Too Good to Be True - Kristan Higgins [1]
And suddenly, without a lot of forethought, I found myself saying that I, too, was dating someone… a boy from another town. The three popular girls turned to me with sharp and sudden interest, and I found myself talking about Tyler, who was really cute and smart and polite. An older man at fourteen. Also, his family owned a horse ranch and they wanted me to name the newest foal, and I was going to train it so that it came for my whistle and mine alone.
Surely we’ve all come up with a boy like that. Right? What was the harm in believing—almost—that somewhere out there, counterbalancing the frog-in-the-pants types was a boy like Tyler of the horses? It was almost like believing in God—you had to, because what was the alternative? The other girls bought it, peppered me with questions, looked at me with new respect. Heather B. even invited me to her upcoming birthday party, and I happily accepted. Of course, by then I was forced to share the sad news that Tyler’s ranch had burned down and the family moved to Oregon, taking my foal, Midnight Sun, with them. Maybe the Heathers and the rest of the kids in my class guessed the truth, but I found I didn’t really mind. Imagining Tyler had really felt… great, actually.
Later, when I was fifteen and we’d moved from our humble town of Mount Vernon, New York, to the much posher burg of Avon, Connecticut, where all the girls had smooth hair and very white teeth, I made up another boy. Jack, my Boyfriend Back Home. Oh, he was so handsome (as proved by the photo in my wallet, which had been carefully cut from a J.Crew catalogue). Jack’s father owned a really gorgeous restaurant named Le Cirque (hey, I was fifteen). Jack and I were taking things slow…yes, we’d kissed; actually, we’d gotten to second base, but he was so respectful that that was as far as it went. We wanted to wait till we were older. Maybe we’d get preengaged, and because his family loved me so much, they wanted Jack to buy me a ring from Tiffany’s, not a diamond but maybe a sapphire, kind of like Princess Diana’s, but a little smaller.
Sorry to tell you, I broke up with Jack about four months into my sophomore year in order to be available to local boys. My strategy backfired…the local boys were not terribly interested. In my older sister, definitely… Margaret would pick me up once in a while when she was home from college, and boys would fall silent at the mere sight of her sharp, glamorous beauty. Even my younger sister, who was only in seventh grade at the time, already showed signs of becoming a great beauty. But I stayed unattached, wishing I’d never broken up with my fictional boyfriend, missing the warm curl of pleasure it gave me to imagine such a boy liking me.
Then came Jean-Philippe. Jean-Philippe was invented to counter an irritating, incredibly persistent boy in college. A chemistry major who, looking back, probably suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, making him immune to every social nuance I threw his way. Rather than just flat out tell the boy that I didn’t like him (it seemed so cruel) I’d instruct my roommate to scrawl messages and tack them to the door so all could see: “Grace—J-P called again, wants you to spend break in Paris. Call him toute suite.”
I loved Jean-Philippe, loved imagining that some well-dressed Frenchman had a thing for me! That he was prowling the bridges of Paris, staring sullenly into the Seine, yearning for me and sighing morosely as he ate chocolate croissants and drank good wine. Oh, I had a crush on Jean-Philippe for ages, rivaling only my love for Rhett Butler, whom I’d discovered at age thirteen and never let go.
All through my twenties, even now at age thirty, faking a boyfriend was a survival skill. Florence, one of the little old ladies at Golden