Royals (Royals #1)(2)

“It was nothing bad this time,” she calls out now. “Just figured you didn’t need to see!”

Giving her a thumbs-up, I continue toward the door at the far side of the store.

My stuff is in the break room, a truly tragic space made up of orange walls, green plastic chairs, and a scratched laminate table. At some point, someone had carved “BECKY LOVES JOSH” into the top of it, and every time I sat there on my break, reading or studying, I wondered what became of Becky and Josh. Were they still in love? Had Becky been as insanely bored here as I was?

Although, hey, at least Becky was never confronted with pictures of her sister on the front of tabloids.

Or being in the tabloids herself for that matter.

Ugh.

The whole prom debacle is still this mix of anger and hurt, a thorny ball lodged right in my chest, and thinking about it is like poking a sore tooth. You forget just how much the tooth aches until you focus on it, and then suddenly it’s all you can think about.

Which means I can’t risk thinking about it now, or I might start crying in the break room at the Sur-N-Sav, and there is nothing on earth more depressing than that scenario. That’s like movie-where-the-dog-dies levels of pathos, so yeah, not doing that.

Instead, I heft my beat-up patchwork bag onto my shoulder and head out the door.

The blinding brightness and heat of the late-May afternoon is intense as I walk outside and into the parking lot, and I squint, reaching in my bag for my sunglasses, my mind already on what I’m going to do for the rest of the afternoon. Mostly, it involves draping myself over the AC vent in my room and reading the new manga I picked up from the bookstore yesterday.

“Dais.”

And there’s that sore tooth.

Great.

Michael is leaning against one of the yellow-painted concrete pylons in front of the store, one ankle crossed in front of the other, dark hair falling in his eyes. He’s probably been practicing that pose. Michael Dorset is a champion leaner, one of the best, really. In the Olympics for Cute Boys, he’d take the gold in the Hot Lean every time.

Lucky for me, I am now immune to the Hot Lean (trademark pending).

Sliding my sunglasses onto my face, I hold up a hand at my ex-boyfriend.

“Nope.”

Michael’s face curls into a scowl. He has these really soft features, all round cheeks and pretty brown eyes, and I swear he’s taught his hair to do that thing where it falls juuuuust right over his forehead. A month ago, I would’ve been a puddle of melted Daisy at that face, would’ve reached out to push his hair back from his forehead. Michael Dorset had been my crush since ninth grade. He’d always hung out with a way more popular crowd than I had (I know, shocking that my glasses and Adventure Time T-shirts didn’t make me a bigger draw), and then last year—finally—I’d gotten him.

“I screwed up,” he says now, shoving his hands in his pockets. He’s wearing the skinniest jeans known to man, jeggings if I’m being honest, and he’s got one of my ponytail holders around his wrist. The green one.

Fighting the kindergarten urge to rip it off, I shift my bag to my other shoulder. “That’s an understatement.”

It’s hot in the parking lot, and I suddenly realize I’m still wearing the little green Sur-N-Sav apron that goes over my clothes. Michael is all in black, as per usual, but doesn’t seem to be sweating, possibly because he’s like 0.06% body fat. This is the last place I want to have this discussion, so I move past him and toward my car.

“C’mon,” he wheedles, following. “We need to at least talk about it.”

The asphalt grits under my sneakers as I keep walking. Even though we’re not that close to a beach, sand magically appears here, pooling in cracks and potholes in the parking lot.

“We did talk about it,” I say. “It’s just that there wasn’t much to say. You tried to sell our prom pictures.”

Fun part of having a famous sibling—you yourself somehow become kind of famous.

But it seems like you just get the annoying parts of fame, like, you know, your boyfriend selling private stuff to a tabloid.

Or trying to.

Apparently the royal family had people on the lookout for that kind of thing and shut it down pretty quickly, which, honestly, just made the whole thing ever weirder.

“Babe,” he starts, and I wave him off. I’d liked those stupid pictures. Thought we looked cute. And now every time I look at them, they’re just another thing that got weird because of Ellie.

I think that’s what pissed me off most of all.

“I was doing it for us,” Michael continues, and that actually makes me stop and whirl around.

“You did it to buy a ‘super-sweet’ guitar,” I say, my voice flat. “The kind you’d talked about forever.”

Michael actually does look a little sheepish at that. He shoves his hands in his pockets, shrugging his shoulders up and rocking back on his heels. “But music was our thing,” he says, and I roll my eyes.

“You never liked the bands I liked, you would never let me play my music in the car, you—”

Fumbling in his back pocket, Michael cuts me off—another habit of his I wasn’t that nuts about—saying, “No, but listen.” He pulls out his phone, scrolling through it, and I’m just about to turn away and walk to my car when there’s a sudden cry from the Sur-N-Sav.