MY FAKE BOYFRIEND CAN HEAR MY THOUGHTS
Chapter Six: When My Best Friend Almost Blew My Cover
"Hazel," Milo said again, louder this time, arms still spread wide like he was about to hug me in front of the entire junior class, "since when do you go to school here? Did you transfer? Why didn't you text me?"
Abort. Abort. Abort immediately.
I crossed the distance between us faster than I've ever moved in my life, caramel apple abandoned on the nearest table, and pulled Milo into the world's fastest, most aggressive hug, mostly so I could get my mouth close enough to his ear to hiss, "Play along. Please. I will explain everything later, I promise, just please, please call me Elowen for the next five minutes."
Milo, to his eternal credit, has known me since the second grade, which means he has exactly two settings when I ask him for something urgent and unexplained: total confusion, or total commitment. He landed, mercifully, on total commitment.
"Elowen!" he said, at a volume that suggested he had immediately overcorrected in the opposite direction. "Sorry, I meant Elowen. Wow. You really do look just like your sister. Freaky, actually."
That was somehow worse and better at the same time.
Behind him, Sloane Carrington lowered her phone another inch, her expression caught somewhere between confusion and the specific hunger of someone who suspects they just missed something important. "Wait," she said slowly. "Did he just call you Hazel?"
"He gets us confused all the time," I said, forcing a laugh that felt approximately as convincing as a cardboard cutout of a laugh. "Family friend. Bad habit. Ask my sister, she'll complain about it for twenty minutes if you let her."
Sloane's eyes narrowed, not quite believing it, not quite able to disprove it either, and I felt the exact same cold, precarious balance I'd been walking since the crossroads note, one wrong word away from the whole thing collapsing in front of a phone camera with an audience already primed to be suspicious.
Thomas appeared at my side less than a minute later, materializing out of the crowd with the specific, unhurried calm of someone who had clocked the entire situation from fifty feet away and decided exactly how to handle it.
"There you are," he said, sliding an arm around my waist with easy, practiced affection, and turned that same warm attention toward Milo like he'd been introduced to him a hundred times before. "You must be one of Elowen's old camp friends. She's mentioned you."
She has not mentioned him. She has never once mentioned him, because Milo is my friend, not hers, but he is somehow rolling with this better than I am right now.
"Camp," Milo repeated, blinking, before recovering admirably. "Right. Camp. Great times. So many, uh, canoes."
Sloane's phone drifted back down another half inch, her attention splitting between the three of us and whatever else was happening across the quad, and I watched, with the particular relief of someone who has just avoided being hit by a car, the moment her interest finally, genuinely moved on to a fight breaking out over the dunk tank line.
We didn't relax until we'd put an entire cider stand between ourselves and Sloane's general vicinity, at which point Milo turned to me with the exact expression I'd been dreading since the second he opened his mouth.
"Okay," he said. "What is happening. Actual explanation, please, right now, or I start narrating this myself."
I gave him the short version, mostly because the long version required admitting things out loud that I hadn't even fully admitted to myself yet, and watched his face cycle through disbelief, delight, and finally a kind of protective concern that made my chest tight in a completely different way than everything else today had.
"So you're pretending to be your sister," he said slowly, "at a different school, for a boy your family arranged for her to date, and he can hear your thoughts because of a magic pen."
"When you say it like that it sounds insane."
"It is insane, Hazel. I need you to understand that I am saying this as your best friend who loves you. This is objectively insane."
"I'm aware."
Milo glanced over at Thomas, who had drifted a polite few feet away to give us privacy, watching a group of freshmen attempt the ring toss with the same careful, guarded expression he wore around anyone he hadn't decided to trust yet.
"Does he actually like you," Milo asked, quieter now, "or does he like the idea of Elowen? Because those are really different things, and I need to know which one this is before I decide whether to be happy for you or start planning how to get you out of here."
That is, unfortunately, the exact question I've been avoiding asking myself.
"He likes me," I said, and surprised myself with how certain it came out. "The actual me. He's known I wasn't her for weeks."
Milo studied me for a long moment, the way he does when he's deciding whether to trust a decision I've already made, and finally nodded, slow and a little reluctant. "Fine. But if this goes sideways, I'm driving up here myself to fight a billionaire's grandson, and I don't even have a license yet, so that's how serious I am."
I laughed, real this time, grateful in a way I couldn't fully put into words for a friend who had walked directly into chaos on my behalf and somehow made it feel a little lighter just by being there.
He hung around for another twenty minutes, mostly interrogating Thomas with the specific, thorough nosiness of a best friend conducting an unofficial background check, asking about his favorite color, his least favorite subject, and, with absolutely no warning, what his intentions were, which made Thomas choke on his cider in a way that struck me as the single most human reaction I'd ever gotten out of him.
"My intentions," Thomas repeated slowly, recovering, "are apparently under review."
