Anyone But Rich (Anyone But..., #1)(2)

“You get that, Kira?” asked Iris. “That can be your front-page story for the next school paper. Miranda Collins has a disfigured, terrifying asshole.”

Miranda rolled her eyes, but she was still smiling. “Just make sure you put an asterisk after that sentence. And her name is Iris.”

“You named your asshole after Iris?” I asked.

Miranda threw up her hands and shook her head. “I thought this was supposed to be some kind of cease-fire meeting. You two are just teaming up on me and my poor asshole.”

Her words reminded us all why we’d come to Overlook Point and of everything that had happened. Nobody was smiling anymore.

“I had an idea,” I said. “It won’t fix what happened, but I think it’s the best way to move forward.”

Iris nodded. “I know what you’re going to say, and you’re right. We leave the gas on in their house and then lob cherry bombs in the window. If science doesn’t let us down, only their teeth will survive the explosion.”

I stared at her. “Surprisingly, that wasn’t what I was about to say.”

Iris shrugged. “If your idea isn’t good, we’re going with mine.”

“I hope your idea is good,” Miranda said, “because I’m scared by how much I like this cherry bomb plan.”

“I say we make a pact. We all swear that no matter what, even if the King brothers come begging us for forgiveness on their knees, even if they end up becoming megafamous billionaires, we’ll never date them again. No matter what.”

“That’s it?” Iris asked. “Can we at least slash their tires? Maybe shove a potato in their exhaust pipes?”

“What the hell?” I laughed. “I don’t see how any of that would help.”

“It would help,” Iris said quietly.

“You can vandalize whatever you want, but I think we all need to swear it,” I said.

Miranda nodded. “I swear.”

“Fine. Me too,” Iris said.

“And me,” I said.





Chapter 1





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.