Kissing the Player - Maggie Dallen Page 0,9

both only children and lived on the same block was how our friendship had begun. The fact that we’d both gotten into this fancy prep school on the nice side of town on scholarships was really just overkill. We would have stayed friends no matter what, but being joined at the hip for a lifetime had made us as close as siblings, even though we were total opposites.

But despite her goody-two-shoes, mega-nerd vibe, she actually had an offbeat sense of humor that meshed with mine. The better part of our friendship was spent making fun of ourselves, each other, or other people. Right now? We were both laughing at Ryan…and against all meathead odds, he’d picked up on it.

“You two think this is funny?” he roared.

Andrew, the pitching phenom for our baseball team and the epitome of chill, tried to placate him. “No one’s laughing at you, man,” he said in that lazy drawl of his.

“She’s laughing at me.” Ryan glared at Simone—the lone gazelle at this table full of lions.

But that’s why she had me.

I leaned forward, blocking his view of my friend. “She’s laughing at something I said.”

Ryan crossed his arms. “Let’s hear it, punk.”

Punk was what these guys called me when I pissed them off. I was part of this group of jock alphas, but also, I didn’t quite fit in. Mainly because…I wasn’t a jock. I didn’t do sports. I was a musician, but I had enough followers and groupies in this school that I was just as popular as they were with chicks and maybe even more popular with the student body as a whole.

Why? Because—unlike Ryan and the rest of his John-Hughes-clichéd friends—I fit in everywhere and with everyone. The artsy crowd dug me because I was into music, the outcasts liked me because I was different than the cookie cutter A-list crowd, and the popular crowd liked me because…well, let’s face it, I was cool. I had confidence and knew how to play the game.

That was all it took in this fishbowl existence we called high school. People our age were suckers. If you showed them what you wanted them to see, they bought it.

Every. Single. Time.

I glanced over at Rose and her friend. They’d stopped goofing around, but a smile lingered on Rose’s lips as they talked.

Rose got that. She knew it just as well as I did, I’d bet. Everyone here thought they knew her—the diva, the star, the theater chick with the killer smile. But I was willing to bet that no one except for maybe her friend Hannah knew anything real about her.

She was all smoke and mirrors and no one knew what was going on behind that pretty face of hers. Not me, not the guys who slavered over her every time she walked by, and definitely not an oaf like Ryan.

My guess? Nothing much. I’d bet that the more you dug the less substance you got. She was as shallow as they come. Vapid and vain, only thinking about what shoes would best show off her legs and which lipstick would make guys drool.

Once upon a time, I’d been blinded by her beauty and her charm, but then she showed her true colors. Fickle and fake.

“Why do you keep looking at my girl, man?” Ryan said as he finally took a seat.

I dragged my gaze back to the moron in question. All right. Fun time was over. I’d been on my best behavior with this buffoon because I actually felt a little bad for the guy.

I’d been on the receiving end of a Rose rejection and it wasn’t fun.

But now he was targeting Simone and trying to draw me into a fight, and everyone knew the best way to shoot down a bully was to stand up to them, right?

Right.

Now I just hoped I’d be able to walk away from this without a broken jaw.

I leaned back in my seat, tipping it so I was balancing on the back two legs as I smirked over at him. “Your girl? From what I hear, she dumped your butt this morning in the parking lot.”

A few of the guys snickered. Andrew just shook his head in weary resignation and turned his attention back to the salad he was eating.

“She didn’t dump me,” Ryan said. He dug into his lunch and some of the threat diminished. It was hard to be too scared of a guy who was unpacking the bagged lunch his mommy had made for him.

I should have