by Tracy Deebs
“Dream Girl.”
“Right.” He tilts his head. “And what does that mean exactly?”
“It means I like you. I think you’re a good guy. And if you have unrequited feelings for a girl, I think we should do something about them. You know, that whole ‘faint heart never won fair maiden’ thing. Hence—”
“Operation Dream Girl.”
I smile hugely. “Exactly. I knew you’d be on board.”
He laughs. “I wouldn’t exactly say I’m on board. Though I am intrigued. How exactly are you going to help me win my fair maiden?”
“It’s a multistep plan.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about it since Saturday night. And the first step—”
“Is going out to lunch tomorrow.”
“No.” I smack him on the shoulder to get his attention. “That is the second step. The first step was me hanging out with you in the café today. I mean, everyone knows you’re a hot commodity here at NextGen, but you haven’t been with a specific girl—that I know of—since I’ve been here.”
“You’ve been watching me?”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Romeo. I watch everyone. Now are you going to stop interrupting and let me tell you the genius of my plan or are you going to go back to class absolutely clueless?”
“By all means.” He sweeps his hand out in front of him in a go ahead gesture. “Lay all that genius on me. I am ready for it.”
I roll my eyes to show him I don’t appreciate the sarcasm, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little charmed. There’s just something about Keegan Matthews that makes me smile.
“Fine. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted for the third time… You’re hot stuff, lots of girls want you, everyone knows it. But if you are so sure that your mystery girl doesn’t know you’re alive—or doesn’t think of you that way—you need to change her mind. Show her there’s some competition around.”
“What if she’s not interested in competing?”
“Then you need to get her interested.” I hold up my hand to ward off the inevitable interruption. “I told you, it’s a multipronged plan. It’s also a work in progress, so we’re going to adjust depending on how she reacts. The first item on the agenda is to make sure she knows you’re looking for a girlfriend.”
“I’m not looking for a girlfriend! I’m looking for the right girlfriend.”
“I know that, but that doesn’t mean she does. Not yet, anyway.” I pause as the final bell rings, marking us as officially tardy. “So again, steps one and two, get you out, get you seen with another girl. And it doesn’t have to be me. I just figured it’d be easier, since I’m in on it. But if you have someone else you’d like to—”
“No!” It comes out really enthusiastically, which—again—I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel a little warm and toasty on the inside. At least until he continues. “If the plan fails, I don’t want anyone else to know about it.”
“It’s not going to fail! Who do you think you’re dealing with here? I’m the one who got Cabot and Mariely together, after all.”
“You got them together?”
“Yes. I totally set them in motion. I’m the one who told her that if she wanted to get over Jacen, she needed to get under someone else.”
“And that someone else was Cabot.”
“Exactly. So I’m one for one here. And after you get Dream Girl, I’ll be two for two.”
“You sound really confident about this.” He gives me a look that says that he is not, even as he starts steering us back toward Oliver’s classroom.
“I am. Absolutely.” I bump his bicep with my shoulder—yes, I’m so short that my shoulder only reaches the middle of his arm. “Who is she, anyway?”
He snorts. “Like I’m going to tell you.”
“Hey, I’m on your side here! I need to know these things if I’m going to help you make her jealous.”
“I don’t want to make her jealous. I just want to catch her attention, which I plan on doing without letting you know who she is. The last thing I need is for you to watch me fall flat on my face.”
“You’re not going to fall flat on your face! Our plan is going to work. Because tomorrow, when we’re at lunch, you’re going to tell me all about her even if you won’t tell me her name. And we’re going to create a wooing schedule.”
“A wooing schedule? That’s like wowing, but with an extra o, right?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“I would never.” He holds his hands up in an I’m-innocent gesture.
“Yes, you would. But that’s fine, because when you finally win Dream Girl you’re going to be tripping over yourself to thank me—and to apologize for ever doubting me.”
“I’m already tripping over myself to get to you.”
“I think you have us confused. All three times we’ve spoken, I’m the one who has approached you.”
“That’s because I’m shy.”
“Of course it is, captain of the debate team and student body president.” I roll my eyes at him as I pull my phone out of my back pocket. “What’s your number?”
He rattles it off and I enter it in my phone. Then I put a quick string of emojis together and text it to him so he’s got my number, too.
“Come on,” he says, propelling me faster down the now-empty hallway. “I’m pretty sure Operation Dream Girl will be going nowhere if we both get detention.”
“You never know,” I tell him as we get to the closed classroom door. “Some girls like bad boys.”
He pauses, his hand on the doorknob. “Do you?”
I think of the guys I’ve dated in the past, most of whom the media considers bad boys. Or at least, that’s what they put in their headlines. I’m pretty sure they just loved the dichotomy of it—the good-girl pop princess with the bad-boy rocker/actor/billionaire’s son—and the fact that the age-old story prompted a hell of a lot of clicks.
Then I think about how all those relationships ended up. “No,” I tell Keegan as I pull the door open myself. “I don’t like bad boys at all.”
