How could anyone be in that good of a mood all the time? How could anyone’s default mood just be set to happy like that?
Like, Rinn literally arrived to work, straight off the L train, in that kind of a mood. Like the crowds and the frustrations of public transit never got to her. Happy, cheerful, nonplussed. With two hundred thousand followers who wanted to hang on every word she said about her latest read.
Like Rinn had no idea what a struggle the day could be. Like she’d never had a bad mood in her entire life. Happiness was like breathing to Little Miss Perfect. An everyday kind of reflex. It was the kind of happiness that drew others to her. The kind of happiness that had to have prevented loneliness.
Imogen mostly ignored Little Miss Perfect. That way Imogen didn’t go around hating her all the time, too. Hating Cool Girl took up enough of Imogen’s energy already.
Luckily, Imogen had seen Eli come in, not half a minute before Cool Girl had been screaming like a banshee. Or a harpy. Or whatever other mythological creature went around screeching other people’s names rather than talking to them like an actual human.
Not that Cool Girl thought of Imogen as an actual human. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who gave anyone the time of day but her own reflection in the mirror and maybe about ten minutes of consideration for whoever she was hooking up with.
That was the kind of person Cool Girl was. Imogen was sure of it.
“Eli.” Imogen had seen him earlier, ducked behind the manga section in the back. She was moving through the YA section—which already had a WELCOME BACK, BROCK sign strung up across it—when she spotted him.
Eli jumped when he heard his name. Then his shoulders relaxed when he saw it was her. Eli was blond and thin, with a mass of curly hair on top of his head. He had one of those everyday kind of faces that made you forget what he looked like. It made sense that he’d have a face like that, to get away with as much theft as he had and only get a slap on the wrist. “Hey.”
“You okay, E?” Not being okay herself, Imogen could easily recognize the signs in someone else. Eli was, well, off. That was for sure. He was jumpy, and Eli was never jumpy. He was tense, ready for some kind of attack, some kind of fight.
He hadn’t even noticed her haircut.
“Yeah, sure,” said Eli. “Of course. Everything’s cool. Super. Fantastic. What’s up?”
“The lady doth protest too much,” was all Imogen could think in that moment. It was her mother’s fault, really, that Imogen could quote Shakespeare on command. Mom had gone through a phase of his writing when she’d been pregnant with Imogen. That was how Imogen had been stuck with the name Imogen in the first place, instead of something normal like Layla or Zara or Amira. Mom couldn’t even name her for a normal Shakespearean heroine. She had to go into some deep cuts and find a name out of Cymbeline, of all the plays.
Imogen stared at Eli. Trying to assess what he was hiding. How much he was hiding. “Daniella needs you in the back.”
Imogen watched as Eli’s whole body went rigid.
Something wasn’t right.
“Cool. Cool. I’ll just go. Yeah. I’ll go check that out. Now.” And then Eli disappeared around the corner from the stacks he had just been hiding in.
Imogen rubbed at her neck, thinking to brush away the hair there. But then she remembered she didn’t have any hair anymore. That feeling was a phantom, a trace of what had been before. She rubbed her palm over the top of her head again, still in wonder at herself.
She’d shaved her head.
Somehow she’d nearly forgotten. Cool Girl might yell and screech and make fun, but there had been something about fighting with her that had distracted Imogen from the actual hell storm that she had created in the store not an hour ago. That moment when everyone had stopped and stared at her. Even Little Miss Perfect didn’t have the right thing to say or a smile for the occasion. Instead, she’d had the expression of a goldfish—mouth dropped and eyes wide. Not a smile in sight.
“Now that’s a haircut,” said a voice from behind Imogen.
She turned. It was Charlene. She was one of the regulars at Wild Nights. She was an ex-zoologist and both her arms were covered in sleeves of tattoos. Animal tattoos, of course. She had retired early in her middle age and was usually in the bookstore for feminist theory or social history. Or both.
Imogen shrugged. “Felt like a change.”
Charlene smiled, like she was more than willing to participate in the charade. “Oh, sure. Must be nice during the summer. Keeps the hair off your neck.”
“Exactly,” said Imogen, with a decisive nod.
“Kid?” said Charlene.
“Yeah?”
“Be careful,” said Charlene, dropping her friendly front for a moment and letting true concern flash through her features. But the expression was gone just as quickly as it had appeared.
“Yeah.” Imogen cleared her throat. “What do you need today, Ms. Charlene?”
A smile pulled at one side of Charlene’s mouth. “I’ve been looking for this book I read about. Daughters of the Sun. Supposedly it’s a take on Mughal history from the perspective of the women.”
“Very cool,” said Imogen. And she meant it, too. Feminist revisionist history wasn’t exactly something she sought out on her own, but she loved getting the highlights from people like Charlene. No reader could specialize in every genre. That’s what Imogen loved so much about Wild Nights—that everyone was into their own thing and everyone could potentially find what they were looking for. It wasn’t a guarantee, of course. But that they all could look and that they all could hope for themselves in the same space was what made bookstores so magic. “How was the last one?”
“She-Wolves? It was excellent. Conversational and not quite history-history. But fascinating to see the way women in power have always been treated.”
“Rad,” said Imogen. “All right, let’s see if we can find the new one.”
They found it, eventually. Not under history. Not under India. Someone had decided that it went under women’s studies. Which, Imogen got. That wasn’t wrong per se. But it wasn’t exactly where you’d go looking for it, either. And it certainly wasn’t where Imogen would have shelved the book.
Not for the first time did Imogen wonder who had originally shelved all the books. The system seemed to have gotten more chaotic as she worked there, rather than more refined. As though the inventory was being shelved in its third or fourth category, rather than its primary one.
But at least Charlene had found her book. She practically bounced when she made her way over to Little Miss Perfect at the register, and Charlene on the whole was not someone who bounced.
The bell on the front door jangled as it opened and then slammed shut. Myrna—Imogen didn’t know her last name—was about eighty years old, carrying her usual homemade pastry in a brown bag that she reused for a whole week before she threw it out. She was carrying her one little luxury—a coffee from the café next door. She liked to come into the store and sit in different stacks. She would sit and then stand all across the store for an entire morning.
Imogen loved the ritual of it.
Plus, it made Imogen almost happy that Wild Nights was a place the little old lady went every day to get out of her house. “What is it today, Myrna?”