The Pretend Girlfriend(5)

"What about your mom and dad?" Beatrice said.

"The bank of mom and dad's been closed for a while," Gwen said. Her parents were nice enough to her, but they hated each other. She'd just started college when they started the divorce. Apparently, they’d just been holding it together for her. Any money they had went to lawyer fees. If she was lucky, one or the other might let her stay with them, but they both lived too far outside the city. She'd have to leave school to do that, and that wasn't an option to her. She told Beatrice as much.

"Lame," she answered. Then she perked up, slopping some mocha out onto her hand and licking it off. "But hey, if you can't fix it, you should try to forget it for a bit. I wanted to get in touch because I got a line on a big party going down tonight..."

"I don't have time to party, B. Besides, we're not freshmen anymore," Gwen said, finally taking a sip from her latte. She savored it, knowing that she wouldn't be able to afford another one for months.

"Oh, come on. It's perfect! You're not gonna get anything done today. So just come with me and get some of this stuff out of your system. Who knows, maybe there'll be some cute rich boy with too much of daddy's money and too little sense."

"B! I'm not about to..." Gwen started.

But Beatrice cut her off with a laugh. "Oh, Gwen, still so easy to bug. And take it from me, rich guys are all jerks. You're way better off figuring out a way to fix this on your own."

"I just had to make sure. Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're being serious or not," Gwen said.

This earned her an indignant look from her friend. "What? Moi, joke around too much? Why Gwendolyn Eveline..."

"That's not my middle name..."

Gwen's middle name was, in actuality, Gladys, which she had unfortunately inherited from her maternal grandmother. It was a secret she intended to take to her grave. Which just made Beatrice want to find out all the more. Beatrice always tried out a different middle name, hoping to hit the proverbial pay dirt.

"...Browning. How could you make such a claim?" Beatrice said, doing her best offended Southern belle impression. It was pretty funny, seeing as Beatrice was from Yonkers and sounded like it.

"Well now I know. And I really don't have time for a party."

"Okay, let me put it this way: you're coming, or I call Messner and give him your telephone number, your email, and a copy of that picture of you in a bikini from when we went to Daytona last summer, and I'll make sure it has a lipstick kiss on it and a note saying with love from Gwen to the handsomest pysch professor at school..." Beatrice said, letting her lips curl up in an evil smile to put cartoon villains to shame.

"You really are ruthless," Gwen said, unable to listen anymore to her diabolical scheme, smiling back. She thought that it probably was a dangerous waste of time to go so some party, but she really could use some way of getting her mind off things that wasn't sitting on her couch watching rom-coms while nursing a pint of Rocky Road.





Chapter 3


The party was at some rich guy's condo in Manhattan. Beatrice and Gwen shared a cab into the city. And by shared, Gwen meant that she chipped in a $5 she found under her bed a few minutes before getting picked up.

Not really being a party girl, her selection of clothes had been, in a word, abysmal. She'd finally settled on the obligatory little black dress every woman kept in her closet and a pair of short heels. Beatrice whistled at her when she sat down, and Gwen tried to keep the hem of her dress pulled down while her cheeks burned.

She kept apologizing and telling Beatrice she would pay her back, but Beatrice just laughed it off. "You want to pay me back? Just be my wingman. I want at least five guys to ask for my number tonight."

"Five? That's... oddly specific," Gwen said.

"Hey, don't look at me like that! Get your head out of the gutter. And yes, five. It's a numbers game, you know. Say only one guy wants my number. He does that dumb three-day wait thing and asks me out for a coffee. It doesn't go anywhere. Now say two guys get my number. It doesn't pan out with the first? Maybe the second's more interesting! But probably not. Especially with these rich guys. They think having money makes them unforgettable. I figure five's a nice number. I mean, at least one has to work out, right?"

It was interesting logic, anyway.

"Whatever happened to rich guys are all jerks?" Gwen said.

"Momma needs a new watch," Beatrice said, watching the river flash by between the girders of the bridge as they crossed, "Besides, they usually drive cool cars."

Gwen snorted at this. Leave it to Beatrice to say what jerks rich guys were in one breath and then express her desire to speed around the city in a Lamborghini in the next.