MY FAKE BOYFRIEND CAN HEAR MY THOUGHTS
Chapter One: The Day I Signed My Twin Sister's Name
Okay, so here's the thing about impersonating your own twin sister at the single most important party of the Hale family's entire year: you'd think the hard part would be the fake name. It was not the fake name.
The hard part was the boy standing next to me in a suit that probably cost more than our apartment's monthly rent, leaning down so only I could hear him, and saying, in this low, amused voice like he already knew every secret I owned, "Nice signature, by the way. Very convincing forgery."
My stomach dropped through the floor of the Hale Tower ballroom.
He knows. Oh my god, he knows, he knows, he knows.
Thomas Hale didn't blink. He just watched me the way you watch a firework you're not sure is going to be a dud or a disaster.
That was the party. That was ten minutes ago. Let me back up, because none of this makes sense unless you know what happened forty eight hours before that.
It started with a sticky note.
I found it on my pillow on Thursday morning, in my sister Elowen's loopy, perfect handwriting, the kind of handwriting that wins penmanship awards and hearts and, apparently, escape plans.
Hazel. Gone to Grandma's in Maine. Cover for me for two weeks. I can't do the Hale thing. I'm sorry. I love you. Don't tell Mom until she notices the suitcase is gone. XO, E.
I read it four times before my brain accepted that my perfect twin sister, valedictorian, debate captain, the human embodiment of a college brochure, had just skipped town like a runaway bride in a movie neither of us was allowed to watch.
She left me a sticky note. A STICKY NOTE. For this.
I should explain the Hale thing, because it is, unfortunately, a whole thing.
Our mom's law firm had been representing Hale Technologies for years, which meant our family orbited the Hales the way smaller planets orbit a sun that's on the cover of Forbes. And apparently, somewhere in a boardroom full of people who are extremely comfortable deciding other people's lives for them, someone decided that a merger between Hale Tech and my mom's biggest client would look a lot better to shareholders if it came with a heartwarming story attached. Something like: two respected families, already close, now bonded even further by their teenage children's Very Public Relationship.
Enter Elowen and Thomas Hale.
They'd met exactly twice before this. Once at a fundraiser gala when they were eleven, where Elowen apparently informed him his tie was crooked, and once at a golf thing our mom dragged us to, where Thomas Hale said maybe six words total and all of them were to his phone. Somehow this counted as "already close" to the people writing press releases.
The plan, as explained to Elowen in a very serious family meeting I was allowed to sit in but not speak at, was this: Elowen and Thomas would be a public couple for one semester. Photographed together. Seen at the right events. A soft, telegenic answer to the question, can these two companies be trusted to play nice together. In exchange, both families got exactly what they wanted, and my sister got exactly nothing except an insane amount of pressure and, apparently, an overwhelming urge to flee the state.
Which brings us to Thursday. Sticky note. Empty suitcase. Me, standing in our shared bedroom, holding a piece of paper that had just ruined my entire month.
I have a portfolio due to Brookhaven in three weeks. I have my own life. I am not doing this.
I called Elowen four times. She didn't pick up once. On the fifth try she texted back, all lowercase, the way she only texts when she's genuinely panicking underneath the perfect-daughter exterior.
please. two weeks. you're literally identical to me. nobody will know. i just need to breathe for once. i'll owe you forever.
Here's the humiliating truth: I said yes. Not because I'm a good sister, although I am, thank you very much, but because Elowen has never once asked me for anything in sixteen years of being expected to be the easy twin while I got to be the difficult one. And also because our mother found out approximately six hours later and informed me, in the calm, terrifying voice she reserves for closing arguments, that the Hale family could not, under any circumstances, learn that Elowen Whitlock had run off to our grandmother's house in Maine two weeks before the biggest photo op of the entire merger.
There was also the small matter of my portfolio deadline, which nobody in that family meeting seemed to remember was a real, actual thing happening in my real, actual life. Twelve pieces, due to the Hartwell Young Artists Scholarship committee in three weeks, the kind of scholarship that could pay for art school without my parents having to have a single opinion about it. I brought it up exactly once.
"You'll still have time for your little sketches," Mom said, already scrolling through her phone for Elowen's old event schedule. "It's two weeks, Hazel. Not a prison sentence."
Says the woman who has never once had to pretend to be someone else at a party full of billionaires.
I didn't say that part out loud. I've gotten very good, over sixteen years of being the twin who colors outside the lines, at knowing which thoughts are safe to say and which ones just live quietly in my head, filed under things Mom does not need to hear right now. Little did I know, in about forty eight hours, that particular skill was about to become extremely relevant in a way I never could have predicted.
"You'll do it," Mom said. It wasn't a question.
This is insane. This is actually insane. Nobody does this outside of a Disney Channel movie.
Which is how, forty eight hours later, I ended up standing in my sister's exact shade of blush pink dress, in my sister's exact silver flats because her feet and mine are the one thing genetics didn't perfectly duplicate, being walked into the private signing room at Hale Tower by my own mother, who introduced me to the room as Elowen Whitlock without a single hitch in her voice.
The signing room had one piece of furniture in it. A desk, black glass, empty except for a pen.
Not a normal pen. A heavy, old fashioned silver fountain pen, the kind you see in museums under glass, resting on a velvet cloth like it was something you were supposed to be a little afraid of. An older woman, elegant in the specific way that means she's terrifying, sat behind the desk. Thomas Hale's grandmother, I would learn later. She looked at me like she was reading the fine print on my entire soul.
