What would have happened if she just...stayed? What if she didn’t look away, didn’t go to leave Peter’s room just now? The thoughts followed Cat all the way until she tucked herself into bed, and kept her up far longer than she wanted to admit. Would he have kept staring at her, kept leaning closer? Would she have let him close the gap, press his lips against hers? Cat certainly didn’t think she’d stop him if it started….

Ugh, she was a terrible person. That much she had figured out by the time she wore an apron and handed coffee to other midterm-plagued people the next day. She spent so much energy thinking about these stupid what-ifs, when she got sweet messages from a guy she knew she liked, knew liked her back, who acted like it all the time and not just whenever it was inconvenient. A guy she was going on a date with. Well, a vocal date. And then a real date. And then...well. Please don’t be a creep, she kept repeating over and over again in her head. If Pumpkin turned out to be anything other than what he claimed...that’s it, she couldn’t trust anybody. She ensured throughout this whole time that he literally got nothing from talking to her. Why would someone work as hard as he did to talk to her so often if he didn’t actually like her?

You know, I was thinking, Pumpkin messaged her while she was on her break, as if thinking about him summoned him, that it’s kind of cool we’ve gone this long without knowing any personally identifiable details. That sounded strange. Cat replied with only a question mark. Like, you don’t know my past, my friends, nothing. You just know my thoughts. You like me for me, because that’s all you have to go off of. Hm. That was one way to think of it. And with you, there’s no barriers of other people around, no pressure of outside influence. I have no idea what you look like, but I know that you’re a beautiful person. She hated that her break was only fifteen minutes long. She hardly got a chance to stop herself from giggling at the message like a freak before she had to return back to work. She did, however, get a chance to reply.

Where’s all this coming from? she typed back. I mean, I agree a hundred percent, but this came out of nowhere.

Pumpkin didn’t reply until she was on her way to her midterm, and by then, she’d almost forgotten that she was waiting for him to reply.

Sometimes I don’t know how people think of me, Pumpkin answered as she settled into her chair for her exam. Like there’s all this...noise. I don’t know if I’m interpreting body language wrong, or if I miss-read something, or anything. But with you, I know. I was just thinking about that this morning. It’s nice. Oh, that was an understatement. While she kept herself awake at night wondering what Peter’s intentions or thoughts were, she could just hop onto Talkative and be straight with Pumpkin. He never yanked her around with several possibilities, or confused her with weird tones of his voice.

As the professor passed back the packets of questions, Cat let out a sigh of relief. Pumpkin was right. With Peter, there was a lot of extra baggage that made things foggy and unclear. So that was it: she wasn’t going to think about what-ifs anymore. She was just going to focus on what she knew.

And right now she was absolutely focused on the fact that she had only done half of the midterm, and the professor let out a bellow: “Twenty minutes left!”

Blinking and looking around the room, to Cat’s horror, made her realize she was being incredibly slow. A great sixty percent of the class had finished and left already. She had her cheat sheet, she had all of the ideas floating around her head, but now that she looked at the questions…. Well, sure, this question may have asked for a definition, but did it want an example? Would she look like she didn’t know what she was talking about if she just explained it without any numbers? And if she put in an example equation, what if she wrote it wrong?

Cat had only finished a grand total of eighty percent of the midterm by the time she was forced to hand it over. And in a very similar fashion to the first midterm, she found herself returning to her dorm room, drained, feeling sick to her stomach, and humiliated.

Not even Peter, a math major could help her.

Even though Cat wanted to do nothing but cry in her pillow at what a failure she was, she let Hannah convince her to join everyone for the last dinner before Spring Break. Kelsey seemed so excited that now it was getting even lighter and lighter during dinnertime, and upon hearing the news of what happened with Oscar last night, she squealed.

“Oh my gosh, finally! Things are looking up!” Ugh. Maybe for some people. While Cat stared at her Caesar salad, waves of shame continued to crash over her slumped shoulders. All of her friends continued to pour positivity at Peter, their hopeful predictions of the future relationship with Oscar.

“Actually, about that,” Peter interrupted, all smiles, “I know it only happened last night, but I have an update.” This caught Cat’s attention. She glanced up with just her eyes to find him looking at her, adjusting in his seat like an excited puppy.

“What kind of update?” she asked. Despite her best attempt, her voice didn’t sound as enthusiastic as she wanted it to. Maybe she helped reunite him with his brother in some small part, but she was too much of an idiot to pass a stupid math class. Maybe she could be a bounty hunter of sorts if she couldn’t handle college….

“Oscar’s going on a camping trip with some friends to Big Sur next week. I’m going to drive there and meet him for lunch when he’s done.”

“Big Sur?” Hannah echoed while the others let out various sounds of approval. “That’s, like, four hours of driving!” Peter only smiled in response. To hide her own, Cat turned her attention back to her lunch. He finally got to see his little brother. And all she had to do was pose in the wind for fake pictures and hand her phone over last night? If she could go back in time to tell herself not to freak out….

