Page 1 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

CHAPTER 1

KANE

“One last party,” Kane McCormick said over lunch. “One last blowout before school ends and we all have to go our separate ways.”

He twirled a cigarette in his fingers, raked his dark hair out of his eyes, and looked around at the group of his friends who were gathered around him. He’d expected that his proposal would be met with cheers and excitement. That was what usually happened when Kane suggested something.

But the others were looking at one another uneasily. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought they didn’t like what he had suggested.

“What?” he demanded.

Predictably, it was his best friend, Bradley, who had the courage to speak up. “It’s not that we hate the idea of a party,” he said. “It would be fun. Parties here are always fun. But… Kane, maybe we should hold off on that kind of thing, at least for a few weeks.”

“What do you mean, hold off for a few weeks?” Kane asked. “Since when have you been one to shy away from a party, Bradley? You usually go as hard as anyone.”

“I know that,” Bradley agreed. “I know I do.”

“So then what’s with you now?”

“It’s just… we’re going to be graduating soon.”

“All the more reason to get wild while we still can.”

“All the more reason to keep it buttoned up,” Bradley countered. “Look…” He hesitated, as if unsure whether he was going to say what was on his mind.

“Spit it out,” Kane said.

Bradley sighed. “Fine,” he said “I was accepted to college.”

And you weren’t. Kane heard what his friend hadn’t said. He knew about Bradley’s college acceptance, of course. He was happy for his friend, even if it did make him feel a little bit funny to think about it.

Not that I wanted to go to college anyway. Four more years of school! If anything, I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for all of these chumps who bought into the system.

Kane hadn’t taken the college application process seriously. He had filled out two applications on a lark, mostly to have something to do one afternoon at the library while a few of his friends were working on theirs. Kane and his group usually went to the library to laugh and cause a bit of trouble right after school, but on that day, no one had been in the mood, and he had thought seriously about just ditching his friends. Instead, he had printed off two of the applications and had filled them out, making a big production about how everyone was worrying over nothing and how any idiot could get himself accepted to college. He had sent them off in high spirits, and when he had received rejections, he’d been more upset about the fact that he would have nothing to wave in his friends’ faces, no way of showing them that he had been right and they had been worrying too much.

Technically, he supposed, he should be embarrassed by all this. It was obvious that Bradley thought he ought to be. That fact just made Kane feel angry. What was there to be embarrassed about? It might be embarrassing if he was someone like — he glanced around at the crew — someone like Taylor, who had always worked hard at the academic side of things. It would definitely be humiliating for her if she hadn’t gotten into college!

But she had, of course. Kane wasn’t close to Taylor — she was a part of the group because her best friend, Maddie, was dating Bradley. But word had gotten around when she had been accepted to the nursing school she’d had her eye on for years, and her friends had decorated her locker, so that you couldn’t walk by without taking in the celebration of her accomplishment. Kane was happy for her, he guessed, but he also thought everyone was making too big a deal out of the whole thing.

“What does college have to do with anything?” he asked Bradley now.

“It matters because we don’t want to be caught doing anything sketchy now,” Bradley said.

“They’ve already accepted you, though.”

“But they can rescind their acceptances. The guidance office was really clear about this when they met with me. I’m guessing other people heard this too?”

He looked around the lunch table where they were all sitting. It was their usual table — it had been since freshman year, when they had staked it out. Kane remembered that moment very well. It was the convention at their high school for freshmen to gather and eat lunch on the lawn outside. The cafeteria was upperclassman territory. And that was all very well on sunny days, but this was Iowa, and there was rain and snow and the cold of winter to contend with. When those days rolled around, the freshmen sought refuge in the auditorium, packing themselves into the stadium seats there, or climbing up onto the stage to eat.

Kane had been the one freshman with the courage to buck that trend. Why shouldn’t he and his friends have a table? So in the first week of school, he’d marched into the cafeteria and claimed one for them, and he had sat there looking all the upperclassmen in the eye, daring them to say anything, until the table was full of the very people who still sat here today.

The very people who were nodding along with Bradley now, as if to say that they had been told the same things he had and shared his fears and concerns about their future.

“Bradley’s right,” Maddie said, leaning forward on her elbows. She’d become intolerable over the past few weeks, her acceptance to a prestigious Ivy League school transforming her from someone who could liven up any party to someone who seemed to think of herself as a miniature adult. Though he couldn’t say so to Bradley, Kane could hardly stand to be around her anymore. She was the only one he wouldn’t be sorry to see leave — though he could admit that he did miss his friend, the person she had been before she had changed.

“You always take Bradley’s side,” he told her now, twirling the cigarette faster in his fingers.

She snatched it from him, snapped it in half, and dropped the pieces on the table.

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