lurk near the ladies’ restroom. I order a surprisingly good burger and surprisingly bad fries.
Lachlan carefully brushes crumbs from his lap, frowning at a ketchup stain on his button-down shirt. He’s left his tailored suits behind in Los Angeles, and packed jeans and sneakers instead.
“Your name is…” he suddenly says.
“Ashley Smith.” The name still feels sticky in my mouth, unwilling to roll off my tongue despite the time I spent in front of the mirror, practicing. “Ash for short. And you’re Michael O’Brien, my devoted boyfriend. You worship the ground I walk upon.”
“As well you deserve.” His expression is wry. “Your hometown is…”
“Bend, Oregon. And you are on sabbatical from teaching…”
“English 101, Marshall Junior College.” He smiles at this, apparently amused by the notion of guiding the youth of tomorrow. “Am I a good professor?”
“The very best. Beloved by your students.” I laugh along with him, but really, I think he would have made a very good teacher in another life. He has a good ear for articulation and the patience required for the long con. And isn’t that what a college education is, after all? It’s the longest con of all: a promise that leaves your pockets empty and rarely deposits you where it says you’ll land. But maybe Lachlan’s talents are more suited for one-on-one tutoring—intense and focused and intimate. The way he’d once tutored me.
Together, we have studied Vanessa’s Instagram page, using the thousands of photos and captions she’s posted there as a road map of her vulnerabilities. She often poses with classic novels, using Anna Karenina or Wuthering Heights as a prop while she’s lying on the beach or sitting at a café. Clearly, she wants to be perceived as intelligent and creative. So Lachlan will become a writer and a poet, will appeal to her as an “artistic soul.” As for her recent turn to inspirational quotes: She is attempting to be deep and grounded, perhaps as a counterbalance to the frivolousness of all that couture. So I will be a yoga teacher, the Zen ideal to which she aspires.
She’s lonely; we will offer friendship. And then there’s the matter of all those come-hither poses, the glittery little minidresses and the bikini shots. “She wants to be desired, obviously,” Lachlan offers. “I’ll flirt with her. Just a little. Keep her interested.”
“Not in front of me, or she’ll think you’re a cad.”
He smears a fry in ketchup, forks it into his mouth, winks. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
And one critical, final touch: Lachlan will pretend to be from old money, a ginned-up family heritage back in Ireland that will be difficult for her to verify. The rich are always the most comfortable around their own kind: Familiarity breeds affection.
We seeded the Internet with our new identities before we left town: A Facebook page for “Ashley,” jammed full of inspirational quotes from Oprah and the Dalai Lama, and photos of women in contortionist yoga poses that I skimmed off other websites. (Plus: A thousand “friends” bought for a mere $2.95.) A professional website, advertising my services as a private yoga instructor. (Safe enough since I’ve sweated through enough Bikram classes in Los Angeles to be able to fake it.) “Michael” got a personal Web page with clips of his writing (lifted from the home page of an unpublished experimental novelist from Minnesota), plus a LinkedIn bio listing his teaching credentials.
The whole thing took less than a week. This is what the Internet has given my generation: the ability to play God. We can make man in our own image, birth an entire human being out of nothing at all. All it takes is a spark, flung out there somewhere alongside the billions of other websites, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts: just one profile, a photo and a bio, and suddenly an existence has flamed into life. (It is also much, much harder to snuff that existence out once it’s been created, but that’s another story altogether.)
The odds are slim that Vanessa will ever see how diligently we’ve worked on our social media profiles for her sole benefit. There are thousands of other Michael O’Briens and Ashley Smiths online; it will be difficult for her to locate