BONUS CONTENT
Extra chapters, flashbacks, and future bits that didn't make the cut in the Fool's Gold Series.
Includes; first impressions, J3 nonsense, Chris & Elena lore, JJo being insufferable and blind to their feelings, fluff, and more!
This wil...
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BACK IN SEVENTH GRADE, nothing really mattered.
Except this did.
Peeler Brown and Jorge Rodriguez had been best friends since kindergarten. Lunch table partners, dodgeball teammates, co-inventors of the legendary 'Cracker Stack Sandwich.'
Basically inseparable.
Until the kiss.
JJ still remembered the chaos of that afternoon—Jorge storming off the swingset, Peeler standing there with her face flushed and blinking hard like she couldn't believe what she'd just done, and every other seventh grader whispering about it by dinner.
Apparently she'd kissed him.
Apparently he'd said he didn't feel the same.
And that was it.
One kiss. One dumb, impulsive, middle school kiss—and everything shattered.
The next day, Jorge pretended like Peeler didn't exist. He moved lunch tables. Picked a new partner in gym...
They hadn't spoken since.
JJ had tried to act like it wasn't a big deal. He wasn't involved. It wasn't his drama.
But the truth? It stuck with him.
A week passed, and he couldn't shake the way Peeler had looked when it all went down—embarrassed and heartbroken and mad at herself, all at once. It wasn't just the kiss that ruined them. It was what came after.
And the thought of that happening between him and Josephine?
It made his stomach twist.
Because if a kiss could end a friendship like that—something so small, so stupid—what would it do to them?
Josephine was his lifeline. The only person who knew the difference between his silence and his storms. He couldn't afford to lose her. Not over some dumb mistake, not over the weird flutter in his chest whenever she looked at him sideways. Not over the fact that, sometimes, he caught himself staring too long at her eyes or wondering what her lip gloss tasted like.
So he did the only thing he could think of.
He called a meeting.
"Emergency Pogue meeting," he'd said on the walk home, trying to sound casual and definitely failing.
John B raised a brow. "Are we under attack?"
Pope squinted. "Did you steal a Kook's jet ski again?"
"No," JJ snapped, a little too defensive. "It's not that kind of meeting."
