The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(20)

Ridhi.

From the café. The one who’ll spit in my food.

Wonderful.

“I like pink boxes,” Carter says with a brow wiggle.

I refrain from gagging but just barely. “I did not miss you.”

Now Ridhi’s actually smiling.

Bad omen.

I try smiling back. “Ridhi. You work with Anna at the Europa Café.”

“My sister, Anya, at Café Nirvana.”

Dammit. “Right. Bernadette’s your niece?”

“Bridget is my stepdaughter.”

Carter snorts and tosses his shaggy hair. “Nice, Phenelope.”

“Shut up, Hardly.” Truly did not miss him while he was on his tour.

And that’s a tour of the world to get supposed inspiration, not an actual concert tour.

Ridhi seems amused by us. At least she’s not hiding it like Teague Miller, who had best be plotting ways to show Gigi the worst that Tickled Pink has to offer, or I’ll have to show him the worst of what Manhattan transplanted to Tickled Pink has to offer.

“What’d you do to irritate your grandmother?” she asks. “Locker room has to be the worst of all the areas in the school to clean.”

“Phoebe tried to let her die when she choked,” Carter offers.

“As opposed to trying to suck the life out of her by being the worst kind of leech,” I reply. “You got locker room duty too.”

“Fighting on the job . . . ,” Ridhi murmurs as she lifts her clipboard.

Dammit.

“Fifteen minutes?” I say to her.

She looks me up and down again. “Fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll see you in the locker room.”

Hello, my name is Phoebe Lightly, and I’ve never met a challenge I wouldn’t take or obliterate in my own way.

I’m three minutes late getting back to the locker room, but I have a very good reason.

And that reason is the bakery bag and to-go mug in my hand. I smile the smile my mother taught me before my first beauty pageant when I was four, before Tavi took over as pageant queen of the family, as I approach Ridhi in the locker room. “Oatcakes and hot—oh my God, what is that smell?”

I truly am gagging now as I clap a hand over my mouth, still dangling the bakery bag, which is suddenly the worst idea ever.

Who could eat anything here?

Ridhi hands me a face mask and rubber gloves. “That’s the smell of eighty years’ worth of pubescent boys doing what pubescent boys do in locker rooms. Wait until we get it wet and really dig in.”

Carter’s nowhere in sight, though there are a few more people with terrible fashion taste standing between the lockers and the shower area now.

Locals, undoubtedly. More people whose names I’ll screw up.

Teague is not among them, and it bothers me. I’d like to know where he is.

I’m not entirely certain he won’t stab me in the back and try to chase me out of town before the rest of the family.

“Locker area or showers?” Ridhi asks me.

“Locker area. I volunteer to clean out the lockers.” I cannot believe those words are tumbling out of my mouth, but they are.

Would I rather I’d already found a way to convince Gigi that this entire idea is ridiculous?

Yes.

But I haven’t, so for now, I’ll play her game.

I’ll play her game so well she’ll have no choice but to admit I’ve passed my good-person test with flying colors and release me to go back to my real life.

Preferably as soon as possible.

And that’s why I’m opening locker after locker along the far wall, tossing out petrified gym socks and copies of Playboy magazine and notes about which teachers these teenage perverts wanted to bang while townsfolk whose names I’ve already forgotten check the wiring and start shopping lists with things like fluorescent bulbs and boards for the broken windows and radon and carbon monoxide test kits.

Carter’s still missing.

We still have to clean the showers, because they’re apparently the only showers in the building.

Group showers.

In the locker room.

“Can you please add shower curtains and separators to that shopping list?” I call to Selma or Terri Lou or whoever that is.

“We’ll put it on the list to run past your grandmother,” Ridhi replies.

I huff to myself as an odd wwooooooooo-oooo floats through the air, followed by a muttered damn kids ain’t got no respect for a clean floor.

No one else seems to notice.

It happens again—the woo, this one followed with yeah, yeah, get the mop, and I pause and tilt my head, trying to identify the source.

“Back to work, Ms. Lightly.”

“Where’s Carter?”

“Girls’ locker room. He annoyed me. It’s worse.”

“It’s worse? The girls’ locker room is worse?”

“School had to shut down unexpectedly a week early the year we closed this building for good, and it meant the kids weren’t allowed back in to do a final clean-out of the lockers. Nobody ever got around to it, matter of fact. He’s hip deep in tampons and boy band posters.”

I stop and study her more closely. Is it—do I—do I actually want to hug her?

And cackle with her?