“All thanks to Cat!” Cam called, patting her shoulder. She shrugged his hand off with a scrunched nose.

“No, I hardly did anything. Peter was the one that had to catfish his brother.” Maybe there was a new word they could use instead of something as gross and illegal as catfish--which, despite all the taunting of having the name Cat granted her in life, she’d never seriously disliked her name until that word came up in earnest.

Peter’s laugh was a little louder than necessary. “I literally said two things to him. He asked if I was a bot, I said no and he asked for a phone number to prove it. I didn’t do anything.” Well, that was a relief, kind of. She didn’t think he would shamelessly flirt with Oscar to get him to call, though she didn’t even think about that possibility until now. Bullet dodged.

Cam straightened up in his seat to gesture to the table. “And who says catfishing is bad?”

“Oh my God, Cam!” Hannah smacked him in the arm, her laughter undermining her attempts to scold him.

Kelsey let out an exaggerated sigh. “It’s good that something good is finally happening to you, Peter.”

“Yeah,” Cam continued, “your life sucks.” Though the table let out soft chuckles, Peter punctuated his smile with a shrug.

“I don’t think so. I’m still really lucky. I have a lot of...privilege.” The conversation continued, but the words faded into the background. Peter searched for her eyes, amusement holding the weight of his dimples high on his cheeks. And, so quick she nearly missed it, he added a wink. She hardly had a chance to react before Kelsey rose from the table and held her arms out for hugs. It took several moments for Cat’s stomach to calm down before she could get up from her seat, and even longer for the tingling in her limbs to go away. Hannah’s farewells to their redheaded friend were loud enough to bring her to consciousness.

“Bye! Have fun in Hawaii! See you when you’re three foundation shades darker!”

Though Cat’s own cheeks were still a dark shade of red just from Peter’s glance. Thank goodness no one else paid any attention to her, and instead focused on cleaning up their dinner mess at the table. And even though she pretended to be engrossed in cleaning up after herself, she could distinctly feel the hairs on the back of her neck raise when it was time for everyone to part ways. He was testing her.

Maybe the pre-calc midterm wasn’t the only thing she failed.

Cat wasn’t all that thankful to have to work forty hours by the time she got to go home, but it did distract her from her roommate and other friends being gone, and from weird thoughts about Peter. Pumpkin did a good job of that, too, though the day she did have time to talk to him as much as she really wanted to, Wednesday, while she rode a bus home, he was busy and couldn’t talk. And when he was done with his Spring Break parties or whatever and could talk, she’d just arrived home and got thrown into catching up with her family.

And even though her heart ached to reconnect with him to the extent they used to, she prioritized her family. She only had a few days with them, and her little brother wasn’t on Spring Break, so time with him was also limited.

Though, had she known what he’d been up to, maybe she would have just stayed at school. Gabe’s stupid adventures made themselves known at dinner, right when Cat was handing the stone bowl of guacamole to her mom.

“So I heard you got your phone taken away at school today,” their mother said to him with a warning tone. “Texting during class again! Who are you texting all the time?” Gabe didn’t look like he minded being scolded, which was Cat’s first indication that he was about to get his Class A license and drive a bus over her.

“I’m actually quite glad you brought that up, Mother!” Gabe announced with a stupidly wide smile. Cat stared warily. “You see, I met this girl on Facebook that lives in SoCal. We’ve been talking a lot.” She now abandoned her dinner plate all together and joined her father in watching whatever weird performance this was.

“How did you meet this girl on Facebook?” their mom asked. And why did Cat feel like this was going to bite her in the ass somehow? Or that it had something to do with her friends? The fake profile, Catrina, didn’t say she was from SoCal. So why was Gabe just looking at her like that?

“Funny story about that,” Gabe continued. “You know how sometimes the Internet is listening and is all like, ‘You might know this person!’ and recommends them to be a friend because you mentioned them in passing, or suggests you buy deodorant because it calculated that the last time you bought it and it thinks you might run out soon?”

Their father finally spoke up. “Going to need to put out Missing Posters to find your point, there, son.” Cat offered a chuckle, but it died quickly when her brother stared at her from across the table.

"Well, I mention that because Facebook suggested I friend that girl I was talking to! And you know what I found out about her? Well, first of all, her name is Abigail Wood.” Cat’s face fell the more her brother smiled. “You know her, Cat? Oh, wait--no, you know her sister, Kelsey. She’s your friend, right?”

“Why are you talking to Kelsey’s little sister?” Cat’s tone darkened with every word.

“We have so much in common!” Gabe blurted. His giddiness was coming through. Oh, God. Abigail--Cat now remembered that Kelsey said she was going to ask Abigail to friend “Catrina” to make the page look more authentic. Cat gasped right as her brother continued, “And it turns out, so weird, that her sister asked her to friend this fake profile on Facebook to make it look real. You want to know something even weirder?”

