KIRA
Seven Years Later
“Friendships are a lot like kindergarten art projects: without glue, they all fall apart.” Surprisingly, my father had said that. Granted, he’d also gone on to rant about how he never understood the stigma of eating glue and how scented glue sticks could have been like candy if people only tried them. It was always a little bit shocking that the man had ended up becoming a mayor, even if it was of a small town in rural North Carolina.
What he said had stuck with me. The first part, at least.
Maybe that was why I couldn’t help feeling like my friends and I were growing apart. Our promise to stay away from the Kings had brought us back together all those years ago, and it had held us together since. The Kings had left right after high school to launch some tech company out in California. Unfortunately for us, they’d found enough success and money that they had become billionaires and they had become national celebrities. Their shocking good looks, antics, success, and money made them household names. Go figure. When you made a solemn vow and 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.
She turned her eyes on me, expression growing serious. Iris always saw straight through me, and she clearly could read my stress. “You’re going to be fine, Kira. Those kids are going to love you. You’re impossible to hate. You’ve got that innocent little small-town librarian thing going on.”
“What the hell?” I asked, half-mad and half-amused. “It’s only seven in the morning, and you already get the award for the most backhanded compliment of the day.”
“You can be butt hurt all you want. Librarians are hot. Especially when they have sweater puppies.” She yanked her nightstick from her belt and jabbed at my boobs with it.
I laughed, dodging and swatting it away. “I’m going to call your boss and get that thing taken away from you.”
She did a stylish twirl of the stick and slid it back into her belt without looking. “Call my boss? I am the law, bitch. So leave a message.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s impressive. The part where you can say that with a straight face.”
She cracked a smile and shrugged. “I’ve been practicing. The guys at the station aren’t really taking me seriously, so I’ve been practicing my tough faces in the mirror.”
Iris’s voice was light, but I thought I sensed a touch of real sadness there. The bell above the door jingled again. Iris and I were the only ones who turned to see Miranda walking in. She had always been a good dresser, even back in our school days. She had a way of finding creative ways to put together ordinary clothes. Thanks to her new job, she also had the money to straight-up buy fancy clothes. Of course, she managed to wear them well, too, which normally drew all sorts of eyes everywhere she went.
I was surprised when nobody in the gossiping crowd at the other end of the store seemed interested.
Miranda skipped ordering a coffee and joined us at the table. Her blonde hair was in perfect order, as usual, and tied into a braid she wore to one side. It had the enviable effect of making her look like some sort of Amazon warrior. She glanced between the two of us like she was waiting for us to say something.
“What?” I asked.
“You guys have heard, right?” Miranda asked.
My eyes went to the gossiping crowd for the hundredth time. “I literally walked straight from my house and plopped down at this table. No pit stops and no phone. So no, I haven’t heard anything except my stomach grumbling, because you assholes think thirty minutes is fashionably late.”
“They’re coming,” Miranda said.
I didn’t even know who she was talking about, but the tone of her voice and the look on her face made my stomach clench. “Who is coming?” I asked, a little annoyed by the theatrics of saying something like that and waiting for the obvious question.
“Hemorrhoids?” guessed Iris. “We’re getting closer to thirty. They say that’s when you really have to be careful. No more than five minutes on the toilet and definitely no straining.”
I gave her a disgusted look.
“What?” she asked. “Google it.”
“The Kings,” Miranda said. “All of them. Not just them either. The entire crazy tribe is coming. Mom and Dad. Media. Probably a wagon of ex-girlfriends. Here,” she added, tapping her finger on the table.
“To Bradley’s?” Iris asked.
Miranda shot her a look. “No. To West Valley. Here,” she said again.
“Why would they come here?” I asked. I wore the perpetual creased-eyebrow look of somebody who was hoping to argue their way out of the inevitable.
“Yeah,” Iris said. “They’ve been perfectly happy in California all this time. It was like they couldn’t leave West Valley fast enough after high school. I don’t buy it. Not until I see them with my eyes.”
“Buy it or not, they’re coming,” Miranda said. “They’re building a new headquarters for Sion, and they’re putting it here.” She tapped the table again, like she couldn’t say the word here without both a whisper and a tap.
I shook my head, still frowning. “No. Silicon Valley is like a mecca for tech giants. Have you ever heard of a Google headquarters in North Carolina? Where would they even find employees?”
“When is this happening? Allegedly, that is,” Iris said.
“Any day? I don’t know. It’s just all over the local news. They announced it last night. And think about it. That massive construction site they’ve been working on out in the hills? The one everybody was having so much fun speculating about a few months back? I think I have a pretty good guess what it’s going to be.”
I was rapidly working my way through the five stages, starting with denial and moving to anger. “What gives them the right?” I demanded. “They want to turn our hometown into a circus? Is that it? They didn’t get enough satisfaction from all the shit they pulled in high school?”
Iris whipped out her nightstick and started stroking it in a way I thought was probably unconscious. Her fingertips ran down its length, and her eyes were distant. I knew she was visualizing some kind of beating.
“We need to agree again,” Miranda said. “The promise still stands, right?”
“Of course it does,” I said.
“Like it matters,” Iris scoffed. “There’s probably going to be an influx of supermodels applying for any and every part-time job they can find around town in the next few days. It’s going to be like a hunting ground around here, and the target will be the King brothers. If you think they’ll even remember us, you’re kidding yourselves.”
“She’s probably right,” I said. “If you made billions of dollars and dated celebrities, would you still be thinking back on high school drama? Would you even give any of us a second glance? No offense to us, of course.”
Miranda shook her head. “It matters. We need to all swear it again. No matter what, we won’t date the Kings.”
I watched her, feeling my stomach lurch at the memory of the last time we swore. I nodded. “I still swear it. No matter what,” I said.
“I swear it,” Iris agreed.
Miranda breathed out, then puffed up like the life was suddenly returning to her. In seconds, the in-control businesswoman was back. “Well, I’ll grab coffees and some food for that rumbling belly of yours.”
I sat back in my chair and stared at the table, mind racing. Five minutes ago, my biggest concern was how I’d avoid embarrassing myself in front of my students. Now I had to wonder what was going to happen when the Kings came storming into West Valley like horsemen of the apocalypse—except these horsemen didn’t bring plague and pestilence. They brought ladyboners, bad decisions, and enough money to make my head spin.
I was being dramatic, though. And Iris was right. It wasn’t as if they’d remember us, let alone be interested if they did. I’d be fine. We would be fine.