She's Faking It by Kristin Rockaway

Author:Kristin Rockaway
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Published: 2020-04-29T20:20:57+00:00

Chapter 17

@robmccrory_official.

That was his Instagram name. Not sure why he felt the need to append an “official,” though. I doubt there was anyone trying to impersonate him. He did have a pretty big audience—over fifty thousand followers—but when I scrolled through the accounts, a bunch of them had the same profile picture. Seemed Rob knew how to pay for fake fans, too. And with his parents’ money, he could afford to buy a lot of them.

I couldn’t get over how good he looked, though. He’d started styling his hair and wearing nice (and probably free) clothes, and that permanent paunch he’d had ever since I’d known him was miraculously gone. In fact, he had a six-pack now. Apparently, he’d been doing a lot of crunches in the Amazon. Or maybe that only started once he got to LA. His Instagram account was only a month old, but who knew how long before that he’d been stateside? Whatever he’d done, it was clear he’d turned his life around, at least in the physical sense.

Other than his revamped appearance, it was hard to tell exactly what was going on, because the photos were typical curated Instagram perfection. Rob standing on Santa Monica Pier, modeling sunglasses. Rob hiking Runyon Canyon, modeling quick-dry shorts. Rob with his arm around a hot woman, both of them modeling swimsuits. Everything hashtagged #collab. A narrative crafted explicitly for likes.

Any question of where he was living or why he was in LA was answered as soon as I saw the photo of him lounging beside a sun-drenched infinity pool. The geotag simply said Brentwood, Los Angeles, but I knew he must’ve been at his parents’ house. I’d never been there—I’d never even met his parents—but I’d seen pictures of and heard stories about that house, and specifically that pool. The endless, jobless summers he spent sunbathing there, possibly in that very same lounge chair. The booze-soaked parties he’d thrown in high school when his parents were away on yet another trip. I’d envied his carefree teenage experience, so different from my own.

Looking back on it, I suppose that was part of what had drawn me to him in the first place. After all those years I’d spent stressed-out in the wake of my mother’s death, his blithe attitude was refreshing. Rob came from wealth, a degree of affluence I couldn’t properly wrap my head around, so he wasn’t tainted by those pervasive feelings of uncertainty and doubt, the fear that the rug could be pulled out from under you at any moment. His trust fund was more than a safety net; it was a crutch.

Of course, he couldn’t get all of his money at once. It was doled out in monthly payments—his “stipend,” as he referred to it. The payments were generous, far more than I was making as a GrubGetter. They would’ve been even higher had he chosen to stay in college, but against his parents’ wishes, he’d dropped out of USC in the middle of his

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