“No,” Cat interrupted, ducking her head as she grabbed her fork. “Doesn’t sound interesting--”

“That fake profile had Cat’s pictures all over it!”

“What?” Their dad now decided to participate in the conversation a little more, now that their mother was shocked into silence.

“Shut up, Gabe--”

“Yeah!” He continued anyway, laughing, knowing that any consequences for his actions would expire once Cat left to go back to school morning after next. “Abigail said that Kelsey and her friends were making this fake Facebook profile, specifically to catfish some random guy.”

"No!” Cat’s fork clattered onto her plate. “That’s not what we were doing!”

“Catherine, what are you doing with a fake Facebook profile?” Mr. Ramos demanded.

“I wasn’t--”

“Catfishing!” Gabe repeated. “It’s when you make some poor schmuck fall in love with you and extort--”

“No!” Cat nearly shouted. “No, it’s not that, it was--”

“Really? You weren’t catfishing someone? With a fake name and fake hobbies?” Gabe fished in his pockets for his phone. “Because I’m fairly certain you are named Catherine Ramos, not Catrina Fallon.” As Gabe reached out to show their mother, Cat stood from her chair to lunge toward the phone, but Gabe pulled back last-second.

“Catherine!” their mother called. With a flinch, Cat sank back in her chair. “Explain yourself!” Ugh, what a shitty brother! What happened to “ride or die” or whatever? Now Cat wished she could go back in time and tell Peter he was better off without Oscar. Little brothers were nothing but traitors.

“Catherine,” their dad repeated. Cat sighed.

“I--I didn’t do anything but pose for pictures,” she started nervously, “and it wasn’t even my idea--” kind of. It kind of was. “But it’s not what it looks like--”

Mr. Ramos was growing impatient, voice taught with exasperation. “Who were you catfishing?”

Cat sighed. “I--my friend, he’s--he was--” She blinked several times and looked to the ceiling, slumped, heart low. Why did admitting this to her parents feel like she was betraying Peter? “He’s got a complicated home life, and needed a secret way to talk to his little brother.”

“That makes less sense than you being a scammer,” said Gabe as he retreated into his phone, tapping away with disinterest.

“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Ramos piped up. “Why can’t he just do it himself? Why did he need your pictures and a fake profile to do that?”

“Their dad, or--well, it was his dad--” Cat hesitated. “Turns out they aren’t fully brothers, and the dad got really--you know, got really pissed, and kicked him out and all that. Wouldn’t let them talk.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, it worked,” Cat said, shrugging. “Now they have a spot where they can talk again. No one is getting hurt from it. Everyone that’s friends with that profile knows it’s fake.” At least she thought so. She didn’t think Kelsey’s little sister would have such a big mouth.

“Isn’t that illegal?” Mrs. Ramos asked with wide eyes. “Did you break the law for this--?”

“No, I don’t...think...it is….” Cat’s lack of confidence earned her an annoyed sigh from her father.

“You need to delete that profile--”

“I don’t have any control over it. I told you, they just used my pictures.”

“So is it this guy?” Gabe flipped over his phone to show a picture of Cam. Cat rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Abigail said it was some blonde hunk.”

“What is a hunk?” Mrs. Ramos asked, leaning over to try and see her son’s phone. “Oh, that’s Cam, right? I’ve seen him in our Skypes!” She let out a small breath. “Ah, hunk. I see, yes!”

“It’s not Cam,” Cat muttered. Now her stomach swirled. “Aren’t you going to ground Gabe for getting his phone taken away?”

“Don’t change the subject!” he spat, eyes wide. “Besides, if you ground me and take my phone away, you’ll never see who Cat broke the law for!”

“I didn’t break the law!” She didn’t think. Maybe she should have Googled that first.

Mrs. Ramos still leaned over to Gabe to stare at his phone. “No computer or TV for the weekend. Who’s that?” Gabe clicked where his mother pointed.

“That’s got to be him. He’s blonde. He’s hunky. Is it this guy?” Cat shut her eyes before Gabe showed her the picture, but she knew who it was; he confirmed it by reading out his name. “Jerard Peter Leon. That’s a rich-boy sounding name. Hey, why aren’t you guys Facebook friends?”

“That name is familiar,” Mrs. Ramos said with a hum. “Have you mentioned him before?” Gabe shifted his phone for their dad to look at the picture.

“Oh! That guy! He’s the one that got Cat from that pond when she fell last year! I looked him up after!”

Cat’s eyes bulged. “You what?”

Mr. Ramos nodded. “Yes! He’s got a very wealthy family. Old money. The old oil rigs in SoCal. The ones the highways are named after. His family was in on that back in the day.”

“Oh, he is rich?” Gabe asked, taking his phone back. “Oh, or not, because he’s not related to his brother?”

Cat caught her head in her hands. “Can we eat dinner now?”

Mrs. Ramos laughed. “Elbows off the table and we’ll consider it, mi criminal pequeña!”