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‘Sure.’
‘I’ve never actually had a boyfriend. I guess it would be kinda cool to have one. But I’ve made my mind up. No boyfriends. I’m done with the sad face stuff.’
It wasn’t until he was opening up the twelfth and final box of laboratory equipment that he had the brainstorm. ‘What about a fake boyfriend?’ he said.
She was standing real close, and now that she was looking up at him, he could see how pretty her eyes were, all blackish brown and sparkly, and how she had a real pretty smile, too.
‘Afakeboyfriend?’
He shrugged. It was a silly idea; maybe he shouldn’t have said it, but Natalie was kind of great and the way she wasn’t even whingeing about any of this bad stuff she was going through had made him feel like he ought to do something. ‘You know. Like in a totally fake way we could have a milkshake every now and then. That way you get to tick the boyfriend box, but I know the rules.’
‘You’d promise not to get all weepy-face?’
He held out his soap-sud-covered little finger, and the words came out slick and easy. ‘I’ll pinkie promise it.’
Her little finger was locked with his a millisecond later.
‘This is so cool,’ she said, grinning.
He grinned back and felt pretty cool himself. ‘School formal coming up next term, too. Think of the trauma you’ve saved me from, having to worry about asking girls and getting rejected.’
That pretty smile parted in a gasp. ‘You’d invite me to the formal? But … what if you had a real girlfriend then? What if you … I mean … maybe you’ve actually got a for-real girlfriend now?’
‘Nope. No girlfriends on the books at present, fake or otherwise.’
She eyed him up and down like she was wondering if there was a reason no-one was going out with him.
‘Hey, I’m not a stalker.’ Besides, he didn’t even want a real girlfriend, not here in boring Clarence. Then he’d be made to feel bad about getting out of town the second school was done, and nothing was stopping him moving to Sydney.
Nothing.
Natalie winked at him. ‘You’re kind of intense, you know, but not in a stalker way. I was just checking you out to see how good you’ll look in a tux for our formal photos.’
He swallowed. ‘And?’
‘I’m gonna say a nine out of ten,’ she said, fanning her soapy hands in front of her face as though she was on fire, and it did weird things to his innards that might have needed a biology textbookanda chemistry textbook to explain.
‘What do you reckon?’ he said. ‘Wanna be a fake girlfriend?’
‘Now or never, right?’ she said.
So that was it. He had a fake girlfriend. And how hard could it be to keep one tiny little promise?
