10 Years Later

All this talk about high school, about who I liked and who I hung out with, was starting to bring me down. Tom and John had no idea how much it hurt to mentally go back to a time that wasn’t filled with only pretty memories. It was a time when I experienced the most painful loss of my life, and even after all these years, just thinking about it broke my heart all over again. I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe.

“Cammie, we’re just worried about you,” Tom said with a giant smirk that didn’t match his concerned tone at all. He was good at his job, which was essentially acting.

Sucking in a quick breath, I attempted to play along. “Why are you worried about me?”

“First of all, Los Angeles, Cammie is a really pretty girl. And for as long as we’ve known her, she’s been single. So we used to think there was something wrong with her, but so far, we can’t figure it out. We think she’s pretty normal.”

I felt my cheeks flush with warmth again and wished I could hide behind something, but there was nowhere to go. “Because I’m single, there has to be something wrong with me?” I rolled my eyes before glaring at Tom.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” John added.

“Maybe I just haven’t met the right guy yet? It’s not that easy to find your match in LA, you know,” I admitted as the honest truth spilled from my lips.

“You’re getting old, girl,” Tom said with a chortle.

“I’m not old!” I shouted. “Oh my gosh, I’m twenty-seven! And we’re in Los Angeles, not Kansas! Twenty-seven is not old!”

“It’s kinda old.” Tom looked at John.

“She is almost thirty,” John said before making a shuddering sound.

“I hate you both,” I spat out. “So much.”

“We knew it!” they shouted in unison.

I stood up from the desk and removed my headphones, placing them down gently under the microphone, signaling to them that I was done being picked on for one morning.

“One more thing, Cammie,” Tom said, and I turned to face him. “Are you bringing a date to the reunion?”

I leaned back toward the microphone. “Yeah.” I paused before adding, “My best friend, Kristy.”

“All right, Los Angeles, keep those calls and texts coming!” John called out before pushing the button that started the next ninety seconds of commercials.

Tom pulled off his headphones and sent me a knowing look. “I should send an intern to follow you around with a recorder for the show on Monday.”

“Don’t you dare!” I shot back. “I love this job, but I can’t have someone recording me at my freaking ten-year reunion.” I glared at him, knowing that these two would do pretty much anything for their listeners.

“So, who’s the guy?” John said as he took a bite out of a jelly doughnut, the powdered sugar sticking on his chin.

I decided to level with them. “I haven’t seen him since graduation, okay?”

“Really? Like since the day of graduation?”

“Yeah. And talking about him is killing me. You have to stop. Please.”

I hoped that little bit of information and my honest feelings would be enough to get them to lay off of me for now. If they somehow found out about Dalton and mentioned his name for all of LA to hear, I’d shrivel up into a ball and die right there on the radio station floor.

Then they’d really have something to talk about.

Shut the Hell Up

Dalton

Sitting on stakeout in an unmarked police car with my partner, Tucker, I turned up the volume on the radio dial.

“Why do you make me suffer through this shit every morning?” Tucker asked as he took another sip from the biggest coffee mug I’d ever seen in my life. I swore it was the size of a Big Gulp. How he drank at least two of those every day and didn’t keel over from a heart attack was beyond me.

“Old habits,” I lied, acting like listening to this show was nothing more than continuing what I’d done since I was a kid.