Run, Girl (If You Can)

Chapter 181: Rico y Reencarnado

Keeley still wasn't sure she believed that the woman Aaron had gotten engaged to was actually Aiden. She wanted to ask her neighbor but nobody answered the door after several tries. Maybe he really was out of the country.

She sent him a text as she waited for one of her classes to start but didn't get a reply for another two hours.

'That traitor!! He promised not to tell!!!!'

That pretty much confirmed it for her. He wouldn't have used so many exclamation points if he wasn't genuinely upset. So he had been telling the truth after all.

What did it matter if he was honest or not? He had still lied about too many things to count. She couldn't trust him. And yet, he was oddly dependable in other ways.

This week all three of the things she had said sounded good before she left for California had arrived at her lab right on time. Today it was a calzone.

"You have the best boyfriend," Erica said dreamily when she came back after eating it in the hallway. "I wish mine were nearly as considerate as yours. He hasn't visited me at the lab once."

"He's not my boyfriend."

Her coworker looked at her like she was the world's biggest liar and put her hands on her hips. "No regular friend would ever go that far for a girl. If he isn't your boyfriend yet, he wants to be."

Keeley couldn't refute that. Aaron had made his intentions clear. He wanted to be the kind of husband he hadn't been before. Pigs would fly before that happened though—she wasn't about to fall for that again.

He didn't have a real desire to be with her; he was only assuaging his own guilt. At this point she doubted he had ever really wanted her around at all. It was sheer stubbornness and rebelling against his father.

"He feels obligated to make sure I'm eating properly but that's really it," she said flatly. "He feels guilty about something that happened a long time ago."

Erica raised an eyebrow. "I wouldn't be so sure about that. Guilt only goes so far."

"Change of subject, please. How's your research coming?"

She sighed dramatically, not wanting to let the subject drop. "Slowly but surely. You're a lot further along than I am."

She was a year behind Keeley in school so she was barely starting her dissertation research on whether or not genome sequence data could be used to understand the evolution of the influenza virus.

She wasn't sure whether or not it was something she wanted to pursue on a permanent basis; it was just the first idea she came up with because she was desperate two days before her topic proposal was due. Not everyone could be as specific in what they wanted to study as Keeley.

"You'll get there," Keeley said confidently. "We're both going to graduate on time and become rock stars in the field of genetics."

She snorted. "Sure. Rock stars."

Believing that she would succeed in this field was the only way she got through the endless mind-numbing hours in the lab and all of the late nights studying and writing papers. None of this would be worth it otherwise.

She had to find a cure for kids like Kaleb even if it took her whole life to get there. That thought sustained her through the rest of her shift at the lab. She was ready to go home and take a break for an hour or so before tackling her homework.

Valentina was hanging out in the living room when she arrived and waved her over excitedly. "Ooh, you're here just in time! Your telenovela's first episode airs in eight minutes! I was worried you were going to miss it."

She had completely forgotten it was coming out today though she was sure Valentina had told her at some point. Her brain was scrambled these days.

Rico y Reencarnado had been in production nonstop for the past couple of months. She still couldn't believe there was actually a TV show based on her life now. No one would ever know.

Well, Aaron might think it was a strange coincidence if he watched it but when would he ever watch a telenovela? The odds were incredibly slim.

Keeley settled down on the couch next to her roommate and waited for the opening credits to begin. This should be interesting.

The opening song didn't have subtitles so she had no idea what they were saying but there were dramatic glamor shots of each of the main characters with their hair blowing in the wind as the actors' names were displayed, among other things.

It looked like her father, Alistair, and Max had made it into the show after all. Jeffrey and Lydia too. Lacy had also had a large posse of mean girls who hadn't been mentioned in her original proposal.

Something she saw that she already didn't like was that Luz and Aaron were seen kissing passionately in their school uniforms in the intro.

Great. So they were going to make this a romance rather than a revenge story.

Submitting this had been a mistake. Valentina would expect her to watch it all the way through because it was her idea without realizing that what she was seeing on the screen would be poking at a wound.

Right there near the end of the opening credits were the words 'personajes creados por Keeley Hall.' Characters created by Keeley Hall. They included her after all.

The first scene took place in a grand Spanish-style villa after a camera panning the grandeur of the estate outside. Older Luz and Aaron (played by different actors than the main ones) were arguing in the living room.

Keeley had to read the subtitles to know what was going on but they followed a fairly familiar script to the last conversation she had with her ex-husband before she died.

The main difference was that when Aaron said that Lacy's character was pregnant, Lorena appeared on screen. How exactly had she gotten into the house? Telenovela logic was weird.

Lorena wrapped her arms around Aaron's neck and kissed it before laughing evilly as Luz ran out of the house crying. The actress really was too dramatic.

She ran into the street without looking because she was crying too hard (Keeley hadn't been that stupid, okay?) and got run over by a delivery truck.

Keeley was surprised they changed the story until she saw that Max's counterpart Ignacio was the one driving it. Why was he posing as a deliveryman?

This was weird. This was so weird. She wanted to stop watching but was oddly hooked.