No Place Like Homecoming, Dallen, Maggie [beach read book .TXT] 📗

Ha! This guy hated me. This guy had given me the most amazing kiss of my life...and he hated me. And I couldn’t even blame him for hating me because he had every right to.

I sucked.

I’d try to play him and he’d caught me. And now I’d driven away the one person who’d ever looked at me like that. Like maybe I was more, or maybe I could be more.

Like maybe there was more to me than everyone thought.

But there wasn’t more to me, there was just this. This pathetic, unwanted, unmemorable mess.

I’d blown my chance with Flynn and now I was out of options. But none of it mattered because my life was over. I’d left for a week and my life had dissolved like sugar in hot water.

I had nothing to go back to.

And my own parents didn’t even want me back.

“Isla, you’re shaking,” Flynn informed me. His voice held so much concern, it hurt my heart to hear it. It would be so easy to believe that it was real. That he really cared.

Get it together. I mentally shouted at my shaky limbs and my failing lungs, but not surprisingly, it didn’t help.

“You guys need a hand?” Flynn’s friend said from behind him.

Oh great. Another hottie gets to witness my epic life fail.

“Nah, man, we’re good. I’ll meet you in there.”

The other guy cast me one last worried glance before picking up a cooler he’d been carrying and heading past us.

I tried to swallow but...ugh. My mouth was too dry. It was like trying to swallow cotton.

“Here, let’s get you out of the sun.” Flynn wrapped an arm around me and led me into the shade. Pulling out a water bottle from some mystery pocket that only a caterer would have, he handed it over. “Drink.”

I chugged it without being told twice.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded. My gaze couldn’t quite focus, but the threat of tears was gone. “I have to get going,” I said. “Dorothy stuff. You know.”

His brows drew down. “Yeah, okay. Just as long as you’re sure—”

“I’m fine,” I said, already walking away. I’m fine. Fine. Fine. Fine.

I repeated that word roughly three thousand times over the course of the next twenty minutes. Apparently my acting skills weren’t as good as I’d hoped because no one seemed to be buying it. Mrs. Messner kept fussing over me. Callie wouldn’t stop asking if I wanted to talk. Even Willow was watching me with concern.

“Dude, if you ruin this party for all of us, I’ll kill you,” Savannah said. It would have sounded far scarier if she’d been the wicked witch. But Mrs. Messner was decked out in green paint and Savannah looked annoyingly gorgeous as the good witch.

Sure, she got to be all pretty in pink while I toted around a stuffed puppy and said things like, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.”

We were called out to the party shortly after we arrived, and it was instantly obvious why no one had wanted to be Dorothy.

I looked lame. I sounded lamer. The kids were too old to find any of this entertaining or cool. And who could blame them? The parents of this castle—the king and queen, I guess?—They’d gone all out. A hay maze had been set up behind the house, along with apple dunking and all the other fall games that I’d only ever heard about up until today. Was this even real?

I looked around the backyard, which was overrun with kids of varying ages, including a group of younger teens in the distance who looked like they were having the time of their lives making fun of us costumed freaks.

“Uh, Dorothy, are you okay?” A deep voice asked from behind me.

I snapped. “I’m fine. How many times do I have to—” I stopped short at the sight of a large lion behind me. Well, a large guy dressed like a lion.

“Who are you?” I finished.

“This is Maverick,” Callie said before he could answer. “He’s on the football team.”

Maverick nodded.

I could have guessed he was a football player, what with the gargantuan shoulders and the towering size.

He actually kind of made a good lion, though I wasn’t buying the cowardly bit. This guy looked like he could lift the entire house with a pinky.

“Mrs. Messner hired you,” I said, stating the obvious because apparently that was all my brain could do today.

He nodded and Callie took that as her cue to fill the silence with the story of how they’d gotten Maverick to sign on at the last minute because he’d been friends with Mrs. Messner’s son and blah blah blah.

I didn’t care. I couldn’t even pretend to care.

I would have given everything I owned for a moment of peace and quiet. Just one full minute of alone time to calm down, to get my head on straight.

But instead I was surrounded. Someone somewhere called out that it was time to start, and there were suddenly a whole lot of kids at my feet.

Oh no. Not again.

The munchkins were back.

With Callie’s encouragement the little ones sang a loud, enthusiastic, and totally off-key version of Follow the Yellow Brick Road.

To me.

They were singing at me, and if singing could be weaponized, these kids would be lethal.

If I hadn’t already felt like I’d been forsaken in hell, this cinched it. I was in a nightmare. A living, breathing nightmare filled with sticky fingers and kids’ shrill voices.

Callie and Willow were interacting with the kids, and the lion stood at my back, possibly just as horrified by where he’d found himself as I was.

Nope. That wasn’t possible. No one could be more horrified than me.

I caught Flynn on the sidelines, taking pictures of my misery like this was something anyone would ever want to remember.

“Dorothy, you’re up,” Mrs. Messner hissed from the sidelines.

I stared at her for a long moment before I realized what she meant.

No. Oh no, no, no.

I was supposed to sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I’d known this, of course, but