Daniella was not, as a rule, a morning person.
It hadn’t helped that she had gotten a message from Eli the night before while she was out, and, in the aftermath, had gone from sociably drinking to basically annihilated by tequila.
Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium was closing.
She parked on a street that was three blocks back from the store, because she liked that walk from her car to the door. The distance between her own space and her work life. She didn’t like to park close. She liked to transition, to ease into the role. It didn’t matter to Daniella that the air was sticky with early-morning humidity; she took her time gathering her stuff out of her passenger seat. She drove an old Mustang from the seventies that she’d managed to pick up from a graduating senior girl for a song. She didn’t even need more than liability insurance on the thing because it was made of solid Detroit steel and either she was going to go out in a blaze of glory or she was going to take out whatever car she hit like a tank.
She’d been teaching herself how to fix up the old boy. It had vinyl seats and a big boat wheel. The radio was a dial with buttons that jumped the red notch down the line when she selected one of the preprogrammed buttons. The engine rumbled as she drove, and the whomping mess of a car made her feel like she had a space that was hers and that would always be hers.
Which she needed right now, because she’d just found out one of her favorite ways to get out of the house was closing down and there was nothing that she could do about it. Daniella pulled up the emergency brake and shifted the gear into first before turning off the throaty, muscly engine. Daniella started thinking how she liked her cars the way she liked her boys, but that felt like too obvious a piece of humor this early in the morning, so she buried the joke down deep and didn’t laugh.
Daniella pulled the strap to her tan leather satchel over her shoulder and pulled the bag and herself out of the car. The bag snagged for a moment on the gearbox and then the e-brake, but Daniella kept pulling, kept using momentum to get everything out in one solid swing.
The satchel came to an abrupt stop against Daniella’s hip, but she wasn’t thrown off balance by it. The thwack against her leg was grounding, if anything. She was here, in this body, in this incomprehensible life.
Daniella took a deep breath, trying to keep a wave of nausea at bay. She’d thrown on a pair of cutoff black denim shorts, some Docs, and a worn-in, soft T-shirt that read Visit Crete, complete with a cartoon of a minotaur on it. And this wasn’t from a quick road trip through Crete, Illinois. This was from actual international travel. Yia-yia had brought it back for Daniella when she and Mom went back to the motherland for a trip without Daniella or any of her siblings.
These were her favorite, threadbare clothes, and she needed that when she had to deal with a hangover. She opened the front flap of her bag and began digging through, past her notebook—her secret notebook, leather-bound in black—trying to find her keys to the front door of Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium. She was the only high school employee with her own set. And they were nearly all high school employees. For reasons that were beyond Daniella’s comprehension, the only employee at Wild Nights who was an adult with a master’s degree was the manager, Jo.
Actually, Jo was the only adult, full stop.
Even Rinn Olivera didn’t get a set of keys. At least Daniella would always have that.
Wild Nights Bookstore was still closing, though. Daniella took another deep breath because she was not going to throw up and she was not going to cry. She was also not going to tell anyone. She’d promised Eli she wouldn’t.
She was going to handle herself, and she was going to open the damned store.
But her mind was still screaming. Wild Nights was closing, was closing, was closing.
Daniella didn’t know how she was going to make it through the morning without telling anyone. Luckily, she was opening the store, which typically gave her time to think.
Daniella was supposed to get to the store right at eight, even seven, on a morning that she opened so that she could set up the bookstore right. But nobody ever came into the store directly at opening at nine—which, now that Daniella thought about it, really wasn’t a good sign, as far as business went. And, anyway, Daniella was usually the one closing at night, so she often got everything organized then—that way it would take her the least amount of time to open the next morning. She was lucky that she never really had to take opening shift while there was school, but, then again, that also meant most of her day was taken up by school.
Summers were different, though. They always had been. So much more time to fill. So much more creativity required to get out of the house and stay out.
Daniella’s jet-black aviator sunglasses slipped down her nose, and she squinted for a moment due to the pain of the sun against her eyes. The air was that heavy kind of humidity that permeated the entire area as soon as April rolled into May. They were into June now, so when she inhaled, Daniella got a taste of her own car’s vintage exhaust and the kind of fumes that only came out of buses or trucks. Industrial-grade smog. A real Chicagoland smell. Daniella pushed her sunglasses back up, unused to having a hangover, much less a workday one. She swatted at a mosquito she felt prickling at her leg.
Normally, Daniella led a carefully segmented life. Weekdays were filled with school. Evenings filled with work. Saturdays were workdays, too. But Saturday evenings were for going out. Sundays were for recovery, while her mom went to church and Daniella claimed she had too much schoolwork to catch up on.
But Daniella typically did her homework in class. Sundays were mostly for Daniella to devote to her own church of sorts—her poetry. Daniella wrote while her mind was still fuzzy and impressionable from the night before. When she didn’t have the energy to censor herself or overthink her words. When she could just write and believe in her words enough to not stop every other word, wondering if she’d gotten it right, wondering if she had done enough. She’d post it throughout the week. Photos of what she’d written on paper. Sometimes she’d doodle. But mostly it was her words scrawled across a page.
The spins overtook Daniella for a moment. She reached out, steadying herself on a nearby parked car. It took two counts for the spinning to stop again. Daniella reached back into her bag and mercifully found the store keys, despite the fact that her sunglasses blocked her ability to see any real depth into her purse. She’d been searching by feel and had grabbed at her notebook more times than she cared to in a public setting. Nobody knew about Daniella’s poetry, and she was planning on keeping it that way.
She hadn’t figured out how to compartmentalize her life for nothing.
Daniella crossed the narrow, flat street, under the speckled shade of the big, circular buckthorn trees. She rounded the corner and made it to the front door of Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium.
AJ Park was sitting against the curb. AJ was one of those devastatingly handsome artistic boys, with hair that flopped into his eyes and clothes that were perfectly worn in. He looked like the kind of kid who could reveal the mysteries of the universe in his deep, dark eyes.
Daniella preferred boys who held no mysteries and carried no depth. They were the kind of boys who were good for one thing and one thing only. The kind of boys who a girl only needed liability insurance for. Destroy or be destroyed. AJ was too thoughtful to be the kind of boy that drew Daniella’s interest. And AJ seemed to see nothing in Daniella but another one of his three sisters. They could be friends in perfect safety.