Faked Love

Zac "Forget it," I shake my head, "I won't do it. Absolutely not. You can't just decide my life like that. I am grown up already." "Oh, is that you?" my father asked me with an amused look, while his voice remained serious. With this question I couldn't help but roll my eyes. He really couldn't mean that. After all, I was twenty-one years old and thus free to do whatever I wanted. Anyway, I handled it that way. So my parents couldn't really talk me into it anymore: "Yes, I am and have been for almost three years. So you could have noticed that slowly, Dad." My mother had followed the events quietly so far and had nodded her head in agreement at the highest level every now and then, which almost made me think that the whole thing was Dad's stupid plan again. So I was quite surprised when she suddenly spoke: "If you want to be considered an adult by us, you should start behaving yourself." Instinctively my eyebrows went up and put my head a little crooked. Actually, I had thought that I was doing exactly that, at least a little bit: "How do you know if I'm doing this or not? So I thought I had won and was about to rise from my seat, when my mother put a newspaper on the table and pushed it over to me. I let myself fall back on my chair and took a look at the front page. The first words alone were enough to make me feel really bad. However, I let the headline end anyway and slowly felt how hot I got. How did I make it back to the front page now? In thick, black letters the paper said 'From innocent boy to affair king: What's wrong with Zac Hayden?' On the outside I tried not to let anything show, while inside I admitted that I had scored an own goal with my words. However, I would not admit that in front of my parents. That would have been for the two nevertheless only a triumph and I simply could not allow that. Although I had never really been bad to my parents, I could not stand it when they wanted to use their position as adults to control my life. In the past it might have worked, but now they could really get rid of it. Especially when they asked me to do something like that right now. "So what? It's just an article. But that still doesn't justify what you want from me", I folded my arms in front of my chest and pushed the newspaper back to my parents. But I caught a glimpse of a word, or rather a name, that attracted my attention and made a cold shiver run down my back. Jules! It was clear that my damn ex affair would go straight to the press after I pushed her off the edge of her bed. "That's just one example," my mother said with eyebrows raised, "Lately you've been making far too many negative headlines." "Better bad than none," I replied without hesitation. It would be much worse for me to disappear completely from the public eye. "But that doesn't go on like that," my father stubbornly contradicted: "You cast a bad light on the family and we can't let that happen. Besides, you won't get any more jobs if things go on like this. Do you think the producers want someone who's always in disrepute?" I swallowed. The two were right to my regret in a certain way. The way they tried to put me back in the right light, however, was not at all what I had thought of. To be honest, I might have thought of one or two talk shows or a few performances at benefit events. But a fake girlfriend. No, I wouldn't have thought of that at all! Only people like my parents could come up with something like that. And which halfway reasonable girl would agree to such a thing? I answered this question by saying that they had probably picked out some famegeile, naive blonde who, to make matters worse, would probably be a huge fan of mine. I really couldn't explain it any other way. "I stick with my "no", with these words I got up: "Never in my life will I agree to this!