Beach Town Bad Boy: A Briarwood High Novella Read online

  There was a brief pause after that grand statement. “Vance, he was the only boyfriend you’ve ever had.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s what makes it so sad, you know?”

  “No,” he said, his voice dry. “I don’t know.”

  He was right, he probably couldn’t understand. After all, he’d never had a girlfriend. Not because he wasn’t attractive. He was. At least, I thought so. But the dopes at our high school—his former high school—hadn’t been able to look beyond the fact that he was…well, let’s face it. He was a nerd. Not just because he was smart, but because he was socially awkward in a way that put every character of The Big Bang to shame. Not even a handsome face could outweigh the fact that Oliver had zero game. He was way too straightforward at the best of times, but most of the time he just didn’t interact with others. Except for me, of course. I was sort of Oliver’s personal translator to the world at large.

  He might have had to tutor me through calculus last year, but sometimes, like right now, it fell on me to explain the obvious stuff, like high school relationships.

  “He was my first boyfriend, my first kiss…” I waved a hand as I searched for the right words. “Getting over your first love is serious business.”

  “He was your first love?” His voice was so sharp I almost dropped the container of food.

  “Well…”

  “Liv Vance,” he said in that deep voice he’d developed sometime when I wasn’t paying attention over the last couple years.

  “Yes?”

  “Were you or were you not in love with Stuart Hall?”

  I paused, trying to remember how I’d felt six months ago when Stuart had first asked me out. I’d been excited, but mainly because a boy had asked me out. And my emotions had gone downhill from there. Excitement had led to curiosity—especially with the kissing part—but then I’d discovered that I didn’t really like kissing Stuart, so then I was just sort of anxious about being alone with him—

  “Vance, this should not be a difficult question to answer.”

  He was right, of course. It wasn’t difficult. “No,” I said with a sigh. “I never loved him.”

  There was a long silence on his end as I climbed the stairs back to my bedroom. “But you still have to feel sorry for me. As my best friend, you’re legally obligated to indulge my wallowing after my first breakup.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, making me grin. That was one of the things I loved best about Oliver. He was so easy to get along with, even when I made up arbitrary rules of friendship.

  “What’s the moratorium on wallowing?” he asked idly.

  “Umm.” I hopped onto my bed and dug into the leftovers. “Seventy-two hours.”

  He sighed, but I just knew he was smiling. “Sounds like we’re in for a long weekend.”

  “Mmm,” I agreed with a mouthful of food. “Get ready for some hardcore pity partying.”

  “Maybe we should party for your pity in person,” he said.

  I froze mid-bite, but I recovered quickly. “That’s some sweet alliteration, bro.”

  He gave a snort of amusement but didn’t say anything. He was waiting for a response to his suggestion.

  Here’s the thing—I’d been trying really hard to give Oliver some space since he’d gone off to his boarding school. Physical space, I mean. We still talked or texted about ten times a day. But I’d been trying to stay away so he could make new friends and start a new life. Much as I missed him, this was good for him for so many reasons. Not the least of which was that he was finally surrounded by people who not only appreciated his genius, but understood it. He was going to school with a bunch of other gifted people, and most of them were probably as rich as he was. And yeah, the boy was rich.

  Or at least, he would be very soon.

  Long story short? My genius best friend created an app…and it was huge. Like Snapchat-meets-Twitter levels of popularity, and it happened crazy fast. One minute he was a somewhat normal high school teenager, and the next he was in the public eye as the world—and mega social media corporations—took notice.

  With the rise in popularity of his app, called Love Quiz, the financial offers started coming their way. Oliver had saved up a nice little chunk of change already thanks to some advertisers, but nothing compared to the fortune they’d get when they officially sold to one of the tech giants. At this point, it was clearly just a matter of time before the sale to Telecor was a done deal, and his parents thought it would be best for Oliver to get out of our tiny town with its limited opportunities and take advantage of all the big city and this elite private school had to offer. So, they’d splurged for the hoity-toity boarding school, with its world-class security and high-powered alumni.

  Oliver’s parents were smart, and like me they only wanted the best for Oliver. And for my part, that meant making sure Oliver thrived at this new school even though the selfish part of me wanted him to come back home so we could go back to being the inseparable besties we’d always been.

  But here’s the thing about life. There was no going backwards, and people were bound to change.

  Especially when they became an overnight success story.

  Oliver kept telling me how nothing would change when he went off to school, but in a way I hoped it would. I’d meant it when I’d said that I’d wanted him to get out and meet people. Being in a new city, on his own…this was his chance to spread his wings and I’d never wanted him to feel like he needed to come home to visit every other weekend or invite me to the city all the time just because he was worried about me.

  Despite what he might say, he did worry about me. He couldn’t help it any more than I could help worrying about him. When you’ve been joined at the hip as long as we have, you couldn’t help but think about the other person.

  The last time he’d asked me to visit I’d said no—it was too soon. He needed to stand on his own two feet. But now? Well, two months was a really long time. Especially for us. This was the longest we’d been apart our whole lives. Granted, we talked pretty much every day and texted non-stop, but still…separation was brutal.