He doesn’t answer, just follows me into class.
All eyes are on us as we move down the aisles to our respective seats, and that’s only partly because of the way Oliver mocks us—the usual punishment for being late to his class. They’re mostly watching because they’re trying to figure out what NextGen’s golden boy is doing with the girl nobody knows and nobody cares about. It’s such a deviation from how my normal relationships are viewed that I nearly laugh right in the middle of class.
I glance over at Keegan, but he’s slouched down in his seat, typing away on his phone, which he is currently hiding behind Mariely’s long, black hair. I have a second to wonder if he’s checked my text before my phone vibrates.
Oliver’s back is turned as he waxes on about the importance of both diversity of thought and unity of idea in our senior project, so I slip my phone out of my pocket and check it quickly.
I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing, because this time I’m not just a little charmed. I’m totally charmed. Keegan totally got the story I was telling with my emojis and he answered with one of his own.
Gotta love a guy who can go from heart eyes to boiling a bunny in nine emojis.
I sneak another glance at him, debating whether or not I should answer with another story of my own. But he’s put his phone away and looks to be in the middle of taking very detailed notes on Oliver’s very crazy lecture.
Yeah, Keegan Matthews is about as far as you could get from a bad boy…and he’s going to make some lucky girl very happy one day in the not-so-distant future.
I’m going to make sure of it.
Chapter Seven
Keegan pulled his phone out and checked his message icon for the tenth time in as many minutes. Still no number next to the icon. Still no new texts. Not that he was waiting for a text or anything. Because h
e wasn’t. Dahlia had texted him. He’d texted her back. That was the end of it—at least until lunch tomorrow.
Unless he texted her now. Another emoji story, maybe? Something clever that she couldn’t ignore. Although if he was being honest, he’d thought the whole Fatal Attraction reference in his last text had been pretty clever. Inspired even, and she hadn’t responded to that. What made him think she’d care enough to respond to whatever he dreamed up next?
But at the same time, he didn’t want her to think that she was the only one in this. She was right when she said that she’d been the one who had sought him out so far, but that didn’t mean that couldn’t change. Maybe if he started being the one to initiate things, she’d finally figure out that he didn’t need her help getting some other girl. Maybe she’d finally figure out that she was the one he wanted to woo.
He still couldn’t believe she had him using that old-fashioned term. It was something from another century—and he wasn’t even talking about the twentieth century. More like the nineteenth. It was crazy. And yet…if Dahlia was so convinced that his dream girl wanted to be wooed, maybe that was because she wanted to be. Maybe she was looking for a guy who would do for her all the things she wanted Keegan to do for Dream Girl.
Too bad he hadn’t thought to ask what those things were today when they were in the hallway. If he knew, he’d have time to prepare for tomorrow’s lunch. Time to come up with a way to woo her that would have her thinking of him as something more than a pathetic new friend who needed her help.
Maybe if he Googled how to woo a girl… He pulled his phone out for the eleventh—or twentieth—time and started to bring up Google.
“Everything okay, Keegan?” his mother asked as she took a sip of wine. “You’ve been checking that thing every few seconds since we sat down to dinner, and you’ve barely eaten anything.”
“Yeah, sorry.” He shoved the phone back in his pocket and swore to himself that he wouldn’t take it out again until dinner was over. God. It had gotten to the point where even his parents thought he was desperate. Could he be any more pathetic?
“We’re trying to get our senior project off the ground and I’m just trying to get my ideas in order before class tomorrow.”
“Oh, so you’ve finally decided what you guys are going to do?” His mom leaned forward, obviously excited.
“We have, yeah.” He left it at that and hoped she would, too, since the last thing he wanted to do was explain to NextGen’s vice principal of discipline the reasoning behind his senior seminar’s admittedly strange choice of project.
“So what is it?” his dad demanded. “You can’t leave us in suspense!”
“Oh, right. We’re, uh, doing a musical Web series version of the life of Lizzie Borden.”
“Lizzie Borden?” His mother looked confused. “You mean the murderer?”
“Yeah. That’s the one.” He reached for his water, took a long, desperate sip. “I mean, she was acquitted, so she’s not technically a murderer—”
“Seriously?” his mother asked. “That’s how you’re going to play this? She wasn’t technically a murderer?”
“I thought I’d give it a shot, yeah.”
“Huh.” She reached for the wine bottle in the center of the table and refilled her glass. “What does Oliver think about it?”
“He likes the idea. Thinks it’s really original.”
“Original. You can say that again.”
“I think it sounds really interesting,” his dad interjected. “What are you doing for it?”
“I’m actually going to run all the social media accounts. I did a lot of the research to help out Willa—the girl who’s writing the script—so I’ve got the most knowledge about the subject. I’m going to put together an Instagram and a Tumblr. A Facebook page and Twitter profile, obviously. Maybe do a Snapchat with live shots of rehearsal and filming. Basically, I’m going to document the whole making of the series from start to finish and get the most interesting parts of that documentation out on social media for the world to see. If I do it right, we’ll build quite a following during the course of the series.”