"The Silver Promise Pen," she said, sliding a single sheet of paper toward me. "Hale family tradition. What's signed in silver must be signed in truth."
Oh, cool, no pressure, just an ominous cursed pen with a slogan.
I signed. I wrote Elowen Whitlock in my sister's exact loopy handwriting, because we'd forged each other's names on permission slips since the third grade and some skills you never lose, and the second the ink touched the paper the pen flared, just for a second, a thin line of silver light running down the nib like static electricity deciding to be dramatic about it.
I froze. Nobody else seemed to notice.
That was not normal. Pens do not do that. I am signing a legally binding contract with a magic pen and everyone in this room is acting like this is a Tuesday.
Thomas Hale's grandmother smiled the smallest smile I'd ever seen and said, "Welcome to the family, dear," in a tone that somehow made it sound like a threat.
And that's how I ended up at the party an hour later, arm looped through the arm of a boy I had met for exactly ninety seconds before this moment, both of us smiling for a camera crew, my heart going absolutely feral in my chest.
Thomas Hale was, I will admit, unfairly good looking in the specific way that makes it hard to hate someone on principle. Dark hair he clearly didn't try very hard with and somehow that worked against him. A permanent expression like he found the whole world faintly funny and wasn't going to explain the joke. He shook my hand for the cameras like it was a business transaction, which, I reminded myself, it absolutely was.
Just get through tonight. Smile. Don't trip. Do not, under any circumstances, forget your own fake name.
That was when he leaned down and said the thing about the forgery.
I actually stopped breathing for a second.
"Excuse me?" I said, keeping my voice light, channeling every ounce of Elowen's composure I'd ever witnessed from across our shared bedroom.
"Your signature." He tilted his head toward the far side of the room, where his grandmother stood watching us with that same unreadable little smile. "It's different from the one on file from the golf tournament three years ago. Slant's wrong. Pressure's wrong. You're left handed and you tried to write like a right handed person."
How does he know that. How does anyone know that. Nobody has ever noticed that before.
"Maybe I've just improved my handwriting," I said.
"Maybe." He didn't look convinced. He looked, if anything, entertained, like I was the first interesting thing that had happened at one of these parties in years. "Or maybe you're not who everyone in this room thinks you are."
Stay calm. Stay calm. If you panic he'll know for sure. Just breathe, smile, and get through the next five minutes without confessing anything to the extremely attractive stranger holding your entire secret in one hand.
Something shifted in his expression, just barely, a flicker like he'd heard something he wasn't supposed to hear, and for one terrifying second I thought I'd said all of that out loud.
I hadn't. I was almost sure I hadn't.
"You okay?" I asked, because his face had gone strange, distant, like he was listening to a sound only he could hear.
"Fine," he said, too fast. He recovered his easy, bored expression like he was putting a mask back on. "Just thinking."
That was weird. That was really weird. Note to self: something is wrong with this family and their creepy magic pen and I would like to go home now, please.
He didn't say anything else for a long moment, just watched me with an expression I couldn't read, something between fascination and quiet, careful alarm, like he'd found the answer to a question he hadn't known he was asking.
Across the room, a photographer called our names, both our fake and real versions of them, and asked us to smile for one more shot, and Thomas Hale slid his arm around my waist with the easy, practiced motion of someone who had done this exact thing his whole life, leaning close enough that his next words landed right against my ear, too quiet for anyone else in that glittering, cursed ballroom to hear.
"Whoever you actually are," he murmured, "you should know I can hear every single thing you're thinking right now. And I have a lot of questions."
THOMAS
Here is what nobody tells you about being able to hear a stranger's thoughts the second she signs her name in a two hundred year old family tradition you were always told was a fairy tale to keep you well behaved: it is significantly less useful than it sounds, and significantly harder to stop once it starts.
I'd expected Elowen Whitlock. I'd read her file, or whatever passes for a file when your family's lawyers hand you a folder labeled Public Relations Asset before your first real conversation with a girl. Debate captain. Valedictorian track. Composed, controlled, exactly the kind of person who'd survive a semester of cameras without flinching.
What I got, the second her pen touched that paper, was a voice in my head going that was not normal, pens do not do that, in a tone so genuinely alarmed it didn't match a single photo in that folder.
I'd spent three years learning not to react to anything at these parties. Bored expression, steady hands, the kind of face that photographs well and gives away nothing, because giving something away was always the first mistake anyone in my family ever made in public. I nearly broke that streak in under an hour, over a girl who was very clearly, very completely, not who she was pretending to be.
Stay calm. Stay calm. If you panic he'll know for sure.
I almost smiled. I didn't, because smiling would have been its own kind of confession, but I wanted to. Whoever this girl actually was, she thought faster and more honestly than anyone I'd shared a room with in years, and she had no idea I could hear every word of it.
I told myself I'd let it go for tonight. Watch. Wait. Figure out what game the Whitlocks were playing before I said anything that couldn't be unsaid.
That plan lasted exactly as long as it took the photographer to call our names, and one look at her, jaw tight, chin up, holding herself together through sheer stubbornness, before I decided I would rather know the truth than spend a whole semester pretending I hadn't already heard it.
HAZEL
The flash went off.
I did not smile for that photo. I'm almost certain of it. I was too busy standing there, frozen, replaying every single humiliating thought I'd had in the last ten minutes, wondering exactly how much of it he'd heard, and understanding, with a cold, sinking, ballroom-shaped horror, that whatever was actually going on with that pen, my two weeks of pretending to be my sister had just gotten a great deal more complicated.