"Correct," Milo said, entirely serious. "I take this very seriously. I once made her prom date fill out a questionnaire."
"That is not true," I said.
"It is extremely true and you know it."
Thomas looked at me sideways, something warm and amused flickering behind his eyes despite the questioning, and for one brief, golden stretch of a Saturday afternoon, surrounded by string lights and cider and a best friend who'd nearly blown my entire cover and then immediately started protecting it instead, I let myself forget every single complication waiting for me back at Larkspur.
That lightness lasted exactly until Monday morning, when Ms. Alvarez pulled me aside before first period at Brookhaven with an expression that told me, immediately, that something had shifted.
"The Hartwell committee moved the final portfolio interviews," she said, apologetic in the specific way adults are when they're delivering news they know will complicate your life. "They've consolidated everyone into a single day. Thursday, four o'clock, in person, no exceptions."
Thursday at four. That's the exact same day, the exact same time, as the mandatory Larkspur donor gala Elowen's contract requires her to attend.
I must have gone visibly pale, because Ms. Alvarez's expression softened further. "I know your schedule's been complicated lately, Hazel. Is this going to be a problem?"
"No," I lied, smiling the specific, brittle smile I'd been perfecting for two weeks straight. "It's fine. I'll be there."
I texted Thomas the second I got a private moment, laying out the collision in blunt, panicked detail, and his response came back fast enough that I could picture him reading it the moment it landed.
I'll figure something out. Don't cancel the interview. That one's not negotiable.
How exactly do you plan to be in two places at once
I don't. You do. Let me handle the gala.
I stared at that message for a long time, turning over exactly how much trouble he was volunteering to take on for me, a boy who had spent his entire life being trained to show up exactly where his family needed him, offering to quietly disappear from an event with his own name on it so that I could chase a scholarship he'd never once made me feel guilty for prioritizing.
He keeps doing this. Every single time, he keeps choosing my life over the version of this arrangement that would be easier for him.
I typed back a dozen different responses, deleted all of them, and finally settled on the truest one I had.
Why do you keep doing that. Choosing my stuff over yours, I mean.
The reply took longer than usual to arrive, long enough that I'd started to worry I'd asked something he didn't want to answer.
Because for the first time in my life, someone's stuff feels more important than the schedule my family built for me. I don't fully know what to do with that yet. I'm working on it.
I read that message four times before I put my phone down, my chest doing something complicated and warm that had absolutely nothing to do with the Hartwell interview or the gala or any of the logistics currently threatening to collide on Thursday afternoon.
By the time I saw him again at lunch on Wednesday, something had visibly shifted in him too, a tightness around his eyes that hadn't been there before, and when I asked what was wrong, he was quiet for a long moment before answering.
"I keep hearing things you don't mean to say out loud," he said finally, voice low enough that only I could catch it over the noise of the cafeteria. "Every single day. Things you'd probably never tell me on purpose. And I haven't said anything about how strange that actually is, because I liked having access to you that easily. I think that makes me a worse person than I want to be."
He's been sitting with that guilt this whole time. I had no idea it was actually bothering him this much.
"Thomas, you didn't ask for the pen to do that. You didn't choose to be able to hear me."
"No," he agreed, "but I chose not to tell you how much I was actually hearing. There's a difference between an ability you didn't ask for and a secret you decided to keep anyway. I've been telling myself those were the same thing for two weeks, and they're not."
"Thomas."
"I need to tell you something," he said, "and I need to tell you before Thursday, before the gala, before any of this gets more complicated than it already is."
Before he could get another word out, Julian dropped into the seat directly across from us, uninvited, his expression sharper and colder than I'd ever seen it, all trace of his usual smug curiosity replaced by something far more dangerous.
"Grandmother told me what the pen does," Julian said, low and deliberate, looking directly at Thomas like I wasn't even sitting there. "The whole family legend. Every detail." He let the silence stretch just long enough to make my stomach drop clean through the cafeteria floor. "So tell me, cousin. Does she know you've been reading her mind this entire time?"
The cafeteria noise seemed to fade into some distant, muffled register, the way sound does right before something important happens, and I watched Thomas's expression go carefully, deliberately blank in the exact way I now recognized as the mask he wore whenever something had genuinely rattled him.
"That's not your business, Julian," Thomas said, low and even.
"It became my business the moment my future in this family started depending on whether you can keep your composure long enough to close a merger," Julian said, standing, straightening his jacket with unhurried precision. "Think carefully about what you tell people going forward, cousin. I'd hate for anyone to think the Hale heir's judgment can't be trusted."
He walked away without waiting for a response, leaving the two of us sitting in a silence that felt considerably louder than the cafeteria noise it had replaced, and I understood, watching Thomas's jaw tighten, that whatever confession he'd been about to make before Julian arrived had just gotten a great deal more urgent, and a great deal more dangerous to say out loud.