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She’d bought one of those with her own money a week before—a soft, hardly-there baby pink, though she hadn’t told her dad because he still thought she was too young. It had cost almost seven dollars.
“Hey, Annie,” Gina said softly. “You got a problem or something?”
She stepped closer, brushed roughly against Annie and kept walking toward the soda fountain.
Speechless, Annie stared at her. Gina had just shoplifted and looked as innocent as a lamb. Hadn’t anyone else seen her?
But there wasn’t a clerk in sight, and the boys were now shelving the magazines and heading for the soda fountain, too.
“Come on,” Clint called out.
Gina turned around to look at Annie, her gaze hard. “You look a little weird. Maybe you should go home.”
“Stay,” Sara urged. “Your dad won’t be picking you up for a while yet.”
Had Sara taken something, too?Uneasiness prickled through Annie, but leaving might brand her as a loser, and maybe they wouldn’t ask her to join them anymore. “I...I’m fine,” she managed to say.
At the old-fashioned soda fountain at the back of the store, the group settled boy-girl-boy-girl on the red stools lined up along the counter, with Clint and Annie at the far end.
This is almost like a date!
Annie gave Clint a shy smile. “Thanks for asking me to come along.”
He didn’t answer, just slid her a quick wink and a grin, and her heart fell right down to her shoes. Suddenly it didn’t matter what Gina had done, because this was turning out to be a fabulous, wonderful day.
The girl behind the counter went down the line, taking orders, her pencil poised over an order pad.
Gina dug into her backpack to check her money and then murmured, “Chocolate malt, large. What about you, Sara?”
“Hmm...my usual, I guess.”
“Hot-fudge sundae with mint chocolate chip ice cream. And a Coke.” The girl behind the counter smiled as she wrote the familiar order on her pad. “You order that every time, Sara.”
Clint ordered a double-scoop sundae of the black cherry supreme with fudge topping. “The same for Annie, and I’ll buy hers, too.” He grinned at Annie, then added, “If that’s okay?”
He was buyinghers?Suddenly feeling as though she’d just been crowned homecoming queen, prom queen—no, queen of the wholeworld,Annie shut away Jolie’s warnings, her dad’s worries, and everything she’d read in those stupid books about diabetes.
It was hard enough being a new girl in school and not having close friends anymore. Beingdifferent,even if none of the kids knew about her diabetes, made it all worse, but now she had a chance to be part of a group. To be accepted.
How could she possibly refuse?
“PERSONAL CALL FORyou, Doctor. Line two.”
Jolie closed the file she’d been studying. The afternoon had been quiet—two patients after lunch, then a lull for over an hour.
For about the hundredth time she thought about how different this was from her crowded clinic in Los Angeles and the crush of patients that usually overflowed well into the evening. She’d rarely left until after eight.
Consider this a mental health break,she told herself dryly.You’ve needed one for a long time.
“Rafe here. I’ve got a bit of a problem.”
Laid-back as Rafe was, that could be anything from a gunshot wound to an accident out on the highway. Or maybe he’d found a clue about the person who’d broken into the clinic. “Yes?”
“I’ve got a young lady here at my office, along with some of her friends. I called her dad’s cell phone and didn’t get an answer. Annie told me to call her aunt, but Nina said Matt and Ed had made an emergency run to Billings for supplies. They might be home late.”
And this involved the deputy? Mystified, Jolie murmured, “Annie and Charlie can come here, if they need a place to stay until he gets back. I have a four-thirty appointment with her in any case, if she wants to walk over.”
Rafe cleared his throat. “Actually, it’s more complicated than that. I’m not letting any of these kids go until a parent comes, and then each one is receiving a good lecture. Agnes Benson caught them shoplifting at the drugstore.”
