Class Clown (The Thornback Society #4)

Prologue

The last week of May

The Thornback Beginning - from Ruby’s point of view

I wiggled my toes in my boring, but sensible, black walking shoes, stretching those piggies apart until none of them were touching as I played with the cap of my cola bottle. Why did shoes insist on squishing your toes together? Sometimes I thought I’d have to tear off my shoes if I couldn’t get my toes to separate, just to let them breathe a little for a moment. I wondered if anyone else had this issue with their toes pressed up against each other?

I usually liked things pressed up against each other. Like in my latest romance novel, where the hero had . . .

“My life, represented in food.” Lizzie’s monotone statement had me settling my toes back together and glancing her way across the faculty lunch room table, daydream over before it could really begin.

She had a noodle dangling from her spoon and wiggled it at each of us, making sure we got her meaning, before letting it slop lazily into her soup. The sound it made reminded me of my mom. She hated a sloppy noodle-eater. The others at our faculty lunchroom table stopped talking as we all watched Lizzie, curious about her uncharacteristically dramatic mood .

Satisfied that she had our attention, she continued. “School’s out for summer next week, and I need to do something that makes me feel alive. I’m in danger of disappearing into the void of monotony.”

The word monotony had me immediately searching for something to bring life back into her expression, and I said the first thing that popped into my head. “I felt alive when I was catching vomit in a trash can earlier.” I chuckled, my dark eyes nearly disappearing as they crinkled up.

They groaned, as I knew they would, and Hailey - never one to deal with ‘yucky stuff’ - pushed her plate of left-over stir fry away while muttering under her breath about proper table manners and conversational topics. I had succeeded. Well, mostly. Lizzie sighed, which had the desired result of reclaiming our attention.

“Am I the only one watching the clock tick and realizing how fast time is passing while I sit inside a school room?” She speared our group of best friend co-workers with a look. “I’m about to finish my tenth year of teaching here, and am in serious danger of becoming a vicious stereotype.” She pointed at us one-by-one with her now noodle-less spoon. “You should all be worried too. We’re all in our thirties, never been married, and teaching school. Eventually someone is going to accuse us of being old maids. Certain parts inside of me are actually turning to dust.”

I pulled a face and wiggled my toes again. As a nurse, I couldn’t get excited over dusty body parts. Bodies were meant to be alive and colorful.

“Old maid is an insulting term,” Meredith replied, her darkly lined blue eyes flashing her offense in behalf of all of us.

“I could have called us spinsters, which isn’t any better,” Lizzie replied with a shrug.

“Who says we need a label?” Meredith continued, pausing to pop a piece of her sandwich into her mouth before reaching up to tuck a lock of her jet-black hair behind her ear. “Labels are limiting.”

“I heard a new term. Thornback,” Aryn stated as she bit into her crisp salad. At our blank stares Aryn hurried to swallow and then leaned forward with a cheery, amused expression. “I read an article the other day that said the word spinster was for women who were like twenty-three to twenty-six. But Thornback was what they called unmarried women over the age of twenty-six. It was some sort of reference to a hideous fish with thorns down its back, meaning those women were ugly and prickly. ”

First we were dusty, and now we’re prickly? I furrowed my brow and pouted my lips slightly. I was neither of those things. “That doesn’t sound any better.”

Aryn held up her hand. “I know. It was terrible. But . . . there’s a movement on social media right now to resurrect the word in more of a dragon-like way. Like saying, ‘who needs a man? We’re Thornback dragon women and we rule the entire kingdom’.”

The five of us were silent for a beat - something that certainly didn’t happen often - before Hailey sputtered out a laugh, her white-blonde bob swaying against her chin as she shook her head. “It’s perfect,” she said. “See, Lizzie, we’re not old maids. We’re a bunch of Thornback dragon women, thriving without men.”

Lizzie leaned across the table to give her a high-five as her mood lightened. “I love it.”

I loved it too, actually. I squared my shoulders playfully and stated, “I’ll stand with you Lizzie, and so will your sisters of the lunchroom table.” I set down the soda I’d been toying with and gestured widely with both hands. “We, the Thornback Five, must seek adventure in the great wilderness outside of this school. Each of us will find our fortunes and happiness will be ours.”

Meredith rolled her eyes while the rest of us chuckled, drawing the attention of other faculty members who had been peacefully eating. Someone cleared their throat and we shared a grin as Meredith cleared hers back, loudly. It was something that happened frequently, and we all brushed it off, refocusing on each other.

“We should form The Thornback Society,” Aryn said, raising her water bottle. “To fierce woman!” We all agreed by picking up our various drinks and tapping them together.

I loved clinking my drink against theirs, seeing their smiles, feeling my place among them.

“What kind of adventure are we talking about here?” Hailey asked after we’d all taken a swig.

Lizzie shrugged. “I’m not totally sure. I just know that I need something to happen before I lose myself.”

The ticking of a clock, and the squeaking of plastic chairs, could be heard while we thought. Across the hall the sounds of children eating and talking wound their way to us and I basked in the sound of life and their excitement at being out of the classroom and together. I fed off the energy pulsing through these hallways.

“I need to be outside,” Lizzie said thoughtfully.

Outside was okay, as long as there were people around. And good food. And a first aid kit. And cute guys cutting wood in flannel and suspenders. I could get into that.

“Oh,” Aryn squealed softly. “My brother went on one of those river rafting trips last summer. It was a week long, and you raft and camp as you make your way along a section of river. Maybe we could do something like that?” Her curly red hair caught the light as her blue eyes grew wide with excitement.

Lizzie’s eyes lit up. “Yes. I’ve never done anything like that. It’s perfect. Who’s with me?”

She looked around the table, crammed into the small faculty room, surrounded by vending machines that were never used and a kitchenette original to the school from the 1970s. My gaze tripped across my four best friends and their thoughtful expressions. In the past four years, since the last of us had found a position here, we’d all clicked into place and found the home we’d been missing. I waited to see what they’d say, hoping it was yes. Because I could use an adventure at all times.

“I’m definitely in,” Aryn said.

Surprisingly, it was Hailey who was next. “Okay, Lizzie, I’m in.”

Lizzie looked to Meredith and pleaded. “It’ll be amazing. The five of us, out in the wild, nobody calling us ‘teacher, teacher’. No routine, no long days of trudging along.”

“You plan something and I’ll come,” Meredith agreed, although I felt her reluctance.

I smiled as they looked to me, and nodded my head. If they went, there was no way I was going to miss out.

Lizzie clapped her hands together, her tight honey-blonde curls bouncing against her forehead as she nodded with excitement.

In my life, some of the best things had come from saying yes.