Royals (Royals #1)(3)



“NO BOYS!” a voice warbles across the parking lot.

I turn back to the store to see Mrs. Miller, my manager, standing on the sidewalk just in front of the sliding doors, hands on her hips. Her hair is probably supposed to be red, but it’s faded to a sort of peachy hue, and thin enough that you can see her scalp through it.

“NO BOYS ON SHIFT!” she yells again, wagging a finger at me, the skin under her arm wobbling with judgment.

“I’m off the clock,” I call back, then jerk my thumb at Michael. “And this isn’t a boy. It’s a sentient pair of skinny jeans with good hair.”

“NO! BOYS!” Mrs. Miller hollers again, and seriously, Mrs. Miller’s hang-up about her female employees having boys around them is both psychotic and ridiculous. I’m not sure why she thinks the freaking Sur-N-Sav is a hotbed of sexual activity, but the “no fraternizing with the opposite sex” rule is far and away her strictest.

“THERE IS ZERO EROTICISM HAPPENING HERE IN THE PARKING LOT!” I shout back, but by now, Michael has found what he was looking for.

“I wrote this for you,” he says, touching the screen, and a tinny blast of music shoots out of his phone. The quality is crap, and I can’t really make out any of the lyrics over the shriek of the electric guitar, but I’m pretty sure I hear my name several times, rhymed with both “crazy” and “hazy,” and then Michael starts actually singing along with it, and please, god, let me die of sudden heat stroke, let a car take a turn and mow me down here in the parking lot of the Sur-N-Sav because between my ex warbling “Daisy’s driving me crazy” and Mrs. Miller beginning to march across the asphalt toward us, I’m not sure this afternoon can get much worse.

And then I look up to see the black SUV parked at the edge of the lot, window rolled down . . .

With a telephoto lens pointed directly at me.





Chapter 2


I hustle to my car near the back of the lot, keeping my head down, my bag tucked close to my side. I can’t hear the clicking of the camera over Michael’s stupid song—he’s trailing behind me still, the phone held out like an offering—but I imagine it anyway, my brain already racing ahead to what these pictures will look like, what the headline will say. Whatever it is, it will totally paint me as the bitch. In the past year since Ellie started dating Alex, I’ve learned that there’s basically nothing that’s not the girl’s fault in tabloid stories. Two months ago, Alex and Ellie went to some ship christening in Scotland, and Alex frowned and winced through the whole thing, which led to all these stories about how my sister was making him miserable, and that her demands for an engagement ring were tearing them apart.

The truth? Alex had fractured his toe that morning tripping down some stairs. The pained look on his face had been actual, literal pain, not sadness because his evil girlfriend was bumming him out.

Yay, patriarchy, I guess.

That’s what’s so weird to me about Ellie buying into the whole royalty deal. It’s built on crap like that. If she married Alex and they had a daughter and then a son? Guess who’d rule.

Yanking my car door open, I turn to face Michael. The song is ending now, and he pauses there, looking back down at his phone. I have a feeling he’s about to start the song over, and that obviously cannot happen, so I put my hand over his. His head shoots up, dark eyes meeting mine, and, ugh, he’s doing The Smile, which is almost as potent as The Hot Lean, which means I need to nip this in the bud right now.

“Is that your doing, too?” I ask, jerking my head toward the SUV, and he glances over. Michael is cute and all, but he’s a terrible liar—I still remember the social studies test incident five years ago in middle school—so when he looks genuinely surprised and shakes his head, I believe him and sigh with relief.

He’s still a douche who sold our prom pictures, but at least he’s not actively calling the paparazzi.

“Look, Michael,” I say now, painfully aware of the lens still pointed at us, at the sweat dripping down my back, at how my hair is sticking to my face, and how any makeup I put on this morning is a distant memory.

“We talked, okay?” I continue. “I get why you did it, and I hope the guitar is awesome and all you hoped it would be. But we’re done. Like. Really, really done.”

With that, I sling my bag into the car, slide into the driver’s seat, and shut the door on him. He stands there, phone in hand, and I look at my ponytail holder on his wrist again, wondering if I should ask for it back.

No, that would just make this whole thing sadder, really, and given that Mrs. Miller has finally reached Michael, he’s being punished enough. Her hair is trembling with righteous outrage, and as she shakes a finger at him, Michael—despite being a good head taller—actually cowers.

Which is fun to see.

I drive out of the parking lot, not bothering to look back in the rearview mirror.

The drive home doesn’t take long since our neighborhood is only a few miles from the store. It isn’t exactly the most scenic of routes, either. When my parents first moved to Perdido, it was actually kind of a cool place. I mean, as cool as a town in Florida that’s nowhere near the ocean can be. It was quirky and eccentric, full of artists and writers and old houses that people had painted nutso colors. Lime green, turquoise, a shade I thought of as “electric violet,” all slapped on these dollhouse-looking Victorian mansions and cozy bungalows.

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