Whiskey Rebellion (Romantic Mystery/Comedy) Book 1 (Addison Holmes Mysteries)

supposed to wash them down with beer.”
    “Hmm, I’d forgotten that rule,” she said.
    I handed Kate one of the Corona s and grabbed another for myself.
    “Your mom wanted me to make sure you were still alive since you haven’t bothered to return her phone calls,” Kate said. “And she wanted me to let you know that she saved you a seat next to her this morning just in case you decided to show up.”
    “Ah, it’s so nice that my mother can send the guilt through you. I can’t even get decent Chinese food delivered here, but guilt—”
    “Hey, what are friends for?”
    “Donuts and shopping.”
    I ate a powdered donut then an apple fritter so I could get a healthy serving of fruit in for the day.
    “I saw Greg this morning,” Kate said after a while.
    “Good for you. Did he get struck by lightning?”
    “Not that I know of. He’s been sitting in the front row every week. Maybe he’s trying so hard because he wants you back. Veronica wasn’t with him this morning.”
    “Ha, there’s no way he wants me back, and I wouldn’t have him anyway. He’s sitting in the front row doing heavy repentance because I heard he’s losing clients by the handful. Apparently, it makes people a little uneasy when their insurance agent is caught cheating.”
    “Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that,” Kate said.
    “Besides, he and Veronica are most definitely still together. She tries to corner me at school on a regular basis so she can give me the explicit details.”
    “What a bitch,” Kate said.
    “You’ll get no arguments from me. I go out of my way to avoid her now because she brought pictures of them in the act and left them in my school mailbox.”
    To say that Veronica Wade and I have a history is an understatement. Every woman in the world knows there’s always one girl you go through school with that makes life miserable. It’s the same girl who dumps water on you and tells everyone you wet your pants. The one who ties your shoelaces together and puts itching powder in your gym clothes. Juvenile bullying at its finest. But then high school comes along and things start to change. Body parts develop and teeth become straight. Tanning beds, nail salons and highlights are discovered. And suddenly the attention shifts.
    I’d always been the scrawny kid with freckles, an overbite, and frizzy hair. Veronica had been the delicate piece of dandelion fluff with a cherub’s dimpled smile and sparkling blue eyes. The one who could charm herself out of any situation with her cuteness. But the cuteness wore off by the time she hit freshman year as she grew taller and started to resemble something more along the lines of a beanpole. Breasts and hips never found a home on Veronica and the dandelion fluff hair turned dark at the roots. My mother liked to say that Veronica was as ugly as homemade sin. Needless to say, Veronica didn’t take the changes high school brought gracefully. Meaning the stuff she’d done to me in elementary school was nothing compared to what she did to me in high school.
    And maybe I didn’t help matters any by relishing in the newfound attention my own breasts brought me. I might have accidentally put dead fish in the trunk of her car and slipped the wrong answers to a test inside her locker, but it was only because she started it. If she hadn’t put superglue on my oboe reed (the results of which ended in very painful surgery on my part) or loosened the bolts on my desk so it fell apart as soon as I sat down (also resulting in pain), then I never would have even considered having such a long standing rivalry with Veronica Wade.
    She was my archenemy. My nemesis. We were Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds. Or Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. It got to the point where the school counselors automatically put us in separate classes just to avoid the aftermath. That we’d both ended up teaching at the same school we’d spent the worst years of our lives in was irony at its finest. The fact that Veronica went away to college and came back with massive breasts, white-blonde hair, a new perky nose, cheek bones that could cut glass and a giant chip on her shoulder seemed to go unnoticed by most people. But not me.
    “So w hat did you do?” Kate asked.
    “I told her to lay off the Twinkies becau se her ass looked huge in one of those pictures.”
    “Good thing she got those breast implants to even everything out.”
    Kate and I finished off the last two donuts with a lot of finger licking