Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

I don’t know what I was expecting when I picked up the phone, scrolled through our class group chat, and texted Jonas: “WTF?” but his reply was definitely not it.

Ah, I was wondering when you’d message :)

Kiki:Srsly Jonas, WTF? A date with me?

Jonas:I’ll explain in person. This isn’t the kind of conversation you have over WhatsApp ;)

Kiki:What???

Jonas:I’ll come over

Kiki:Wait, what??

Jonas:See you in twenty min

Kiki:Wait

Kiki:JONAS

Kiki:FFS

“He’s coming over,” I say, and my voice feels like it’s coming from a very faraway place.

“What? Like, over here? Right now?” Cassie says.

“Sounds like it.”

“Let me see that.” Cassie plucks my phone out of my hand and scrolls through my chat with Jonas. “What the hell? This douche is something else. How does he even know where you live?”

“I don’t—” I shake my head, feeling dazed. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s on the class register or something?”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“Uh, I don’t— What should I do?”

Cassie gnaws on her bottom lip for a while, then sighs. “Well, you need to talk to him anyway, right? So I guess that’s what you do.”

“But. Here?” The thought of having Jonas in my house, of all places, is horrifying.

For a second, Cassie frowns, but then the frown suddenly melts away and is replaced with a smirk. “You could talk on the front porch? That could be a real power move, not letting him inside your house.”

I nod slowly. “I guess…”

“That sends the right message,” Cassie says. “So you stand right outside your door, at the top of the front steps, hands folded in front of your chest, and go, ‘You can talk from there.’ And you’d be, like, three steps above him, so you’d be looking down at him. Perfect.”

I run through this scenario in my head and find that I don’t hate it. “Okay, I guess that could work….”

“But first, let’s put some makeup on you and turn you into a bad bitch.”

“I’m not putting on makeup for Jonas freaking Arifin.”

“Think of it as war paint. It’s not to impress him, it’s to intimidate the ever-living shit out of him.”

It’s clear that Cassie isn’t going to take no for an answer, so reluctantly, I let her lead me to my vanity and start dabbing BB cream onto my face. As she works on my makeup, she goes through lines like “I’m not really seeing your point, Jonas,” and “I think you’re full of shit, Jonas,” and so on.

Barely ten minutes have passed when all of a sudden, Mami calls up the stairs for me. “Kristabellaaa!”

I startle, and Cassie very nearly pokes my eye out with eyeliner.

“Damn it,” Cassie groans. “Look what you did.”

I glance at the mirror and find a stray black line going up across my right eyelid. I rub at it, but instead of erasing the line, it merely smudges it. I quickly grab a tissue and wipe it off.

“KRISTABELLAAA!”

What is going on? Then cold realization seeps down my spine. Mami’s got that tone of voice, the one she puts on when we have guests at the house. It’s high and smooth, with an extra generous helping of British accent.

“Oh god,” I murmur. “I think he’s here already. And Mami must’ve let him in.”

Cassie stares at me in horror. “But. So fast?!”

I stand, brushing lint off my pants, my mind a scrambled mess. In a doomed daze, I walk to the door and down the stairs.

“You’ve got this!” Cassie hisses from my room.

I walk down the curving staircase and find the worst sight awaiting me down in the living room. Jonas Arifin is sitting on my sofa, holding a saucer with a cup of tea, looking downright at home. He beams up at me.

I blink. I blink again. The apparition remains there, on my sofa, smiling politely. Well, it looks like a polite smile, but I’ve known Jonas long enough now to know when he’s really smirking. But—how did he get here so fast? My mind is short-circuiting. I can’t even form complete thoughts. How did I miss the doorbell? How did—

“Hi, Kiki,” he says in a genial tone, putting the saucer down gently.

“It’s Jonas Arifin,” Mami hisses, as though I didn’t already recognize the snake sitting there. “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re friends with an Arifin?” Her eyes are glowing with the fierce fire of Asian ambition. Great. As much as I love my mom, she’s also a shameless social climber. She’s going to crow for ages about having an Arifin in our house.

“How’d you get here so fast? Speed all the way here in one of your fancy cars, did you?” The words blurt out of me without warning, as ugly as a burp.

Mami’s mouth drops open in shock. “Kiki! Is this how you greet your friend who’s been so nice and so polite? He even brought us gifts!” She gestures to an obnoxiously huge hamper that’s taller than she is. It’s filled with artisanal cakes and cookies and exotic orchids. The sight of it only makes me even more suspicious, because if Jonas is coming to my house bearing gifts, then he must have an ulterior motive. It’s like Satan offering up something: you just know he’s going to want your soul in return.

“Truly, Jonas, you shouldn’t have,” Mami is saying.

