The Secret Life of a Dream Girl (Creative HeArts) (4 page)

It’s been a good night. Talking to Finn, meeting Keegan. For the first time since I got to NextGen, I don’t feel completely alone.

It’s a good feeling.

I don’t want to push it, though, don’t want to stay at the dance too long and risk losing my anonymity the way Cinderella lost her shoe. But as I slip out to the parking lot and into my car, I can’t help thinking about Keegan and his mystery girl.

If I’ve learned anything in the last few years, it’s that guys like Keegan don’t come along very often. He might not think Dream Girl knows he exists, but he’s wrong. The whole school knows who Keegan Matthews is, and most of the female population spends a couple minutes each day drooling over him as he walks through the halls.

Why shouldn’t he get Dream Girl? And why shouldn’t Dream Girl get him? Every girl deserves a really nice guy at least once in her life. God knows, I’ve wished for one more times than I can count. I’ve never been that lucky—it was pretty hard to find a nice guy when my dad spent years organizing my social life according to who was most advantageous to my career.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want one. Doesn’t mean I don’t believe in happily ever after for some people. Keegan deserves a happily ever after, especially with everything the kids at school say is going on in his life right now. If I can help him get it, why shouldn’t I?

Now the only question is how to do it.

I know about dating in Hollywood—where it’s easily as much about what you can do for each other’s careers as it is about if you actually like each other—but high school dating is a whole new world for me. Still, a lot of the same rules apply, right? Keegan is a hot commodity, so dating him is a coup in and of itself. But right now, that status also makes him a little untouchable. Like something to be put up on a shelf and admired but never taken down for a spin.

In Hollywood, when a celebrity suffers from this enough to impact the box office/record sales/television ratings, they get him or her a few dates with some charmingly approachable but still hot B-list actress or actor. They do a few pap walks, maybe an awards ceremony, have a few cute moments, and bam, Mr. Untouchable is now not only hot as hell, but also relatable—a winning combination.

So the question is, how to make Keegan “touchable” to the girl he has a crush on? The answer is, of course, by having someone show that he is. But who? And where?

I’m still contemplating this as I pull onto the street. And that’s when the perfect idea hits me. Suddenly, I can’t wait for Monday when I can put it into action.

After all, isn’t that what friends are for?

Chapter Four

Keegan let himself into the house around two in the morning. The after-party was still going strong at Finn’s house—big surprise considering the guy had everything from a pool table to a heated pool—but he hadn’t been in the mood to party. Not when an uneasy feeling had been dogging him ever since he’d left the dance.

Part of it was because of how he’d left things with Dahlia—or how he hadn’t, to be more specific. Their conversation had been broken up when he’d gotten bogged down talking to everyone. He’d tried to include her in the conversations, but she’d spent most of the time standing on the sidelines looking uncomfortable and doing everything
but
participating.

He’d tried to break away numerous times, but people kept sucking him back in. And maybe it was stupid of him, but as student body president, he felt a responsibility—especially at school functions—to be available to whoever wanted to talk. Sure, they weren’t talking about school stuff, but that didn’t matter. It was his job to make sure everyone had a good time and felt included. Some of his friends told him it was stupid that he felt that way, but he didn’t run because he wanted to be the same kind of president the school had had the other three years he’d been there. He’d run because he wanted to do things differently. Wanted to do them right.

And normally he didn’t mind talking to people from all the different groups at NextGen. After all, he liked people. He liked talking to them, liked helping them, pretty much liked everything about them. But the fact that he’d lost his only time with Dahlia to them, had lost his chance to connect with her…yeah. That pretty much blew. Almost as much as him finally getting up the nerve to ask her out only to have her laugh it off like it was a joke.

He was still brooding about the whole encounter as he closed the door behind him and carefully made his way through the dark and quiet house. He didn’t have a curfew, so it wasn’t like he was sneaking in or anything, but his dad had a hard enough time sleeping as it was. The last thing Keegan wanted to do was wake him up if this was actually one of the good nights—

He froze as he saw it, the light shining from beneath his father’s closed office doors. And knew that he’d been wrong. Tonight
wasn’t
one of the good nights, after all.

As he walked over to the door and knocked softly, he ignored the little voice in the back of his head that told him the good nights were getting so much fewer and farther between. He wasn’t going to think like that, not now when his father’s voice—as deep and strong as ever—called for him to come in. And not when there was still so much chemotherapy and radiation to go through. Still so many things that might go right with his treatment. The doctors said it was important for them to remain optimistic, and he was damn well going to do just that. At least in front of his father.

“Hey, Dad.” He stuck his head in the door. “I just got home from the dance. Do you need anything?”

