Just the thought of squeezing my body into something like that made me feel like a sausage. It wasn’t a pleasant visual.
Ty’s phone rang, so he dropped the heels on the mattress next to me and handed the dress to one of the women from the army he’d brought in to help him. Apparently, they didn’t speak English, although I suspected it was an excuse they used to avoid dealing with my sister.
“There, practice walking in those,” he said while staring at his cell and moving toward the door. Based on the way he walked with his butt cheeks clenched, I assumed it was Tiff calling. That became even more apparent when he waited until he was in the hall to answer.
Ignoring the heels next to me, I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and called Dave. He’d been my roommate since college, so it was weird not to have him here. He said he would come stay with me when he could, but he wouldn’t be able to take that much time off work to stay the entire two or three months. Not to mention, seven hours was a long way to drive one way, so being here every weekend didn’t make sense. Then there was the camera crew to consider—Dave said he’d pretend to be my servant, but Ty said no.
“Hey, boo.” His chipper voice flooded the line and filled me with a sense of home. It was something I desperately needed. “Hang on a sec, ’kay?”
As I listened to him talk to the kids at the youth center where he worked, I reminisced about my own job and the reasons I’d even accepted this deal to begin with. Thanks to the non-disclosure agreement I had to sign, I couldn’t tell anyone the truth about where I’d be or why I’d be gone. Dave had to sign one as well. When it came to my job, I had to tell them that I had a family emergency. Really, all I had to do was show them a picture of my sister and tell them she’d been beaten up and mugged; they gave me the time off without asking any questions. Like Tiffany had quipped…I was an assistant manager for a video game store. It wasn’t like they’d fall apart without me.
The main reason I’d agreed to carry on this façade was to help the youth center. While it provided kids with a more structured environment, it didn’t exactly reach the nerds. Those kids who’d just sit at the tables and twiddle their thumbs because nothing at the center was of interest to them. Dave and I could relate, because we used to be them. There was no way you’d catch either of us on a basketball court or running track when we were kids. But the center refused to provide the money to create an arcade room or computers, and neither Dave nor I had extra funds to make it happen.
I was only able to do so much—I’d donated old consoles or defective products from the store where I worked that could be fixed for cheap, but that only went so far. If there weren’t enough controllers or games, the kids wouldn’t come. That was the bottom line. So when Ty had offered that monthly allotment, I’d been caught between a rock and a hard place. I needed that money to open an arcade for the center.
“You still there?” He came back on the line.
Hearing Dave’s voice was enough to calm me down, but hearing him at work gave me the incentive I needed to keep moving forward. Even if that meant I had to move forward, sucked deep into the Spanx that could rearrange my organs and heels, which would likely cause me to break my neck.
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know…you’re supposed to be Tiff, and I doubt she’d wait around for anyone.”
I belted out a pretentious chuckle. “Oh, darling, Tiffany Lewis wouldn’t have called you in the first place. Don’t you know that you’re well beneath her?”
“Yet another perk for being gay—I’ll never be beneath your sister.”
My obnoxious humor quickly transformed into sincere laughter as I was reminded of our younger days. Dave used to always say that Tiffany made him gay—that she had solely turned him off so much she’d successfully turned him off all females. And she used to claim that he became gay to be more like her—which was where the rumor of him wearing her clothes had stemmed from.
They had a hate-hate relationship. Absolutely no love involved.
That’s probably why we’d always gotten along so well.
“How’s it going over there? Are you having fun being a rich snob yet?”
I groaned and rolled onto my back. If there was one good thing that came from taking over Tiff’s life, it was this bed. Seriously, it had to have been made from clouds imported from heaven. “You know…in theory, impersonating a pretentious elitist sounds fun, but in reality, it’s quite the opposite.”
“I’m sure a few cabana boys could turn that around for you.”
When all else failed, at least I could trust Dave to cheer me up. “They’re literally turning me into a carbon copy of my sister.”
He hummed into the receiver for a moment. “Hate to break it to you, Tosh, but that’s kind of what you signed up for. If they only wanted someone who sort of resembled Tiffany, I’m pretty sure they’d have their pick of the litter at any local Botox treatment facility. Or hair salon. Or—”
“I got it, Dave.” Whose side was he on, anyway? “I’m well aware that I need to look and act like Buffy when I’m out and about, or when they start filming this stupid TV
