Anyone But Rich(Anyone But... #1) - Penelope Bloom Page 0,2

filled it with a bunch of “even if” clauses, you didn’t really expect every last one of them to come true.

The way things had turned out also made our promise seem silly. It wasn’t like back then, when we had to hold each other accountable. The Kings weren’t walking the halls of our school and parading right in front of our faces day after day. Now they were just gorgeous faces on tabloid magazine racks in the grocery store checkout. They were occasionally spotlighted on TV, but they were as distant and untouchable as Brad Pitt and Ryan Reynolds. Pretending we had to even think about trying not to date them was beyond silly.

To make matters worse, we’d all been struck by adulthood. That inexorable internal shift when people started judging the success of a day by how productive they were instead of how much fun they had. Fun was the enemy, and it was only allowed if the production quota was met. Our common interests were dying a slow death, and it was becoming more and more clear that we were clinging to the last, decaying wisps of the promise.

I let out a long sigh through my nose, because that wasn’t as dramatic as a mouth sigh. I was sitting at our usual table by the windows in Bradley’s, a local-bakery-slash-coffee-shop-slash-comedy-improv-venue-slash-gossip-nexus for the entire town. A dose of routine felt good when everything else was changing, and Bradley’s for coffee before work was our routine.

As a longtime eavesdropper, I saw all the signs that some particularly juicy bit of news was circulating throughout the store. I knew it had to be something good, because Landry Miller had actually set down his newspaper and hobbled all the way across the restaurant to lean into the conversation. There would’ve been no shame in getting up to listen in, but I wasn’t in the mood today, no matter how interesting the news was.

Tomorrow, I had to find a way to stand in front of classrooms full of high school seniors and try not to make a fool of myself. Seven times in a row. Yay for the seven-period school day.

I was almost driven out of my disinterest when I heard a collective gasp from the gossipers and saw a few wide eyes. What the hell are they talking about? I was usually disappointed by what passed for juicy gossip in West Valley. I’d seen the same group of people practically frothing at the mouth when somebody caught Franklin Moore with one of his sheep. It didn’t help that Franklin had tried to defend himself by saying it was actually a goat. As it turned out, his wife didn’t care much which it was, and she promptly left him. The real kicker was when her divorce lawyer managed to get her custody of the goat, and it had been revealed that the goat was a male.

Thinking back, I realized that had actually been a pretty juicy story. It made me want to get up and dive into the gossip circle even more, but then I saw Iris come in through the front door. Rumors could wait a little while longer.

The bell above the entrance gave a half-hearted jingle to announce her presence, but nobody so much as turned to look at who had come in. I distantly wondered if it was the Frank-and-farm-animal-romance saga part two that had everyone so transfixed. Maybe he’d moved on to bigger game—cows and horses, beware.

Iris was clad in her police uniform. She had graduated from the academy four months ago, and now she even got to carry around a gun. I still wasn’t quite used to the girl I grew up with packing heat instead of soccer cleats, but we’d all changed, and I had a feeling the differences were only going to continue to grow.

Iris sat down before getting herself a coffee. She flashed me a quick, friendly smile. She had her black hair trimmed short in a pixie cut, and her cute pointed chin made it somehow both adorable and sexy. I knew she was always trying to look more tough to fit in with the guys at the station, but unfortunately, she was blessed and cursed with highly feminine features.

“Something big going on today?” she asked with a nod toward the crowd of people at the other end of the store.

“Something,” I said.

She turned her eyes on me, expression growing serious. Iris always saw straight through me, and she clearly could read my stress.