bag at his head, and Caitlin shrieked like a little girl. Blake blocked my bag with his forearm and broke away from her.

“Damn, Dylan, chill out,” Blake started to say, rolling his eyes, his palms up as if I were a diseased wild animal. People in the parking lot were beginning to stop and watch the drama, their mouths hanging open.

“Excuse me? I will definitely
not
chill out! How could you do this to me?”

“Dylan … come on, be reasonable. We had a good run, right? It was never going to last, you knew that.”

In response, I went around to open the back of Blake’s Range Rover, where I knew he kept his golf clubs, and yanked out his nine iron. I gripped it firmly and turned to face him. The crowd gasped appreciatively. I dimly registered that a kid from my physics class was holding up his phone, recording the whole thing.

“Hey … uh, hey, what the hell are you doing?” Blake was actually smiling, like he thought it was a big joke. No girl had ever dared touch his sacred golf clubs in anger.

I looked him in his beautiful eyes, rage filling me to the brim. My friends had been right. I was an idiot. Of course he’d betray me like this after everything I’d so easily given to him. My time, my life, my
body.

My hands quivered around the golf club, and for a moment, I felt powerful.

“I’m doing this, you asshole!”

Without another thought, I bashed off his side-view mirror. Then I started smashing away at the windshield with every ounce of strength, watching the glass spiderweb, until Blake ripped the club out of my hands and shoved me away. As I stood there gasping for breath, already starting to regret what I’d just done, Blake slowly walked up to me. He put his face so close to mine, it almost seemed like he was going to kiss me on the mouth.

“I only hung around with you because I knew you’d put out, you dumb little insecure bitch,” he told me in a low voice, somehow both amused and furious. “You’re pathetic. I’ll end you.”

Then he turned, put his arm around Caitlin, and walked away.

The next day, everyone who mattered at school had the topless webcam pictures of me in their inboxes from an anonymous email address. The email also contained a link to a YouTube video of me swinging at the car with the golf club.
Dylan Mahoney = CRAAAZY SLUT
was in the subject line.

I knew all that because it was forwarded on to me by several thoughtful acquaintances from Blake’s lunch table.

At which point I fetal-positioned up in bed and prayed not to wake up.

I wasn’t there to witness much of the immediate aftermath because I got an immediate five-day suspension for the busted car—a punishment I’d expected. My parents, who both managed to take the morning off work to come deal with my screw-up, were able to convince Blake’s screaming, red-faced father not to press charges.

But what really burned was getting called back into school two days later to get an additional suspension for the pictures.

My parents took another morning off and argued the sentence, but the administration at my school wanted to make an example of someone. “Sexting,” as all the cable news shows breathlessly called it, was a trend the school district wanted to make a show of punishing, whatever the context. However unfair.

“But I only sent them to one person,” I said to the vice principal, beyond tears in my humiliation. “I didn’t
mean
for anyone else to see them. They were private pictures for my boyfriend!”

I looked desperately around the room for support, but my parents wouldn’t even meet my glance. Dad sat with his hand covering his eyes, like he was denying what was happening right in front of him.

“Blake Compton says he lost his phone a few weeks ago and doesn’t know anything about the pictures being disseminated. And unfortunately, there’s no way to prove he had anything to do with it,” the vice principal said, shaking his head. “Look, Dylan, you should just hope you don’t get charged with distribution of child pornography, like some counties are doing. It doesn’t matter what your intent was. You created and sent pictures of an underage girl. That’s a felony.”

I huddled back in my chair, wrapped my arms around myself, and shuddered. “But
I’m
the underage girl.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

All anyone could do was shrug and frown at me like I was a lost cause.

My parents took me home, yelled at me for likely ruining my chances at a good college, and grounded me for the rest of the school year. Mom was particularly livid, like I had done this just to embarrass her personally.

“I can’t believe you were so stupid!” she said, pacing the living room floor, almost in tears. “We raised you to be smarter and stronger than that. Did you even stop to think for a second about what you were doing? Debasing yourself like that for some
boy
? I don’t even know who you are anymore. This isn’t something
my
daughter would do.”

I could have screamed back at her, asking where she and Dad had been the past few months and why they hadn’t ever asked if I was dating someone, or if they could meet Blake, or anything else about my life other than details about grades and application fodder.

But by that point, I didn’t really care enough to fight. I couldn’t even muster up the will to feel anything but shame. Nothing could be worse than what had already happened, how I’d acted, what everyone had
seen
.