“Yes, you shouldn’t have,” I say flatly.

“Kiki!” Mami snaps. “What has gotten into you?”

“No worries, Tante.” Jonas gives an easy laugh that’s so fake my insides seize. “Kiki and I are always messing around with each other like this. We like to give each other a hard time, but it’s all in good fun. For example, she likes to kill me over and over again in the game that we play online.” He turns his full attention to me then, and his smile grows wider, showing more teeth. “Don’t you, Kiki? Or should I say, Dudebro10?”

The floor gives way under me. I would’ve fallen if I hadn’t caught hold of the back of a nearby chair to keep me standing. This can’t be real. No, he didn’t just call me—

“Dude…what?” Mami says, laughing uncertainly.

“Dudebro10.” Jonas’s eyes are still on mine. “It’s her gamer tag—the nickname she uses in-game.”

Mami waves her hand and laughs. “Oh, you kids and your ever-evolving lingo. I can’t keep up with you.”

Jonas opens his mouth, but I quickly bite out, “Mami, can I speak with Jonas alone? Please,” I add.

Mami dithers, hesitating. She looks wholly torn. On one hand, she disapproves of me dating anyone while I’m still in high school. On the other hand, this is an Arifin, and if there’s anything that can break her no-dating rule, it’s the likes of Jonas. After all, it’s one of the real reasons she moved me to Xingfa in the first place. She only did so after finding out that George Clooney goes there, and she’s hoping that I’ll make friends like George, and now here is Jonas Arifin. After a few long, torturous seconds, she nods. “Okay, you may go into the study. But leave the door cracked open.”

“You can trust me, Tante,” Jonas says. “I won’t disrespect your daughter.”

What little bit of tension there was on Mami’s face melts away at this. Gag. I can’t believe how easily she fell for that.

I lead Jonas from the living room to the study. After my bedroom, the study is my favorite room in the house. It’s far enough away from the living room to be quiet, and there’s a large picture window that looks out into a corner of the backyard, washing the whole room with gentle sunlight. The walls are covered with warm wood panels, and it feels so safe and cozy in here.

Well, usually it feels safe and cozy, but for the first time, with Jonas in it, I feel the furthest thing away from safe or cozy. As soon as we’re inside, I push the door so it’s only a crack open, then I take a deep breath and turn to face him.

“How did—”

“I find you?” Jonas cocks his head to one side. “Did you not hear your mom repeatedly say I’m an Arifin?”

I grit my teeth. “Yes, Jonas, I know who you are. Big freaking deal. I don’t see what that has to do with—”

“My family owns TalkCo.”

“Yes, Jonas, we all know your family owns the nation’s leading internet and cell phone service provider, big freaking deal. Wooow, can I please have your autograph?”

Jonas snickers. “I wasn’t saying that to show off. Okay, maybe a little.” He winks in what he probably thinks is a very adorable way. “But basically, it’s really quite simple. First, all I had to do was ask one of my employees to look up Dudebro10’s IP address, then all they had to do was trace the IP to your home address, and…” He leans back in his seat, smirking. “Here I am.”

“What?”For a few moments, all I can do is gape at him. “What the shit?” I cry. “Jonas, that is such a breach of privacy. You’ve broken pretty much every freaking privacy law there is, not to mention betrayed the trust of your customer!”

Jonas rolls his eyes. “Methinks someone’s been watching too many American shows. You know the rules are different here.”

And as much as I hate to admit it, I do know. I can rant on and on about Jonas breaching privacy laws, but am I actually sure that such laws exist? Or, rather, they probably do exist, but am I certain that our internet contract didn’t come with fine print that says the provider can use our IP address to track us down? And even if the law were on my side, am I really going to take on someone as rich and powerful as Jonas Arifin? His family won’t just have a lawyer, they’ll have a whole entire legal team, and they’d probably countersue or something and we’d end up being buried under legal fees for years to come.

I gape at him wordlessly, taking in his smug expression, the way he’s sitting so relaxed in Papi’s chair. He knows he’s won. He knows there’s not a damn thing I can do about him being here. All I can do is…what? What can I do? I shove all that aside and try to focus on why I contacted him in the first place. “Okay, so…but why have you asked the Lil’ Aunties to match us with each other?”

“Ah.” Jonas leans forward, putting his fingertips together, and says, “Keep an open mind, because I actually have an amazing proposition to offer you.”

I almost blurt out that I’d rather eat my own foot than enter into any kind of agreement with him, but I remind myself that he has the upper hand, so I should at least hear him out.

Jonas raises an eyebrow at me, and I can just tell that he thinks he’s so damn cute. “The reason I asked those kids to match us with each other is…I want you to be my girlfriend.”