His father waved him in, gesturing for him to sit beside him on the oversize leather sofa that ran the length of one wall. “How was it? Did you have a good time?”

“It was okay. Nothing special.”

“Nothing special, huh? Does that mean the girl you like didn’t show up?” He didn’t look up from the piece of wood he was whittling.

“What girl?”

“I’ve got lung cancer, dude, not a brain tumor. The logic center of my brain still works well enough for me to remember that you always have a date for the school dances and to draw the conclusion, then, that if you don’t have a date for this dance, it’s out of choice. And if that’s the case, then there’s probably a girl you wanted to take but a) you couldn’t work up the nerve to ask her or b) she was already going with someone else. Either way, you were hoping if you went stag you’d at least get a dance or two with her.”

He didn’t ask if he was right, but then he didn’t have to. Just like he didn’t have to look up from the wood in his hands for Keegan to know that most of his father’s attention was on him. The whittling was a hobby, yes, but they’d had too many important conversations while his dad was carving out shapes from blocks of wood for Keegan to not understand that it was also a way for his father to give him a chance to figure things out without the pressure of having to look his dad in the eye the whole time.

“You forgot an option,” he said after a minute.

His father did look up then, just a quick glance with eyebrows raised almost to his hairline. “Oh, yeah?”

“I could have asked her and she could have said no.”

His dad laughed. “Yeah, that didn’t happen.”

“Oh, yeah? How do you know that?”

“Because if she had, you would have stayed home and nursed your broken heart or asked the hottest girl you could find to the dance even if you didn’t like her so you could bolster your wounded pride.”

“That’s not true.” It was totally true. Not because he was a jerk—or at least, he didn’t think he was a jerk. But even before his dad got sick, he had never been big on wearing his feelings on his sleeve. Unlike most of his artistic friends, he didn’t feel the need to share every single emotion he had—or to explore those emotions through some big, public art demonstration.

This time the look his father gave him was filled with quiet amusement. “Whatever it takes to get you through the night, buddy.”

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”

“Got the Mensa membership to prove it, don’t I?”

Keegan groaned. “Oh God, not the Mensa membership again. It’s not like you got the Nobel Peace Prize. You’re in a club for smart people who are super impressed with themselves for being smart.”

“That may be true, but at least I was smart enough to ask the girl I had a crush on to my senior dance.”

“And then you married her five years later, as soon as you both graduated from college.” He made a gagging noise as he recited the story he’d heard a million times growing up. “Just because I like a girl doesn’t mean she’s my soul mate, Dad.”

“So there
is
a girl. What’s her name? What’s she like? How long has she gone to NextGen?”

“Wow, curious much? Isn’t it Mom who’s supposed to lead these little inquisition sessions?”

“Yeah, well, she’s had a long day. She passed the torch on to me before she went up to bed.” He put down his own carving long enough to reach into the large basket of wood at his feet and pull out a random shaped block to toss at Keegan.

He caught it, then reached into the coffee table in front of him for his own whittling kit. He wasn’t much in the mood to carve tonight, but it wasn’t like he was just going to go off to bed and leave his dad here when he was either too nauseous or too worried to sleep. He had a bunch of tools he’d gathered through the years—most gifts or hand-me-downs from his father—but he didn’t even have to think before he reached for the pocketknife that had been his first whittling tool, and still the one he used most.

He stared at the block of wood for long seconds, trying to decide what it wanted to be turned into. As he did, a picture of Dahlia at the dance flashed into his head. She’d been wearing a pair of long, intricately designed peacock earrings that brushed her shoulders whenever she moved her head. He’d only noticed them because they weren’t the first peacock thing he’d seen her with. She had a bracelet that she wore to school pretty regularly, and he was almost positive the journal she pulled out in senior seminar also had a peacock on it.

Not that it should matter at all that Dahlia liked peacocks, but now that he’d realized it, he couldn’t get the stupid bird out of his mind. Figuring it was better to just go with it instead of trying to think of something else to carve, he started the slow, painstaking strokes that would eventually yield the bird’s long, slender head and neck.

“Her name is Dahlia,” he admitted after a few minutes. He wasn’t sure what it was about woodworking that made it easier to talk to his father.

“Pretty name.”

“Yeah.” He made a few more strokes, being careful to leave enough wood on the top of the bird’s head so that he could carve feathers later.

A couple more minutes went by with nothing but the sound of knife on wood before he got up the nerve to ask, “So, how are you feeling? Is it the nausea keeping you awake again?”

“Nah. I feel good. I was just waiting up for you.”

“Yeah?” He wasn’t sure he bought that. His dad’s insomnia had been pretty out of control recently.