“Wow. That sounds like a huge job,” his dad said. “Are you sure you have time for all that?”
“Yeah, of course. It won’t take that long. Plus it’ll look really good on my college applications. Showcase practical experience for the whole marketing major thing.”
His mother just shook her head. “You’re the only kid I know who can go to a school dedicated completely to the arts and have even his role in the senior project be something that is totally non-arts-oriented.”
“If there was no one around to make sure the artists’ work got promoted properly, there’d be no audience for the work. No audience means no money. No money means less chances for the artists to create. You may not be big on business, Mom, but you have to admit it serves its purpose. Even in the arts.”
“I’m not saying it doesn’t serve a purpose. Of course it does.” She reached over and patted his cheek. “I’m just saying I still can’t figure out how my kid wants to be a business major.”
This was a years-old argument and one that he knew he had no chance of winning. It should be enough that she was willing to back off and let him choose his college major without interference, but still…he couldn’t just let it go. “You know, there are a ton of parents of NextGen students who wish their kids would be business majors. Who can’t figure out how or why they are artists or writers or actors.”
“I know, sweetheart. I just wish you weren’t always so practical. I wish with this senior project you could just let go, could just do something that you love and not worry about its viability for once. You’ll be in college and then out in the real world soon enough. These last months of high school—you should be able to indulge yourself a little. To try new things, to be creative, to do what you enjoy.”
“I do enjoy what I’m doing! I love marketing, love trying to figure out how to bring a product—like our Web series—to the biggest audience possible. I use all kinds of tools to do that, and I don’t get why that isn’t creative enough for you.”
“Okay, separate corners, people,” his father said, throwing out his arms like a referee. “This is an argument that isn’t going to be solved tonight.”
Keegan didn’t see why not. He just couldn’t understand why his mother was so against what he wanted to do. Most of his friends’ parents would be thrilled if their kids were a little more practical and a little less convinced that they were going to be the next great Picasso or Spielberg or Clooney. But not his mom—she wanted him to follow his great artistic passion. To throw caution and practicality to the wind and just go wherever his art took him. As long as he kept up his GPA and managed to make valedictorian all at the same time. And completely put aside the fact that he didn’t have a grand artistic passion or a need to follow it anywhere…
He knew that following her art had once been her dream. That she had wanted to be a professional musician, to play violin in the New York Philharmonic. She’d given up on that dream in college, had chosen to pursue education instead. And though he knew she loved her job, he also knew there was a part of her that wondered what if. A part of her that wanted to make sure he never wondered the same thing.
He got that. He really did. But when was she going to get the fact that he didn’t have that same artistic bent? He didn’t want to be the person who gave up everything for his art. He wanted his family to be able to depend on him, wanted to be the kind of man his father was. Steady, calm, always there for his family, no matter what.
There was nothing wrong with that.
Silence reigned at the table for the next few minutes as Keegan shoveled in his food as quickly as he possibly could. He still had calculus to figure out tonight, not to mention some more brooding over Dahlia to do. Because seriously, how the hell had he managed to convince the only girl he’d liked in over a year that he needed her help to reel in a different girl? And, more importantly
, how the hell was he going to get out of it?
He was almost done with his chicken when his father cleared his throat several times before asking, “So, what are the other students in senior seminar doing? You’re handling all the marketing and social media, Willa is writing the script, but how about everyone else?”
Keegan didn’t respond right away. He was too busy listening to his father’s voice and trying to figure out if all that throat clearing had just been him grandstanding a little or if it meant something was wrong. There were a lot of weird things that came with cancer and chemotherapy, and throat clearing was just one of them. Sometimes that’s all it was, and sometimes it meant something more—like he couldn’t breathe or was feeling really nauseous.
But his dad was grinning at him from across the table, and he was looking pretty good, actually—if you didn’t count the port in his chest or the way his skin sagged over his bones from all the weight he’d lost.
Keegan lowered his guard, felt his heart rate calm back down. They’d had more than one emergency room run since this whole cancer thing started, and he grew a little more worried—a little more paranoid—each time it happened.
When he didn’t answer right away, mostly because he was trying to settle down again after the adrenaline that had spiked through his system, his mom prompted, “Keegan, are you going to answer your father?”
He ground his teeth together to keep from telling his mom to back off. He knew she was worried about his dad, knew that was why she was riding him so hard all of a sudden. But it didn’t make it any easier to take, especially when he was as worried about his father as she was.
In the end, though, all it would do was cause a fight—one where his dad would have to come down on his mom’s side instead of his—and it wasn’t worth it. Especially not when his phone had just vibrated with a text coming in and was now burning a hole in his pocket.
“We’ve got almost everything assigned. Mariely and Jacen are going to be the main characters, Tru is the cameraman, Himesh is doing all the tech support stuff with the website, Dahlia is writing a different song for each episode, Sloane is doing set design stuff—”