BYE BYE, PIPER BERRY
(The Fake Relationship)
JULIE MURPHY
PIPER
Every iconic teen movie my dads ever made me watch prepared me for the moment a boy would throw pebbles at my bedroom window in the middle of the night. I just never thought it would be me throwing the rocks and at Gabe Rafferty’s window at four in the morning. I guess it helps that to throw rocks at Gabe’s window, I only had to open mine, and that instead of rocks I was throwing plastic beads from a beading kit my aunt Sylvia bought me because she thinks I’m still eleven years old.
“Psst, Gabe,” I hissed. “Psst!”
A light flickered on in Gabe’s room as his silhouette stumbled out of bed. After a minute, he pushed his bedroom window open for me like he had so many times before.
“He’s sorry,” Gabe swore for the hundredth time as he rubbed at his eyes and put his black-rimmed glasses on. “What time even is it?”
“Yes, I’ve heard him use that word many times, but I don’t think he understands the meaning,” I said as I leaned out the window into the dewy night air. “He can be as sorry as he wants,” I told Gabe. “It’s over for us. It was over the moment he even thought about sticking his tongue down Carolyn Daniels’s throat.”
Gabe’s full lower lip turned into a frown. “This blows. It’s the start of our senior year. We’re supposed to be having the time of our lives. All of us together.”
“Don’t pretend like I’m the one who completely ruined our friend group here, Gabe.”
“Well, if you’re so dead-set on not forgiving him, why exactly are you throwing shit at my window like an angry squirrel on a mission?”
I scoffed as I sat in the frame of the window with one leg hanging over the side. “There is nothing ‘squirrely’ about me, Gabe!”
He yawned. “Out with it, Piper.”
“I know that you knew.”
Gabe Rafferty was never a good liar from the time we were six and he tried to cover for me and take the credit for the time I pooped in the pool at Victoria Treviño’s birthday party. Mrs. Treviño saw right through his round, flushed cheeks then just like I did right now.
“I knew it!” I quietly shrieked. “Gabe Rafferty, you little piece of shit. You knew! You knew this whole time!”
“That’s not fair,” he said. “You know all my tells.”
“Calling the full-body reaction you have when you’re nearly caught in a lie your ‘tells’ would be generous at best. Your whole head turns into a flashing billboard.”
“I’m feeling very victimized here,” Gabe said as he squeezed his large frame through his open window. His body hit the grass with a thud, and he groaned as he stood. He used to keep a wooden crate between our two houses, so he could use it as a boost, but now he was so tall he could just lean right into my window like some giraffe at a drive-through safari.
“Gabe, I’m serious. How could you not tell me Travis was cheating?”
He ducked his head through my window and clasped both hands in a prayer. “He said it was a one-time thing, Pipe. I swear. Besides, they had that onstage kiss … I figured it couldn’t be that much different.”
“Well, it obviously was,” I said, trying and failing to disguise the hurt in my voice.
Gabe would always belong to Travis first. In the same way that Maisie would always be mine, but Maisie was a year older and already well into her semester at the University of North Texas. The four of us had been friends since our bikes had four wheels instead of two. And even though his loyalty would belong to Travis before anyone else, it still stung to know that Gabe—sweet, reliable, chronically funny next-door neighbor Gabe—had known about Travis’s transgressions and kept me in the dark this whole time. And now with Maisie gone, Travis turning out to be a cheating dirtbag, and Gabe covering for him, I had no one.
Tears began to well up as my chest tightened with a new kind of pain.
“Oh, Pipe, don’t cry.” He pulled himself up and ungracefully slithered through my window. There was a fifty-fifty chance my dads would hear and come crashing through my door to defend me from an intruder.
I couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of him there on my floor, but it came out like a sob. “What are you doing? We have school in like three hours.”
“You’re the one who started it by throwing rocks or nuts or something at my window.”
“Beads. They were friendship bracelet beads. And don’t worry, I’ll pick them up before Ziggy eats them,” I told him, referring to his mom’s Pomeranian, as he stood up.
He took a step closer and pulled me against his chest for the kind of hug that felt like a good wringing-out. Like Gabe’s whole body was a sponge and he was soaking up all the pain and all the heartbreak.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice raspy and muffled against my hair.
“Good,” I said with a pout before taking a step back, so I could look him right in the eyes. “Good. Because you owe me.”
Suspicion passed over his face like a cloud. Just like I knew Gabe couldn’t tell a lie, he knew I held on to a grudge like it was a life raft. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. You let me go to all those Bye Bye Birdie rehearsals like a total fool. I’m literally Carolyn’s dresser! I have to help the girl my ex-boyfriend of three years cheated on me with in and out of her costume so she can just go onstage and kiss him all over again.”
Gabe winced. “Travis does make a good Albert Peterson.”
Travis had explained to both of us several times during the lead-up to auditions that Conrad Birdie wasn’t actually the best role in Bye Bye Birdie. Why name a whole musical after a character that’s not even the star of the show?
