Rent a Boyfriend - Gloria Chao Page 0,6

his Lamborghini, Sheila, which he named after the model who rolls around naked on top of a Lamborghini in some music video”). For the Wangs, it also didn’t hurt that Hongbo’s family was stupid rich due to the success of their tech company, No One Systems, which was, according to Jing-Jing, “thriving despite its founders not realizing that the period in No. One is important and that No One means something else.” (I may have laughed reading that part.)

In her desperation to escape dating “one of my former bullies,” Jing-Jing had lied about already having a perfect boyfriend. Her parents had agreed to give the supposed love of her life a chance—one chance—so enter Rent for Your ’Rents. Enter me. My mission (should I choose to take it, which, yes, I obviously did) was to win over the Wangs and make them feel secure enough in Jing-Jing’s and my loving relationship to turn down the heir of No One Systems. Which meant that on this job, Andrew Huang had to be rich and successful, with a bright enough future to rival Hongbo’s. Given how the Wangs had reacted to my parents’ jobs plus my UChicago education and potential doctor future, we were right on course.

I was helping her. Providing a much-needed service. Without Rent for Your ’Rents, what would she have done? She’d mentioned in her application that talking to her parents wasn’t working, that they were convinced they knew better for her future than she did (man, did I know what that was like), so in some ways this position was honorable and not sleazy or a joke, right?

I wriggled around, trying to find that comfortable spot—you know the one, where you sink down so far it feels like you’re melting. But I couldn’t find it. My couch-bed was beautiful (burgundy leather, button-tufted, rolled arm), but it wasn’t made for melting. Or any sort of comfort, really. Too cold to the touch, and not broken in enough to conform to my body at all. It matched the rest of this house in its clean, minimalist, not-quite-lived-in style. Sterile, like a dentist’s office. The house was spacious for Palo Alto and the ridiculous pricing, but in another city it would have been on the smaller side for a family with two working dentists, I was guessing. Perhaps that explained the modernist approach to the interior design—an attempt to make it grander than the size and layout inherently were.

All in all, it wasn’t the best or worst couch I’d slept on for a job. The jackpot was getting a king-size bed to myself, which had happened twice, and the range for other jobs had included bunking with a younger sibling, an air mattress on the floor, and even a sleeping bag in the dog’s room (Denny was very friendly and cuddled me as I slept).

As I tossed and turned that night, I told myself it was because I was missing my Froot Loops pillow, the little one with the faded Toucan Sam that I liked to hug when I slept. The one my little brother, Jordan, had given me so long ago you could barely make out Sam’s eyes now. I hadn’t seen Jordie since my falling-out with my parents, and the most we caught up these days was exchanging Are you okay? and I’m fine texts once at the start of every month (a.k.a. the most he felt he could do without ruining his relationship with our parents too). Jordie was currently three months into his freshman year at Berkeley (the golden sheep to my black), and three quarters of the time I was glad I had dropped out of college so that he could afford to go now and do more with it, like study computer science instead of art history.

Maybe some late-night pie would help me sleep. Except, that was a creepy thing to do in a stranger’s house. Even if I were her boyfriend, or maybe especially if I were her boyfriend, I wouldn’t want to make myself too at home and overstep the imaginary boundary. Or perhaps I was oversensitive because of my first client, Michelle. Less than an hour into the job, I’d used the fancy soaps in the bathroom, only to be screamed at by Michelle’s mother. Apparently, those “display-only” soaps (which, in my defense, had been located closer to the sink than the regular soap) had been in her family for fucking generations, as if that were a thing. Not that I’d know—the