Page 31 of The Perfect Rom-Com

At my turn, I knock down eight pins.

Socorro, who is always using the aisle of my classroom during breaks to practice with a baseball (much to the chagrin of my desk lamp and Saliha, who always ends up getting a baseball tangled around her skirt), rejoices flamboyantly over a strike.

Gloria, who just got her nails done and decided she didn’t “need” to put her fingers in the holes in the ball, gets zero.

I look over at Jack.

“Order up,” Pinstripe Girl says, sliding paper bowls and cups to the woman beside him.

I frown as I watch her flash a smile at Jack, who doesn’t look up. My frown becomes a little disgusted as she leans over the counter toward him, her bubblegum lip gloss grin in his downcast face, and asks him if he wants anything.

“Jack,” I call, and he veers off from staring at the phone and our eyes meet. I nod toward the lanes. He jump-starts our way.

“I mean,” Gloria says, “I see women in court lying their heads off for their deadbeat, money-smuggling husbands who are less in tune than the two of you.”

“Impossible. I’d never go to jail for Jack. They don’t have a bowling league.”

“Bryony.” She’s eyeing my hands. I’ve transferred some of Jack’s Oreo ice cream sandwich sundae (the man’s weekly kryptonite) into my bowl and begun spooning off my peanut bits onto his.

“So,” I say, as Jack slides into the seat beside me. “Who was it?”

There’s a pause from him, and I add, “On the phone?”

“Oh, just Pat, having his weekly mental crisis.” Jack scratches the back of his head, then reaches for the bowl. It’s a curious pause, the kind that he tends to give when he’s bluffing about something and about to lie to me. One of those, “No, no, of course I didn’t erase that side character from your manuscript I told you was disturbing. I’m merely an agent, Bryony. Why would I go messing about with your slash Amelia’s work? And yes, I do understand and respect that what you are doing is art, even if you don’t get to put your name on it.”

He did.

He entirely erased my favorite, possibly creepy, side character from Smuggler’s Paradise.

“Pat . . . Henderson?” Gloria says with a little hiss wavering on awe. I cast her a look that says, “Stop it. Or I’m going to give you the talk—again—about how we don’t dump out the contents of our purses and then thrust them in Jack’s hand whilst begging him to do us a teeny tiny favor and get his client’s autograph on them.”

I decide I don’t care enough to press for reasons behind Jack’s dodginess and move to the more interesting matter. “Did you tell him I saw his books at Costco the other day? Tell him it was ten. I saw a full ten.”

For being a man with four million sold copies and ten years of dedication to the literary field, you’d think he’d have more self-esteem than he does.

Jack shakes his head, unwilling as always to stoop to this level of affirming obviously successful authors.

“I’m going to meet him for lunch next week. Want to come and tell him the revolutionary news that he is in Costco yourself?”

“Fine.” I hand him a spoon. “He’ll love it.”

“Great.” He digs in. “I’ll bet.” He waves a spoon at those around us. “Have you discussed with everyone yet the change to our appalling team name?”

“I’ve been thinking on it, and we already have the T-shirts. The team name is going nowhere.”

“I’ll buy new T-shirts.”

“They don’t want new T-shirts.”

“I’ll make them less pink.”

“Maybe we all like pink.”

“Striking Pencils changed their name. Tell you what. Let’s just take their name. I’d much rather have a cobra on my back than this”—he motions to my shirt—“this . . . pink angelic turtle.”

“Striking Pencils had a team member with a terrifying python backstory. Do you have any terrifying flying turtle memories you’d like to discuss?”

“I once was at the beach and a hundred hatchlings sprouted and began finning toward me. That count?”