But even AJ didn’t know about Daniella’s writing.
Daniella hadn’t meant to become a great secret keeper. But she had learned early that information was not just power—it was safety. So she kept from AJ, too, that Wild Nights Bookstore was about to close.
According to Eli, at least.
Daniella had to assume that she could trust Eli, that he wasn’t exaggerating for effect or lying by omission, but that wasn’t an assumption made lightly or easily by Daniella. Ever.
“What’s up?” AJ stood; he brushed some of the asphalt rubble from the back of his pants.
Daniella shrugged. All she had to do was compartmentalize this one thing. Just one more segmented section of her life. Easy. “The same.”
“You close last night?” asked AJ.
“No, didn’t you hear? Jo trusted Eli to close. Alone. Told me I could have the evening off. I guess she decided to trust him. Or try out trusting him.” Daniella hoped her worry didn’t show on her face. Eli was a hell-raiser, but he was basically harmless. He liked to give Jo shit and then do everything that Jo asked. Or at least, that’s what Daniella had always assumed. She’d hate to give him the benefit of the doubt now, at the end of things, when he didn’t deserve it.
A troubled expression crossed AJ’s face. “Shouldn’t he be here, though?”
Daniella shoved the key into the lock, but it was old and it got stuck as she tried to turn it.
Stuck. Typical.
Daniella almost had the door unlocked and she’d almost made it through this conversation with AJ. She just had to hold on to this secret for a little while longer. She just had to finesse the key and—there it was—the tumblers would turn and she could shove the door open.
Daniella breathed a sigh of relief as she walked into the store and the bell that hung on the door jingled. She flipped the sign at the front from CLOSED to OPEN. Everything in Wild Nights was still manually operated. “If he closed last night, I don’t mind him coming in a little late. It’s not only me in here. You made it on time.”
“And if I hadn’t, you’d probably be more mad at me than at him.”
Daniella laughed. “True. But I expect more of you.”
“And why is that?”
“Because you’re much more handsome than he is.” Daniella winked.
AJ laughed. “Thanks, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”
Daniella was glad he was laughing and distracted. “Like you don’t know you’re gorgeous.”
AJ rolled his eyes, like he really never had thought about it. Like his looks were something beyond his own power and therefore beyond his notice.
Daniella had nearly used that in a poem a thousand times—the beautiful boy who wore his extraordinary looks like an everyday pair of jeans and an old T-shirt—but every time, she had come to the conclusion that the irony was too clean and too simple, and she rejected clean and simple literary devices outright.
She liked old language and old forms. Purple prose, that’s what her English teacher had called it. And she certainly didn’t want to write poetry that could one day be studied in school and picked apart and dissected like a dead frog in a science lab.
Daniella liked purple prose. Mr. Fischer could go choke on his copies of Hemingway.
The bell jangled again, reminding Daniella which plane of reality she needed to be on right now.
“Hey, guys—I’m here.” It was Rinn Olivera—a girl who was moderately internet famous, at least in the bookish corner of the universe. She had a mass of curls on her head, but they weren’t the wild kind. These were the kind of curls that had been curly method–ed into perfect, submissive ringlets. They bounced as Rinn walked and added to Rinn’s otherwise insufferable level of perfection. She wore one of those annoyingly pressed tennis skirts and a polo, like that was how actual humans dressed or something. All she needed was a ribbon in her hair and Daniella could have gagged on command.
Rinn was a walking, talking reminder that nobody was perfect, except for people who spent their days filming themselves for content. Rinn bounced up to them—because it wasn’t enough to be a straight-A student and have an enormous, bookish following on the internet. She had to be all smiles and springing ringlets, too. “Hi, Daniella. Hi, AJ.”
This last part Rinn said a little bit breathlessly, because, as was obvious to everyone in the store and potentially on planet Earth, Rinn had an enormous crush on AJ.
Well, obvious to everyone but AJ.
“Oh, hey, Rinn.” AJ smiled his devastating but standard smile, and Daniella had to watch Rinn melt where she stood.
It was revolting.
Daniella’s stomach lurched. She was so not in the mood to deal with Rinn’s attempts at flirting. Daniella was not, on the whole, into love. And Rinn’s doe-eyed, fairy-tale kind of expression only made Daniella want to shake the girl and tell her that gallant knights were a thing the Victorians made up and to toughen up already because no matter who you loved, they were more likely than not to smash your heart into a million pieces.
But Daniella didn’t know Rinn well enough to tell her this.
And anyway, that morning, Daniella was barely in the mood to deal with anything other than a bottle of Pedialyte and a double dose of Pepto-Bismol. If she told Rinn that love was dead, she might end up telling her the bookstore was closing, too.
Daniella ignored Rinn and dug the Pepto out of her purse and popped the chewable into her mouth. Each spin was getting worse than the last. But she’d made Eli a promise and she was sticking to it, hangover or no hangover. Maybe there was something salvageable in the books that Eli hadn’t seen. Daniella had been tracking Wild Nights’ book sales for the past year. She knew them inside and out.
She couldn’t believe she’d missed something so huge.
“Okay, I’m going to go into the back and deal with some inventory. One of you take the floor, and the other one take the register.” But then Daniella realized that Rinn would take the floor just to try to hang around and flirt with AJ as he took the register, so she amended. “Actually, Rinn, could you take the register? You do such a good job.”
There. That would give AJ some space, for the morning at least. He never directly said he hated the cash register, but Daniella could tell that AJ enjoyed having the floor and time to himself in the mornings. Too much customer interaction too early really wore AJ out.
Daniella understood that—she hated most people. Her problem was, she needed them. She gained her own kind of boundless energy from being around other humans, even if they irritated her. There was a kind of poetic irony in being the kind of person who recharged around others but who resented having to recharge around them in the first place.
AJ shrugged and said something that sounded like sure as he walked off, receding into the safety of the unilluminated corners of the store.
Rinn’s face fell for a moment. Daniella wasn’t trying to thwart Rinn’s love story. She just didn’t care enough to help it along, either. Daniella felt a small lump in her throat, which she tried to swallow along with her mildly guilty conscience.
But then—in the road—a terrible screeching sounded. In Daniella’s experience, that could only mean one thing.
Imogen was here.