  “So?” he said. “What do you think?”

  I bit my lower lip as I tried to be selfless and objective. Had enough time passed? Had I given him enough space?

  “Yes,” I said before I’d actually answered either question. A girl could only be so selfless.

  “Great,” he said. “Next weekend then?”

  “Yes.” My heart did a little happy dance in my chest at the honest relief in his voice. “But,” I added, “If I come, we have to manage our time wisely.”

  “I see.” He dropped his voice to match my serious tone. “And why is that?”

  “We have to juggle my pity party with a serious celebration of all things you.”

  His laugh was low and rumbly and so heartwarmingly familiar it nearly made me swoon. Man, I missed this guy. “All things me, huh?”

  “Yup. It’s not every day an eighteen-year-old from Harmon, Pennsylvania becomes a BILLIONAIRE!” And yes, I screamed the word billionaire, ignoring his protests that it wasn’t a done deal yet, and maybe it would fall through, and blah blah this guy was way too humble for words.

  “Your dad told me the other day that it was as good as done,” I said.

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah, well…”

  I rolled my eyes. Only Oliver would feel uncomfortable about the fact that he’d struck gold. “You deserve this. Why not embrace it?”

  He mumbled something incoherent about not wanting me to make a big deal out of it.

  “Tough,” I said. “I’m making a big deal out of it. This is huge. You’re living the dream.”

  “I got lucky, that’s all.”

  My exasperated sigh said it all. We’d been over this before. Many times. In some ways, I got it. No one had seen this coming, least of all Oliver. It had all started as an extra credit computer programming assignment his sophomore year.

  There’s no other way to put it�
��Oliver became obsessed with his project, a sort of dating app, but the term ‘dating app’ makes it sound way too simple. It was an app and it was designed for young people to find their perfect match, but it was so much more than that.

  He’d called it Love Quiz, but again, he’s oh-so-humble. It was hardly just some quiz. He based the whole concept on the fact that people lie when asked to talk about themselves. Whether it’s intentional or not, people say what they think they should, what they believe others want to hear. What really matters is what they do.

  The app could be synched with all your other social media and apps to compile all sorts of data, and rather than a straightforward quiz, it has users solve puzzles and play games that are designed to ferret out actual personality traits. He’d made this app that was originally designed for his class, then he scaled it up for the whole high school. When his father, a super savvy businessman, got wind of how successful this could be, Oliver leveled up again, and bam! It took off like wildfire.

  The app and its creator garnered a ton of press, and by the end of junior year, it had become the number one social media app among teens and college students. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so shocked when Telecor approached him and his father asking to buy the app.

  But I was shocked, and so was Oliver. I wasn’t sure he’d actually absorbed the fact that he could very well be the first self-made teen billionaire in history. Okay fine, I didn’t know that for a fact, but how many teen billionaires do you know?

  “So you’ll come here and celebrate with me?” he asked, turning the conversation back to my upcoming visit.

  I grinned like a moron on my end of the line. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Great.” He grew quiet and I knew that was all he’d say on the topic.

  “Wait, how am I going to stay with you?” I asked. “Aren’t there, like…rules?”

  “Rules?” he repeated.

  For a genius, my best friend wasn’t always quick on the uptake. “Yeah, you know rules. Like, about fraternizing or whatever.”

  He was silent on the other end and I found myself shifting uncomfortably, getting to my feet because I couldn’t sit still. I didn’t know why I felt weird about this. I mean, Oliver and I had been having sleepovers for years, and it had never been awkward. But then again, there had never been any issue about us sleeping in the same room before either. Our parents knew we were friends. Just friends.

  But the nameless authorities who created the rules of his super strict dorm? Something told me our word of honor on the topic wouldn’t be enough. I heaved a sigh and spelled it out for him. “Won’t there be an issue with me staying in your room?”

  He cleared his throat. “Oh. Um. Yeah…”

  We were both quiet for a second and this silence was just plain weird. We didn’t do awkward silences. It so was not our thing. And yet, here we were, hovering around a topic we’d never had to face before.

  Truth be told, we never really talked much about the fact that he was a boy and I was a girl. I mean, why would we? It would be like discussing the fact that I liked olives and he didn’t, or that he was better at math than I was. Not much to say, really. Just the facts.

  Maybe that’s why it suddenly seemed so weird. We were forced to acknowledge the fact that while we might not see each other as male and female—at least not like that—other people did.

  I found myself pacing my bedroom, trying to backpedal from the edge of awkward. “If you need me to stay at a hotel or something, I could do that.” I stopped walking. “I mean, I can’t really afford it but, you know…you could.”

  That made him laugh. “Using me for my money already, Vance?”

  “You’d better believe it.” Just like that, we were back on normal footing, and I fell back down onto my bed, lying flat so I was staring up at the ceiling. “I have big plans for making you my sugar daddy, you know…minus the creepy stuff.”

  “Creepy, huh?”

  I wrinkled my nose as I babbled away. See, now this was normal. “Don’t you think it’s a creepy term?” I asked. “Sugar daddy…ugh. I wonder where they came up with that.”

  “How exactly am I going to be your non-creepy sugar daddy?” he asked.