“Could we just stop treating Travis like a god for a freaking minute?” I asked. “Yes, he makes a great Albert What’s-His-Face, because he’s good at everything. Including sneaking around! But not good enough to not get caught and humiliate me in front of the whole school. And you weren’t good enough to at least warn me!”
He exhaled heavily. “Okay, okay. What do you want me to do?”
“Easy. Be my boyfriend,” I said simply. I didn’t actually know if revenge was one of the stages of grief, but it only took me a few days of tears before I decided I wanted to get back at Travis and I wanted to make it hurt.
Gabe’s cheeks turned a bright shade of red as he wiped the back of his hand over his brows, and it was very clear that just the thought of seeing me as a romantic interest made him terribly uncomfortable. It was a real confidence boost to see one of my oldest friends find me so deeply disgusting. “W—what? What do you mean?”
“Not my real boyfriend,” I clarified as I took a step closer, peering up at him. “Just my fake boyfriend for a few days.”
“A, this is an awful idea. B, can this at least wait until next week when Bye Bye Birdie is done?”
“No,” I told him. “In fact, that’s exactly why it can’t wait. So what do you say, Gabe? Will you be my boyfriend?”
GABE
According to Piper, boyfriends picked their girlfriends up for school. I knew that wasn’t entirely true, because Travis only had his mom’s Suburban on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but Piper made it clear that our arrangement was very much about appearances.
I shouldn’t have said yes to begin with, but it turns out it’s impossible to say no to the girl you’ve loved since first grade. I guess it probably seemed like my whole life up until this point must have been torture—my best friend dating the love of my life for so long that they were practically married in high school years. But I knew early on that Piper existed in a glass case for me. I could be near her and I could enjoy her company and her wry sense of humor, but she would never be for me. The chubby guy with a dad bod didn’t really stand much of a chance when it came to girls like Piper, especially when I’d been in competition for her since the day she moved in next door and Travis and I trotted over to meet the girl with long brown hair, her know-it-all older brother, and two dads.
I fell for her first, but Travis was the first to let his feelings be known when in fourth grade, he gave her a mini box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day with a stuffed monkey wearing a T-shirt that said You’re Ape Out of Ten. To this day, it still bugs the shit out of me that the joke on the monkey’s shirt didn’t even make sense. Monkeys aren’t even apes. Whatever. I noticed the awful thing still pinned to her bulletin board when I crawled through her window this morning. I was almost shocked she hadn’t purged everything she owned relating to Travis, but the moment she asked me to be her fake boyfriend, I knew. This wasn’t about getting revenge on Travis or making him suffer just as much as she had. This was about winning him back.
Piper was quiet the whole drive to school. Either she was exhausted from only getting a few hours of sleep or she was feeling just as awkward as I was by the prospect of what we were about to do.
I parked the car and turned the ignition, Taylor Swift’s voice cutting out halfway through “Lover.” (Swiftie till the day I die.) “You ready, Pipes?” I asked.
She nodded. “We should have gotten here earlier to get a better spot. This will only work if people see us.”
I sucked in a deep breath and stepped out of my truck, preparing myself to fully betray my best friend. Piper met me halfway in front of the truck, and I did the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I took her hand.
She looked down quizzically at our interlaced fingers, perfectly locked into place like they were finally right where they were meant to be.
“We gotta sell it, don’t we?” I asked.
She nodded, and squeezed my hand lightly.
We walked into school, heads slowly turning and chatter beginning to hum. “Let ’em stare,” I whispered as I pulled her a little closer.
She leaned her head against my shoulder and my heart … it soared.
* * *
It only took one class period for Travis to find out.
“What the fuck, man?” he demanded as he stayed close on my heels.
I couldn’t let him see my face, because then he’d know. He’d know I was lying just like Piper had. I threw my hands up and shrugged. “It just happened, but you’ve got Carolyn, so it’s cool, right?”
“That’s no—not bro code,” he stammered. “And I don’t got Carolyn. That was a one-time thing! I even told you so!”
“Trav, you’re into theater and I’m a bigger Taylor Swift fan than almost everyone at this school. Pretty sure ‘bro code’ isn’t a thing for us. And explain to me how a one-time thing happened four times.”
“Well, then, best friend code,” he said as finally caught up to my long strides, gripped my shoulder, and spun me around.
I had about six inches on my best friend, but he was limber as hell from all those years of spinning and twirling dance partners across the stage of Martindale High School.
“Zora in the Spotlight” copyright © 2022 by Elise Bryant. “In a Blink of the Eye” copyright © 2022 by Elizabeth Eulberg. “Anyone Else but You” copyright © 2022 by Leah
Johnson. “Liberty” copyright © 2022 by Anna-Marie McLemore. “The Surprise Match” copyright © 2022 by Sandhya Menon. “Shooting Stars” copyright © 2022 by Rampion Books. “Bye Bye, Piper Berry” copyright © 2022 by Julie Murphy. “Auld Acquaintance” copyright © 2022 by Caleb Roehrig. “Keagan’s Heaven on Earth” copyright © 2022 by Sarah Winifred Searle. “The Idiom Algorithm” copyright © 2022 by Abigail Hing Wen
