All Chapters of My Fake Boyfriend Is My Biggest Rival: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

I submitted the fellowship application on Friday night with Luca sitting beside me, which was probably the only reason I didn't spend another week convincing myself I needed to improve answers I had already rewritten twelve times. The application had occupied most of my evenings since I finally told him about it. There were academic records to upload, recommendation requests to confirm and three written responses that somehow made five hundred words feel both impossibly long and nowhere near enough. The hardest question asked what I hoped to gain from studying outside my familiar environment. Every answer I wrote sounded like something an admissions committee had heard a thousand times, so I deleted them until I finally wrote about wanting to discover who I was when nobody already knew what to expect from me. That answer frightened me enough that I nearly deleted it too.Luca had come over after rehabilitation with food and strict instructions from me not to touch anything on my lapto

I waited until Monday to confront Fiona because doing it immediately after Mason's confession would have meant doing it angry, and anger was exactly what Luca had wanted to use weeks ago when I told him we needed proof first. Now we had enough. Not proof that Fiona personally ran every account or uploaded every file, but proof that she had collected information deliberately, asked questions about us for months and accepted photographs she had no right to possess. Mason had agreed to tell the school what he'd done if necessary. I could have taken everything straight to the administration, but before adults and policies turned the situation into something else, I wanted to understand why Fiona had started collecting pieces of our lives before Luca and I even knew there was anything real between us to expose.I found her after school and asked her to meet me the following afternoon at the small coffee shop near the public library. I chose somewhere away from Westbrook because I was tired

Luca and I didn't decide anything at his front door that night. He had suggested keeping our relationship out of sight until recruitment settled, and I had stood there understanding every reason while hating what those reasons required from us. My mother was expecting me home, his father was somewhere upstairs, and neither of us wanted to make another important decision while fear had put a clock on it. We agreed to talk the next day instead, so I went home with Fiona's recording still saved on my phone and spent most of the night thinking about how easily forty-seven seconds could turn me into the girl who had ruined Luca's future.We met Saturday afternoon at the community clinic after everyone else had left. The place had become one of the few spaces that still felt untouched by Westbrook, which made it easier to speak honestly. Luca sat beside me on the reception counter with his injured leg stretched slightly forward, and for several minutes we discussed the problem like two peop

The fellowship email arrived during lunch on Tuesday, buried between a reminder from my history teacher and a message from Priya containing a photograph of the vending machine stealing her money. I almost missed it because I had trained myself not to check the application portal every hour, although that had mostly resulted in checking my email instead. The subject line made my hand stop halfway toward my drink. I read it once without opening the message, then again to make sure my brain hadn't rearranged the words into what I wanted to see. My application had advanced, and I had been shortlisted for the fellowship.Priya noticed my face before I said anything and nearly knocked over her water, reaching for my phone. Within minutes, our table had become louder than it had been in weeks. She hugged me hard enough to crush my shoulder against the chair, then immediately started telling anyone close enough to hear that I had been shortlisted for a university fellowship, leaving out the p

Priya took my phone out of my hand before I reached my locker on Monday, which told me the weekend had ended more efficiently than the bell could have managed. She didn't hide the screen. She pressed the volume button until the little bar disappeared, then returned it with her thumb still covering the video. Behind her, two boys near the stairwell stopped talking. I could hear somebody dragging a chair inside the classroom beside us, an ordinary sound that made the care on her face seem even worse. I asked her to move her thumb.The video contained no moving picture, only a photograph of Luca outside the changing rooms and a strip of captions beneath his face. My voice started before I found the pause button. I heard myself tell him he didn't have to keep playing for his father, followed by Luca saying he could lose the money. Then my voice returned, impatient and horribly clear: let them take it back. Someone had added a question about whether university recruiters knew who was actua