The urge to vomit intensified, and Daniella was forced into a dilemma—stay in the bathroom and definitely throw up but have an excellent receptacle (i.e., the toilet), or leave the bathroom and maybe don’t vomit, but lack a proper receptacle if she did.
To puke or not to puke, that was the question.
Daniella fled the bathroom.
For a little while, all she could do was lie on the floor and wait for the Pepto-Bismol that she had taken on her arrival to kick in. Eventually, she was able to sit up and take in her surroundings. It was only the break room, but it helped that she knew the layout so well.
There were the two worn-out chairs covered in a floral print that had to have been the ugliest fabric Daniella had ever seen. She stared at the chairs, willing the spinning that was overtaking her head to stop.
After a few minutes of sitting, Daniella crawled over to the mini fridge that Jo stashed under her desk. It was full of Diet Snapple and Big Red. But Daniella would not be deterred by Jo’s horrendous taste in beverages. She was digging toward the back, hopeful. Daniella pulled back a few red cans and tan bottles until she saw the glimmer of purple.
Saints be praised.
There it was—a lone can of grape soda. Daniella cracked it open with a satisfying pop and reveled in the overly carbonated sugar as she took her first sip. If anything was going to bring her back, it was going to be this purple stuff.
Daniella belched properly in the empty room and—Oh my God—she could finally sit up and breathe without feeling like the world was going to end. Like the world was spinning out into eternity. It was one thing to know that the planet was hurtling thousands of miles an hour through space and infinitely spinning. It was another to have your body feel like it was hurtling thousands of miles an hour through space and she would keel over before the spinning stopped.
Daniella drank some more soda and, for a moment, believed that there was some good in the world. The next thing Daniella did was pull her bag down out of her locker, get out her phone, and switch from her personal account to her poetry account.
Daniella never left her poetry account open—ever.
Same way she didn’t let anyone see her notebook or touch her phone. Her safeguards were all in place for a reason. They were why she’d never gotten caught writing her poetry by anyone in her life. Not even her mother. Her personal account was DaniellaDaze, which was innocuous and perfect and what everyone would think her handle ought to be. It was the cool-girl-that-smokes-weed-and-drives-muscle-cars identity that she had willingly carved out for herself to get through the four years of hell that high school was. But her poetry account was something else.
Her poetry was anachronisticblonde, and that was perfect, too, but for entirely different reasons. It was a literary term, and Daniella loved those. A word for out of its own time. She liked to revisit the old forms. The sonnets, the odes. Maybe even one day a real epic. But it was also a wink at the blond—the DaniellaDaze—that she had created. A girl out of her own time. That part was perfect for her alone. Daniella dug in her bag to find her notebook and flipped through her work. Nothing caught her eye.
She’d have to make something new.
A warm-up. That’s what she’d post. She didn’t have the mental space to write a whole piece. But she could handle a fragment. She put her knees up and balanced her notebook on them. She bit on the end of her pen to free her hands as she flipped until she found a blank page. She took the pen in hand and sketched circles, thinking about the spinning. Thinking about the world. A makeshift globe, moving and spinning. A rock hurtling around through space, held together by invisible forces beyond its control.
And as she drew that, she knew what she would write.
In truth the sun does not rise, but Earth
Spins with all her might to bear creation
It was a bit maudlin. But it felt right, given how intense Daniella’s spins had been not a moment before. “Ode to a Hungover Girl,” she might call it. “Lament of the Wild Night,” even. But the title would come later—it wasn’t a full poem, yet. It was still in its infancy, still simply a fragment, with the potential for anything. A bit that might eventually grow into a sonnet. But now it was simply a couplet with a little doodle.
It always felt good to create.
Daniella took a photo of the page. She hit post, and she tucked her phone back into her bag. Now that she had found a little bit of steadiness and a bit of poetry, Daniella really did need to double-check the books.
They were over on the desk where Jo kept the old calculator. Daniella took the hefty calculator in hand and sat, back against the desk and legs akimbo for a solid minute. She reached back up and grabbed the black leather-bound notebook that kept the financial ledgers off the desk.
She was going to double-check her sales record.
Daniella hoped Eli was wrong. Hoped she had unwittingly lied to Rinn Freaking-Stick-of-Sunshine-Up-My-Butt Olivera about the store closing.
Ugh.
Daniella’s stomach nearly revolted again, but she took a deep breath and stuck her head between her knees for a moment and, eventually, the feeling passed. She took another sip of the grape soda, and she knew that would hold her over until the Pepto kicked in—which should be at any moment now.
Daniella scanned another line of sales. She’d been keeping the books for a while. She had a copy that she sent in for Archer Junior’s review and she had the copy that was kept in this notebook in the break room. She started with this year’s numbers, and even in six months, things were not looking good. But they weren’t the worst sales she’d ever seen. Along the margins, there were the little notes Imogen had written by hand.
Customer requested When We Were Us. That was dated from just a few months ago.
Eight customers were looking for books by Jonathan Gold. That had just been last week, Daniella remembered seeing it. At the time she had guessed that everyone had read the same think piece or posthumous profile. It was too much of a coincidence otherwise.
Customer returned asking for When We Were Us update.
There was something about these requests, the simple human annotation of them among all the numbers. Daniella couldn’t believe the store was closing.
But numbers didn’t lie. And the numbers were down. Daniella was just disappointed that she hadn’t figured it out herself. Math was one of those things—like poetry. Once she got into a flow, Daniella could practically keep going until infinity. It didn’t make sense that she’d miss something so huge.
Daniella pulled her own notebook out from under the ledger. She didn’t normally do this, but she wanted to check something. She started scribbling the distribution curve. Started seeing where the pattern fell. It took a minute, but everything checked out. Everything seemed normal. There were rules about the way that numbers were supposed to be distributed in groups. Rules that a person couldn’t fake, not really. Those were holding with basic numeric distribution principles.
What had happened?
The sales were down, overall, but not dire. Just a steady, slow slide. Daniella looked around the room. Behind Jo’s desk was a whole set of shelves. In the middle of the shelves was a row of binders. In front of her was Jo’s laptop, whirring quietly, its blinking light beckoning her in.
Daniella knew she wasn’t supposed to touch the laptop. But she also knew that she needed answers and that was the fastest likely route to them. She typed in thebatman as the password, because that had to be Jo’s password. Jo complained about “the Batman” being the focus of the “Batfam” comics at least once a week. Also, it was the Wi-Fi password. There wasn’t another master password that Jo could possibly use.