“Yeah.” His dad flashed him a reassuring look. “I just, you know…”

He didn’t finish, but then, he didn’t have to. The words hung, unspoken, in the air between them. This might be the last school dance he was able to wait up for Keegan. Prom was seven months away and no one—not even the doctors—knew what those seven months might hold.

It was a thought he’d been having more and more lately, but that didn’t make it any easier to handle. In fact, it only made everything more difficult. More difficult to accept that his father might be dying.
And
more difficult to imagine him actually beating the cancer.

He hated himself for having that thought. Hated himself even more for lying awake, hours later, staring at the ceiling and thinking about what it would be like to come home after prom to a dark house and his father’s empty office.

Chapter Five

Keegan was still thinking about his father—and how much cancer sucked—when he walked down the hall to the cafeteria early Monday afternoon.

Of course, he was also thinking about Dahlia and what he was going to say to her in senior seminar after the weird way things had ended on Saturday night.

Plus he was worrying about the fact that he’d pretty much bombed his calc homework. Which was great. Just great. Especially considering his mom had been riding him extra hard lately about being valedictorian. He didn’t actually give a shit about being first in his class, but she obviously did. And the last thing he wanted to do was make waves by not living up to parental expectations. None of them needed any more stress.

He was so lost in thought that he nearly plowed into two freshmen as he made his way through the huge double doors. They jumped back just in time, yanking their trays out of the way, but he still felt like a total jerk. Especially when they took one look at his face and then scurried off before he could even apologize.

Jeez. He must look as pissed off and miserable as he felt. Maybe he really should have stayed in bed today, because the day was shaping up to be a total clusterfuck and he hadn’t even gotten to the part he’d been dreading.

What the hell was he going to say to Dahlia? The last thing he wanted to do was ignore her after the conversation they’d had, but maybe she wanted him to? She had turned it into a joke when he’d asked her out, after all. She was probably regretting ever having spoken to him at the dance, even though she was totally the one who had started the conversation.

God, why were girls so freaking complicated all the time? And why did he have to go and fall for one who seemed a million times more complicated than any of the others?

Keegan gave himself a couple more seconds to wallow as he grabbed a sandwich and a bag of chips from the express line. Then he made his way over to his regular table in the back corner of the cafeteria. Most of his friends were already there, since he’d stayed behind to talk to his calc teacher for a few minutes in what turned out to be a totally fruitless effort to figure out what the hell he was doing wrong.

Grabbing the last chair available, he settled down next to Chris and Lauren, who were arguing over a movie they’d seen the day before. While they disagreed with the happily-ever-after ending, each had their own idea of which terrible direction the screenwriter and director should have taken the characters. Because, obviously, the only way a movie could be good was if someone died terribly at the end and those left behind nearly drowned in their own sorrow.

He barely resisted rolling his eyes. Fiction writers, man. They were the worst. Always rewriting other people’s stuff in their own heads, always thinking they could do it better. Always wanting to make some important statement about the world and the people in it… And that’s if you didn’t count how much time they spent wallowing in pits of their own existential despair.

Then again, the artists did that, too. And so did a lot of the musicians, especially the composers. They were constantly dressing in black and bemoaning the state of their own existence—and everyone else’s.

All the angst and emotion was a little unnerving, especially to a guy who was only at this school because his mom was vice principal. And who planned on majoring in marketing next year. He was in the graphic arts track, with an emphasis on Web design and social media, but in his opinion it was all just training for when he got a job in marketing for a kick-ass nonprofit company that wanted to save the world.

Shaking his head at all the drama his friends were manufacturing, he opened his bag of chips and absently shoved a few in his mouth as he prepared to be entertained. But after a couple of minutes of listening to them go on and on about the lack of authenticity in a happily-ever-after ending, he couldn’t resist saying, “I liked the ending. I thought it was kind of nice how they ended up together. I mean, people deserve to be happy, don’t they?”

They both gasped in outrage, their eyes widening and mouths dropping in horror at his “ridiculously bougie attitude.” He just grinned and wiggled his eyebrows at them as Chris informed him, scathingly, that “happiness is a social construct.”

“So is unhappiness. So is everything,” he answered before shoving more chips in his mouth and turning to Jacen and Himesh to see what the lovebirds were up to today.

But he barely had a chance to say hi to them before his arms and lap were filled with warm, strawberry-scented girl. And not just any warm, strawberry-scented girl, he realized as he looked down into wide brown eyes. The
perfect
warm, strawberry-scented girl.

Dahlia.

“What—” he started, but she wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly against her.

