A Bad Day for Sunshine (Sunshine Vicram #1)(11)

“See?” she said as she walked to the front of the room. She looked back at the other two adults. “What’d I tell you?”

Auri hazarded a glance over her shoulder and saw that both adults wore pleased grins on their faces.

“That was beautiful,” one of them said. “Mrs. Ontiveros was right, Cruz. You’re very talented.”

The other woman agreed with a nod, but when Auri turned back to him, his expression was anything but grateful. Either he didn’t believe them or he didn’t care. He gave his head a quick shake to let his bangs fall over his eyes before he strode to his desk and slid into it.

But in the middle of the slide, when his body was still facing the classroom, he stopped for the span of a heartbeat to look at her. To lock gazes with her. He held it a hairbreadth longer than he should have, the startling intensity of his attention giving her a mild cardiac arrest.

Then he turned in his seat and faced the front as a couple of boys wearing red-and-gold letter jackets patted his shoulder, and a couple of girls wearing sweaters of the same colors graced him with adoring smiles. Again, he didn’t seem to want or need their praise, but he took it well.

Auri sat stunned while her heart restarted with heavy thumps against her rib cage, then spent the next five minutes trying to decipher the look he’d given her as another student read a poem about a girl who died after saddling a rocket and riding it to the moon.

She pondered his name. Cruz. She liked it. More to the point, it fit him, though she couldn’t reason why.

Forcing herself to look away, she took the next few minutes to scan the other students around her. Some she recognized from her summers in town, but she’d never really gotten to know any of the locals. Faces, yes, but that was as far as it went.

One girl who looked familiar, a pretty blonde, waved when she looked at her and wiggled in her seat with excitement, the smile she wore genuine, and Auri began to breathe a little easier. At least she had one friendly face to turn to.

Sadly, there were a couple of unfriendly faces sprinkled throughout the curious onlookers as well. Both of them seemed to be friends with Lynelle, the girl who’d taken the carving from the principal’s office. While Lynelle kept glancing Auri’s way, her smile not friendly so much as calculating, her friends glowered outright and kept on glowering through three more poetry readings.

All of this because they thought she’d narced? There had to be more to it than that. They could cool the Sahara with the kind of shade they were throwing her way.

Lynelle leaned over and whispered something to Cruz. One corner of his mouth lifted in response, and another kid, a jock named Liam Eaton, shoved him from behind playfully.

She knew Liam’s name because everyone knew Liam’s name. He was rich. And cute. And rich.

“Anyone else?” Mrs. Ontiveros asked. “You guys had two weeks to come up with your masterpieces. Surely, someone else—”

A knock at the door interrupted the teacher mid-lecture, and before she could get to the door, the principal walked in with a security guard in tow.

He spoke softly with Mrs. Ontiveros, whose worried gaze flitted across the room and landed on Auri. She froze for the second time that day.

“Aurora Vicram?” the principal said.

Auri hesitated, then offered the barest of nods. Neither man looked happy to be there.

Then, in a tone that could slice concrete, he said, “You need to come with us.”

Auri couldn’t move at first. Flames engulfed her, and it took her a moment to gather her backpack and start out of her seat. She wouldn’t have dared a look around her if not for the giggling squeak that came from one of the two girls.

She glanced over. Lynelle’s smile had gone from calculating to lethal, and Auri knew she was in trouble. Payback was a bitch, and they felt they needed retribution for the raid.

Just as she got to the door, she couldn’t help herself. She glanced over her shoulder at the boy. Cruz. The poet. The one with dark hair and a full mouth that made hers water in response. But if anger had the ability to shape-shift into human form, she imagined it would look just like him at that moment.

Apparently, the entire school wanted to see her hang.


“Mayor,” Sun said as she put the box on a massive oak desk. The room had bookshelves, a computer, and a fortysomething, sandy-haired woman who sat in the only chair in the room. Sun’s office chair.

Mayor Donna Lomas stuffed her phone into her purse and stood, giving Sun her full attention. “Sheriff.”

Donna was curvy with a button nose, a bouncy bob, and square wire-framed glasses. She was that girl in town all the other girls wanted to be when they grew up. Pretty. Perky. Popular.

The two shook hands for the briefest of moments before the mayor got right to the point. “So, how’d you do it?”

Sun cleared her throat and walked to the window to look out on Main Street. “Well, I wanted to be bold, you know? So, I went for the red first, but then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Is that too bold? Should I tone it down a bit?’ That’s why I threw in the yellows and the blues. A few peaches to highlight the piece.”

She turned back. When Donna only pursed her lips and waited, Sun continued, “Weren’t you talking about that time I beat your little sister in the finger-painting competition?”

There had been a lot of pressure that year. Who knew kindergarten could be so competitive? Her classmate Sabrina, a.k.a. Donna’s little sister, had never liked her after that, and Sun had felt that same chill every time she’d crossed paths with Donna as well.