Fake Victim

The first time Amanda pressed her palm flat against my chest, I was holding a tray of coffees and she was holding a lie.

"You'll do," she said, like she was picking a melon from a bin.

We were standing in the corridor outside the psychology building, that narrow hallway where the fluorescent lights buzz like trapped flies and the radiator clanks no matter the season. I'd known Amanda for two years, maybe three. We'd shared lecture notes, split cab fares home after late library sessions, once spent an entire night arguing about whether Kubrick was a genius or a fraud. Nothing about her had ever suggested she'd touch me without warning, or that her fingers would linger long enough for me to feel the heat of them through my shirt.

"Do for what?" I asked.

She pulled back. Her eyes did that thing they do when she's already decided something and is just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Dark eyes, almost black in certain light, and she has this habit of biting her lower lip when she's nervous, which she was. Nervous. Amanda, who once told a professor his lecture was "intellectually bankrupt" in front of two hundred students, was standing here chewing her own mouth like a kid before a spelling bee.

"I need you to be my boyfriend," she said.

I laughed. She didn't.

"Megan's coming to visit," she said. "Next month. She's transferring here for her master's. She'll be around. All the time."

I knew about Megan. Everyone knew about Megan, or at least the version of the story Amanda had told me at three in the morning last year, both of us drunk on cheap wine and the particular honesty that comes with it. Megan was her sister. Older by four years. And Amanda, back when she was nineteen and stupid in the way nineteen-year-olds are stupid, had slept with Megan's boyfriend. Not once. For months. In Megan's own bed, on sheets Megan had picked out.

"She doesn't know it was me," Amanda said now, her voice lower. "She thinks it was some girl from his work. He never told her. But she suspects. She's always suspected. And she's the type to wait. To circle. To make you comfortable before she cuts."

"That sounds paranoid."

"It sounds like Megan."

I shifted the coffee tray to my other hand. The cardboard was getting damp. "What do you actually want me to do?"

"Pretend to be with me. When she's here. Be... I don't know. Sweet. A little pathetic. Like you're in over your head with me and you don't care because you're so into it." She paused. "She needs to see me as someone who could get hurt. Someone vulnerable. If she thinks I'm happy and in control, she'll destroy it. That's what she does."

"So I'm bait."

"You're a shield."

"And what do I get?"

She looked at me then, really looked, and something passed through her expression I couldn't name. Not quite calculation. Not quite desperation. Something in between, like a door opening and closing fast.

"Ted," she said.

"What about him?"

"I met him. Two weeks ago. At the bookstore on Callow Street. He's doing his PhD in music theory, and he has hands like a pianist, and I think I might actually like him. Like, actually." She said the word like it embarrassed her. "But if Megan finds out I'm seeing someone real, someone I care about, she'll take him. She'll find a way. She won't even have to try hard. He'll just... gravitate toward her. Everyone does."

I should have said no. Any sane person would have said no. But I'd spent two years watching Amanda from the edge of her life, close enough to notice the way she tucked her hair behind her ears when she was lying, the way she laughed with her whole throat when something genuinely amused her, the way she never asked for help unless the world was ending. And now here she was, asking.

"Fine," I said. "But you owe me."

She smiled. Quick, bright, gone. "I always pay my debts."

That was three weeks ago.

Now I'm standing in her apartment, the one she shares with two other girls who are never home, watching her arrange cheese on a plate like it's a military operation. She's wearing a dress I've never seen, something dark green that makes her skin look like it's lit from underneath. Her sister arrives in twenty minutes.

"He's here," Amanda says, not looking at me. "Ted. I invited him. I thought... I don't know what I thought."

"You thought you'd make it more complicated."

"I thought I'd make it real."

She sets the plate down. Her hands are shaking, just slightly, and I notice because I've made a study of her hands over the past few weeks. The way she holds a pen. The way she gestures when she argues. The way she touched my chest that first day, palm flat, like she was checking for a heartbeat.

"What's the plan exactly?" I ask. "I hold your hand. I look at you like you're the sun. I say something dumb about how I can't believe you're with me."

"Something like that."

"And Ted just... watches?"

"Ted thinks we're actually together." She finally meets my eyes. "I told him I was seeing someone. I didn't tell him it was fake."

The doorbell rings.

Neither of us moves. The sound hangs there, three notes, cheerful and obscene. Amanda's face does something complicated. Fear, maybe. Or hunger. Or both, braided together so tight you couldn't pull them apart.

"Jimmy," she says.

"What?"

"If she asks you anything about me. Anything at all. Just... tell the truth. But make it sound like a lie."

The doorbell rings again.

I don't know what she means. I don't get a chance to ask. She's already walking toward the door, her heels clicking on the hardwood, her spine straight as a blade. And I'm standing here with a glass of wine I don't remember pouring, wondering how I ended up as a prop in a play I never auditioned for, and whether the woman about to walk through that door will see through me in five seconds or five minutes.

Either way, I'm in it now.

The lock turns.