  I could practically see his smile as we talked about the pros and cons of having a rich friend who could magically make all your dreams come true. My list of wants and demands grew more and more ludicrous, but it was fun to daydream.

  “Wait, wait,” he interrupted at one point. “What’s this about a helicopter? I mean, the private jet taking us to Italy, I can understand. But a helicopter?”

  I could hear the amusement in his voice and it made me grin as I stared up at my ceiling. “Picture it, Jackson. It would be like something straight out of a movie.”

  “Uh huh.”

  He didn’t sound convinced but he did sound like he was smiling. That’s how well I knew him, I could hear his smiles. Not just that, I knew what kind it would be. It was a very particular type of smile he’d be wearing right now, the one that caused a little wrinkle between his brows because it was part amusement and part befuddlement. He often gave me that look.

  “You’d swoop in with a helicopter and whisk me away from all the jerks at Harmon High and we’d fly off into the sunset.” I ended with a sigh.

  After a brief pause, Oliver said, “So you’re saying you want me to sweep you off your feet and run away with you.”

  I let out a giggle that was so stupidly girlie I clapped a hand over my mouth. “Something like that.”

  “Got it,” he said. His tone was so dry I burst out in another laugh.

  After another pause, he cleared his throat. “Hey, Vance?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not really heartbroken over Stuart, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “My ego’s just bruised, that’s all.”

  “You can do better than Stuart Hall.”

  “I know.” I said it to make him stop worrying about me, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. I was far from a beauty queen. I wasn’t butt ugly, but I wasn’t a hottie either. I was somewhere in the middle. A solid five on a scale of one to ten. My curves were a little too curvy and I was shorter than the average girl in my class. I had the sort of face that people called cute, at best. And my hair? Forget about it. It was a big ball of frizz no matter what the weather was like outside.

  “Do you?” he asked quietly.

  The guy knew me too well. But I wasn’t in the mood for one of his pep talks. He was my loyal best friend, and sometimes I was certain he was blind to my faults because of that. From the way he talked, you’d think I could have any guy on the planet. He was worse than my mother, who insisted that boys didn’t ask me out because they were intimidated by me.

  Right. That was totally it. Nothing to do with the fact that my nickname in middle school was Loser Liv. Kids were the best, weren’t they?

  I was still a loser, but my classmates had stopped with the nicknames years ago. Now it was just understood that while I might make them laugh in class sometimes, and they were more than happy to let me organize the charity events as student council president, I was not in their league. I was not of their world. And I was definitely not dateable…at least not by anyone with decent breath or clear skin.

  Did that sound pitiful? Well, tough. This was my pity party, after all. I still had a solid seventy hours of wallowing left and I intended to take full advantage.

  “You’ll find someone else, Liv.”

  “I know,” I said again, this time with more forced confidence. I really needed him to stop. When Oliver got all sweet like this, it made my throat close up and my chest grow tight, and I had no idea why. All I knew was, the reaction had nothing to do with Stuart or this recent breakup.

  I scrambled to think of something else to say before he could start in again, this time with some nice but baseless comments about how I deserved better or how I was too good for all the guys in our school.

  “Honestly, I’m already feelin
g better,” I said, my tone a little too bright for believability.

  “Yeah?” My smart friend didn’t sound like he believed me.

  “At least now I’m free for Mikey Haverford when he finally realizes that I’m the love of his life.”

  There was a long silence and I held my breath. When Oliver let out a huff of amusement I let out an exhale of my own, the tension seeping out of me.

  “You can’t possibly still have a crush on that guy,” he said.

  I didn’t. Not really. But it was good for a laugh. “Why not?” I said, mentally calling up an image of Mikey, Harmon High’s resident stoner. “He’s sort of an outcast, like me and Stu,” I said.

  “That’s because he never knows what day of the week it is,” Oliver said.

  “Yet he’s still invited to more parties than me,” I marveled. The standards by which one was deemed acceptable at Harmon High were still difficult for me to grasp. Too smart, bad. Too dumb, good. Oh, what a world we lived in. It had to be different in college…right?

  “He’s only invited because he brings the marijuana,” Oliver said. Only Oliver would refer to it as marijuana rather than pot or weed.

  Mikey probably referred to it as breakfast.

  “He is kind of cute, though,” I added. This was true. Mikey had a sort of hot grungy vibe about him.

  “He doesn’t shower.”

  I wrinkled my nose. This was also true. Sometimes Mikey took the grungy vibe a bit too far. I shrugged. “Maybe it’s my lot in life to date smelly men.”

  Oliver sighed. “Do you even hear yourself?”

  “What? He’s of my caliber.”

  Oliver groaned. “Stop it.”

  I did, because I knew it honestly annoyed Oliver when I spoke like that. Like there were different leagues and classes based on popularity and attractiveness.

  “You are better than all of them,” he said gruffly.

  My heart did a weird wringing movement. “No, you are.” I said it teasingly, but it was true. Oliver was better than all of them, and far better than me. He was handsome, smart, and good. So very good.

  It was for the best that he’d left because he deserved so much more than anything he could find here in Harmon.