He started to pull away—largely because he was starting to wonder if he’d just ingested hallucinogen-dusted potato chips and wanted to get a better look at the bag—but his arms wrapped around her waist of their own volition, holding her in place when she started to slip off his lap.

She laughed a little, then placed a careless kiss on his cheek, right at the corner of his mouth. Electricity shot through him at the first press of her lips on his skin, and as Dahlia wiggled a little in his lap—either trying to get more comfortable or trying to drive him completely insane—it took every ounce of control he had not to get hard. And even then it was a close thing.

It got even worse when she leaned forward, pulling his head down so her lips lined up with his ear. “Smile,” she murmured softly, her breath hot and shivery against the sensitive skin of his neck. “And say something funny.”

He smiled—of course he did. With Dahlia in his lap grinning up at him with stars in her eyes, it was hard not to. But as for the rest… “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he whispered back.

She threw back her head and laughed like he was the funniest guy in the world. And right there he decided to forget about acid-laced potato chips. He’d obviously fallen straight into the twilight zone.

“You’re hilarious!” She giggled, patting his cheek a couple of times before twisting around in his lap to grab his sandwich off his tray. She handed him one half, then took the second for herself. “What kind is it?”

“It’s supposed to be turkey, but we usually call it mystery meat.”

She laughed again before reaching out and patting his chest. “It’s so good to see you. I missed you yesterday.”

Forget the twilight zone. He’d obviously fallen into some alternate dimension where he and Dahlia were actually a couple. There was no other explanation for the fact that she was eating his food and sitting on his lap like she belonged there. Like she was comfortable there and had done it a million times before.

Except when he glanced around the table, he realized all of his friends were staring at them. Oh, some were trying to be subtle about it while others—like Chris and Himesh—were gaping, mouths opening and closing like the huge clown face at miniature golf. The one that did its worst to keep you from scoring. Jacen, of course, was grinning like an idiot and giving him a not-so-subtle thumbs-up.

So, not the twilight zone, then, and not another dimension.

This was real. Dahlia was actually sitting on his lap right now, trying to choke down half of his very dry turkey sandwich. And he was just staring at her, trying to figure out what was happening. And what he was supposed to do about it.

Before he could think of anything else to say, Dahlia twisted around in his lap and smiled at Lauren. “I agree. I thought the ending was a total cop-out. Like, you can’t set up all that crazy conflict and then just end it like it was nothing. It makes no sense.”

Lauren blinked for a second, looking back and forth between Keegan and Dahlia. But then she grinned and punched him lightly in the shoulder. “Right? It makes no sense. You can’t have a resolution until you deal with the conflict. That’s Writing 101.”

“Also Relationship 101,” Jacen chimed in, shooting Keegan another long look. The second Dahlia’s face was turned away, though, he mouthed,
Is this her?

Keegan shook his head and glared. This so wasn’t the time for that.

“You’re Dahlia, right?” Himesh asked in an obvious attempt to deflect Keegan’s annoyance from his boyfriend. “We’re in senior sem together.”

“We are.”

“Oh, right. You’re the one who’s going to be writing the songs for
Lizzie
.”

Dahlia grinned at the mention of their senior project, a musical version of Lizzie Borden’s life. “Yep, that’s me. Theoretically, anyway.”

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Chris commented, and Keegan tried not to notice that the guy was looking at her like she was fresh meat. “My senior sem group is doing a graphic novel and I’m doing the writing. Which is cool, but it’s hard trying to fit my words to someone else’s vision, you know? Like, other people are plotting it out and I’m writing according to what they want.”

“It is hard,” Dahlia agreed. “But it’s kind of cool, too. Definitely makes me work harder. But I like hearing all the different ideas. Collaborating usually makes the final product better—and it’s fun.” She shot Keegan a grin that nearly had him swallowing his own tongue.

“If there
is
a final product,” Jacen interjected. “Has anyone seen any part of the script yet?”

As the whole table started talking about their own senior projects, Keegan racked his brain, trying to think of something to say to Dahlia that wouldn’t sound stupid. But before he’d come up with anything that didn’t start with
Um,
she was twisting the lid off his lemonade and taking a long sip. Which shouldn’t have been a big deal, except it was a little mesmerizing. He tried really hard not to think about how good her mouth looked on the bottle, but it was no use. She looked
really
good.

She put the bottle down after she’d drained about half of it, then she popped off his lap without warning. He wanted to reach for her, wanted to pull her back down so badly that he ended up curling his fingers into his palms in an effort to resist the temptation. “Thanks for lunch,” she told him as she waved to the rest of the table. “I’ll see you in class in a little.”

Then she was gone, half walking, half skipping across the cafeteria, and he was left staring after her, wondering what the hell had just happened.