Page 78 of Drama Queens Don't Fall For Charming Boys

Chapter Twenty-Two

Mia

While Valarina is crouching behind an NPC ready to snatch something from her satchel (yes, I’m leveling up her pickpocketing skills, thus turning her into a bad, bad girl), my phone rings with a video call. It’s Willow!

I answer it and gush, “Willow! Hi!” I haven’t spoken to her since winter break. “Darn it!”

“What happened?” she asks, adjusting her glasses.

“I got caught.” The guard chases me all over the city. No matter how many spells I use to run faster or heal myself, he pounces on me and shoves me to the ground. Everything I stole for the past half hour is confiscated and I’m thrown into prison.

“Bummer.” I push away from my desk and leap onto my bed with my phone, a huge smile on my face. “How are you doing on this fine Saturday afternoon? How’s Colt? Is he going to join the call?”

Willow is at MIT and Colt’s college is a few hours away from hers. They meet a few times a month so it doesn’t feel like they’re in a long-distance relationship, but it’s still hard. They’re not worried, though, because their relationship is solid and nothing can break it.

“Probably not because he has a very hard paper due on Monday,” she says. “But he’ll call you later this week. What’s up with you?”

“Everything is great. Well, other than the fact that I just lost all my progress on Chronicles of the Eternals. I was trying to level up my pickpocketing skills. Now I have to wait for my bounty to disappear.”

“Are there any cheats? Or I can access the game and remove your bounty. Maybe even revert your character to before she got caught, thus restoring all your stolen items.”

Oh my gosh, how tempting is that? Willow is such a whiz with tech. She even hacks sometimes, like when her best friend, and Rylee’s sister, Chloe, wanted to know who was slipping secret love letters into her locker. Willow hacked Edenbury High’s camera to find the guy.

“It’s an MMO, so it might be hard,” I tell her. “But honestly? I don’t want to cheat, even though it’s super tempting. Valarina got caught and she needs to live with the consequences.”

“Very mature of you.”

I bow. “Thank you. Is Colt working on the sequel to Detective Ret: Unsolved Cases? I feel like all I do is pester him about it.”

Detective Ret: Unsolved Cases is a point-and-click adventure video game Colton’s sister, Bri, worked on before she died in a helicopter crash, which killed her boyfriend, too. To keep her memory alive, Colt spent most of his high school years finishing it for her. He published it a few years ago on PC, and it just came out last year on console. It’s nowhere a bestseller or anything, but gamers who love the genre—like me, because I love all genres—are total fans. And we’ve been begging Colt for a sequel.

Another cool thing about it is that Ally’s oldest daughter, Evie, who is an extremely talented artist, does all the artwork and design for the game.

“He tries to work on it whenever he has free time, but college is pretty tough,” Willow tells me. “Don’t worry, Mia, he’ll be able to dedicate all his time to it once he’s done with school. And with my help, of course. But enough about us. Tell me more about what’s going on in your life.”

I lift my shoulders. “Nothing new. Play rehearsals are going well and we have book club on Monday, which I’m so excited for because we’re reading a super swoony Regency romance and I can’t wait to gush about it with my Musketeers.”

“Fun. I miss when my Musketeers and I would have our book clubs. I hope we’ll be able to keep the tradition once we all move back to Edenbury. Mom and her friends kind of forgot about their book club after they got married and had kids. But it’s great they started it up again, thanks to Lily.”

“Yeah, I can’t imagine not obsessing over books with my friends. It’s the highlight of my life. I think I would catch a deadly disease and die a horrible death if I had to give it up.” I fall on my bed and then pretend to be dead.

Willow laughs. “I miss your dramatic antics. You said things are going well with play rehearsals? Didn’t you text me the other day that you want to skewer the leading guy and feed his carcass to the birds?”

I sit up and chuckle. “I did text that, didn’t I? Well, funny enough, I don’t feel that way about him anymore. There was a…a misunderstanding. But it’s all good now.”

She moves her face closer to the screen and narrows her eyes. “Are you blushing?”

“What? No!”

“Didn’t you have a crush on him while you were on the set of The Beat of My Heart?”

I gape at her. “How do you know that? I mean, no. I didn’t have a crush on him.”

“Uh huh. I knew back then that you liked him.”

I fold my arms over my chest with a huff. Why does she have to be so similar to Mom? Nothing gets past her.

“Fine, I might have had a teensy-weensy crush on him on set—”

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