I swear the entire universe implodes right then. All forms of logic and reasoning shatter into a billion meaningless pieces of rubble, leaving nothing behind but this most nonsensical of situations. Jonas freaking Arifin, asshat who has tormented me ever since I arrived at Xingfa, asking me to be his girlfriend. Do I cry or do I laugh?

“You can go right to hell” is what hisses through my lips.

Jonas places his palms on his chest dramatically. “Kiki, you wound me.”

“Well, the answer’s no, so you can fuck right off now.”

“Hear me out. I have to admit, when I first went looking for Dudebro, all I wanted to do was take revenge. I thought it was some asshole dude—” He snorts, shaking his head. “A literal dude bro! Great job with the name, by the way. None of us even suspected it was a girl. Why did you play as a dude?”

“To avoid getting hit on or threatened by assholes like you,” I mumble.

Jonas frowns. “Wow, Kiki. I would never.”

“No, all you did was gaslight and bully me in person. So much better than bullying me online.” I can barely keep my voice at a reasonable volume, I’m so incensed.

Jonas sighs. “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot at school. Anyway, where was I? See, my employees all guessed that Dudebro must be someone I knew in real life, because why else would he be so invested in griefing me continuously in-game? I thought it was Andre from Charity, or Tommy Hilfiger from Kindness. Those two losers have had it out for me since day one.”

“Oh? Did they also not take kindly to your gaslighting and bullying them?”

Jonas only gives me one of his bashful, winning smiles. It doesn’t win anything with me, except maybe the almost overwhelming urge to punch him right in the face. “Anyway, imagine my surprise when they traced the IP address to your house!” He chuckles. “I was so certain it would be a guy that it took an embarrassingly long time to figure out it was you, even after I saw that the account holder is Siregar. I was, like, this surname sounds familiar, but I can’t think of any guy at school with this last name! Then one of my employees said, ‘Maybe it’s not a guy?’ and it clicked into place. Kiki Siregar.” He gazes at me, shaking his head slowly. “You are amazing.”

“What the hell are you smoking? You just told me that you found out I’m your online troll. Well, good for you.” I raise my arms wide before letting them fall back down. “Here I am. I bet you hate my guts even more now. So. Yes, you’re right. I am Dudebro10. Yes, I took pleasure in killing you over and over in Warfront Heroes. I wish I could tell you I’m sorry, but…”

Jonas laughs again. “Kiki, no! I don’t need you to apologize. I just—god, how do I even describe it? When I found out it was you, it was like…” He rakes his fingers through his hair. “It’s so unbelievably romantic, right?”

“What?” I must be dreaming right now. This has all the hallmarks of a dream—sudden plot twists that make zero sense, me being stuck and powerless to do anything.

“Do you know how boring it is to be me?”

At this, my mouth quirks into a smile. “I do, actually. Probably mind-numbingly boring.”

Jonas rolls his eyes. “You know I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, like, being me…there’s not much that’s a challenge. Every girl would kill to date an Arifin. All of them so eager to please me.”

“Poor you, life is so tough.”

Jonas points at me. “See? This attitude right here, that’s what I like about you, Kiki. You’re not like all the other girls.”

Not like all the other girls. I’d like to find the asshole who normalized “Not like other girls” as a compliment and grind his stupid head into the dirt.

“You’re so strong and stubborn,” Jonas continues. “You don’t care about offending me. It’s so refreshing. You’re exactly the kind of girl I need in my life. And it’s pretty romantic, don’t you think? Classic enemies to lovers. You’re this strong, stubborn girl. I was your enemy, and you killed me in-game every night. But why were we always fighting? Because there are so many feelings simmering underneath.”

“The only feeling I have for you is revulsion, you privileged asshole!”

Jonas’s eyes narrow. “I don’t believe that. You don’t spend hours killing someone in-game over and over again unless you have some serious feelings for him.”

“Yeah, those feelings are called hate,” I cry. “And I don’t get it, Jonas. All this time, you’ve been calling me Crazy Kiki, and now you suddenly want to date me? I just—I don’t get it!”

“Really?” He looks genuinely confused. “How can you not get it? Isn’t it obvious?”

“Isn’t what obvious?”

“You know how when we were kids and if a boy liked a girl, he would pull her pigtails?” Jonas raises his eyebrows at me. There’s a moment of expectant silence as I gape at him.

“You’re saying…” I hesitate. “That this whole time, you…liked me?” The words sound so alien and wrong that I’m pretty sure I’m hallucinating.

Jonas shrugs. “Yeah, why not? You’re pretty cute, and I did find you intriguing, yes. I told you, before you, no one dared to ever question me. You’re refreshing.”

“You tormented me this whole time because you thought I was cute?” My words come out as a shocked whisper.

