「故事·听力」I Had A Fake Boyfriend But My Friends Found It Out
I Had A Fake Boyfriend But My Friends Found It Out
This is Lily, and she has something to confess: she lived a lie for several months.
By the time she turned 16, all of her friends already had boyfriends. This was all they talked about – boyfriend “this” and boyfriend “that”, blah blah blah. She was the only one without a boyfriend, and they sometimes made fun of her for that, and so she felt like a total loser compared to them.
One day, they asked her yet again, “hey Lily, you still don’t have a boyfriend?” And she then did something very stupid. She should have said “no, I don’t”, but instead, she said “yeah, I do, he’s great!” That was a big mistake, because they immediately started to ask questions: “what’s his name? What’s he like? Is he cute?” She had to improvise, so she came up with an answer on the spot: “uhhh, he’s called Dan. He’s...very nice, he’s into, um, hockey…” God, it was so embarrassing! But suddenly...they all changed their attitude towards her. They stopped mocking her and no longer acted like she was the least cool girl of the group. Finally!
The next day, when they started discussing their boyfriends again, she realized that they would eventually ask her about “Dan” as well, so she had to lie again and talk about how they had gone to a concert – and of course, they asked her what concert and a thousand other questions. After this, Lily started to plan everything in advance, like where she and Dan were the previous evening, what he was like and how their relationship was progressing. In a weird way, Dan felt like a real person!
Soon, just talking about “Dan” wasn’t enough. Her friends asked her to show them his photos, messages, and other stuff like that. So she had to find pictures of some cute guy online and make social media profiles. Of course, she made all the accounts private so they couldn’t check his profile. Lily spent a lot of time writing messages to herself from Dan to make him seem real. At some point, the girls even got a little bit jealous because Dan was so much better than their boyfriends. They would say things like, “I wish my boyfriend were a bit more like Dan”. Of course, because there was no Dan!
Next, they started to ask her a real tough question: “how come you don’t have any pictures together with Dan?” So guess what she had to do? If you guessed “Photoshop pictures of Lily and Dan together”, then you’re right! She spent hours and hours trying to learn Photoshop just to make believable photos of her and Dan. When her friends decided to go somewhere to hang out, she had to decline, because she was “with Dan” – while in reality she was trying to make those stupid fake photos.
At some point, even photos were no longer enough. Her friends seemed to become suspicious; they asked why they had never seen Dan. She had to lie again, saying something about him living far away, so it was tricky for them to see each other. But now they knew something was wrong, because earlier she had often said to them that they met every day.
It HAD to stop! She couldn’t tell them the truth, so instead she started to plan...their break-up! But what could her perfect Dan do that would lead them to break up?
After thoroughly thinking through the options, she came up with the story that Dan had cheated on her with another girl. She hoped that this would not only put an end to the constant lies, but also make the girls feel sorry for her. The next day, she told the girls her sob story about how Dan had secretly been dating another girl all this time, and that was why he was so perfect all the time – he felt guilty. She expected her friends to comfort her, but instead...they started to laugh.
It turned out that they knew that she had been lying for a few weeks already. They noticed that she was was logged in from Dan’s Facebook, but decided to keep silent to see how far she would go. She was so embarrassed that she ran away and tried to keep out of sight for a few days. After some time had passed, she apologized for lying and asked if they could still be friends. They said yes, but of course they now made fun of her and “Dan” every day.
Lily decided that she would NEVER lie to her friends again. The worst part of it all was that she could have spent the time searching for an actual boyfriend instead of spending hours on an imaginary one. If there is one good thing to come out of it all, it’s that she’s now pretty good at Photoshop.