“Aww, Kiki, come on, I wouldn’t call it ‘tormenting.’ It was just a bit of teasing. Flirting, you could even call it.”

“I don’t think—no.” I take a deep breath. “Look, I don’t give a shit what your explanation is. The answer is still no.”

The warmth leaches out of Jonas’s face, but only for a moment, before a slow smile spreads across it. “Don’t you think the other kids would find it interesting that you, Crazy Kiki, have been bullying me online while disguised as a guy? I mean, if that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is.”

My mouth falls open. “But I—” Nothing else comes out, because what else is there to say? I have no idea how to defend myself, because yes, it sounds absolutely ridiculous. It sounds so bad when he puts it like that, and even if I were to convince myself that I wouldn’t care what the whole school thought of me, I care a lot what Liam would think. If he found out that I’m Dudebro10 from Jonas, it would look a thousand times worse than it is.

Jonas’s smile wanes a little at my horrified expression. “Hey,” he says quickly, “don’t look so terrified. Jesus, Kiki. I’m not a total asshole, okay?”

He is so completely in love with the image of himself as the hero of the story that he can’t see what a huge asshole he’s being. I very nearly snort out loud at him.

“Come on, just give me a chance. You’ll see that I’m a nice guy. You know how many girls would kill to have me as a boyfriend?”

“Said like a true nice guy,” I mutter with obvious resentment.

Jonas laughs. “See? This is what I like about you! So feisty. So sassy.”

“So patronizing. I don’t understand what’s in this for you. You said it yourself: girls are falling over themselves to date you. Why go for me?”

Jonas shrugs. “I like a challenge. Also, everyone at school basically worships me, and having you there obviously hating me is kind of a bummer, you know?”

That’s probably the realest reason he has for wanting to date me. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been so angry or disgusted by anyone before. “I’m not ‘a challenge,’ Jonas, I’m an actual living human.”

Jonas makes a tch sound. “You know what I mean. And I never shy away from challenges.”

A revolted shudder trembles through my entire body. I want to violently gag at him. But I know when I’m beat. I can’t have him tell everyone that I’m Dudebro, especially not Liam. For a moment, I squeeze my eyes shut, willing this day to end. I feel so utterly defeated, not a single atom inside me has any fight left. No way out. I can’t believe it, but I am going to have to enter into this deal with the devil. “No touching,” I manage to force out. “Absolutely nothing physical.” If I were forced to kiss Jonas, I would vomit all my organs right into his stupid face.

Jonas mimes a stab wound to his heart. Oh, if only it were a real stab wound. “Ye of little faith,” he moans. “Do you really think I would kiss a girl who isn’t into me?”

“Yes, actually.”

He pouts at me. “Okay, well, you’re wrong. I’m not like that. No physical contact, deal.”

I’m releasing a sigh of relief when he holds up his index finger.

“Except hand-holding.”

My head immediately whips back and forth. Ugh, the thought of having to hold his slimy hand…

“Hand-holding, because we are going to be a couple, and that’s only expected. And I’ve got great hand-holding skills. I don’t get sweaty palms, I’ve got huge hands….” He wiggles his eyebrows. Oh lord, kill me now. He holds out a hand toward me.

“Jonas, I’d rather chop off my right hand than have to hold yours.”

He grins. “See? And they say romance is dead.” Then he nods at his hand. “Take it.”

“Nope.”

“Seriously, Kiki. Unless you want everyone to know the truth about Dudebro.”

It’s truly amazing how quickly this sociopath switches from grinning romantic fool to coldhearted mercenary. My insides recoil as I reach for his hand, but I have to hand it—haha, hand it—to Jonas: he’s right about having decent hands to hold. Not that it makes this situation any less bad, but at least holding his hand doesn’t feel like I’m holding a frog. Then he gives my hand a friendly squeeze, and I instinctively yank it back. So gross. God, I hate everything about this. “And there needs to be a deadline. One week, then we’re done.”

“Two. Until the Spring Dance.”

Two weeks of dating Jonas Arifin. I squeeze my eyes shut. I can do this, to keep my online identity a secret. To keep my friendship with Liam from being destroyed. I nod.

“Cool,” Jonas says easily. “Well, I’ll get out of your way. I’ll pick you up for school Monday morning.” For one horrifying second, he starts to lean forward, as though he’s about to plant a kiss on my cheek, but at the last moment he catches himself with a laugh. “Sorry! Force of habit.” He raises his hands in an exaggerated I’m-so-harmless way and winks at me before sauntering out of the study. I hear Mami ask him why he’s leaving so soon, and he tells her he needs to study as she clucks over him, happiness bursting out of her every word.

Dear god, what the hell just happened?