“I was the only one who knew how to get up here.” Daniella crossed her arms over her chest just to emphasize her displeasure.

“Nah,” said Eli, the door clicking behind him as it closed. “I figured it out ages ago. But I knew you liked to come up here alone, so I tried not to bother you. And now I don’t even regret it because, really, this is the crappiest view. I can see straight into someone’s overstuffed office and the back alley of a building that probably has a very nice facade, if I could see it. You can always tell the buildings that have nice facades because they’re really shitty on the back side. Like all the money went to the front and the front alone.”

“Eli,” said Daniella.

“Yeah?” He looked so earnest as he said it. Like she really was about to say something nice and supportive.

Daniella shook her head. “Stop talking.”

“Alright,” said Eli, and he perched down beside her. “You gonna say anything?”

“Nope,” said Daniella.

“Fair enough.” Eli moved out from his crouch so he was reclined back on his hands.

And so they sat there for who knows how long, their fingers inches apart, their bodies both leaned back. The sun was hot and sweltering—except for that lazy, steady breeze that kept coming back from Lake Michigan, reminding them that that lake effect they’d been told about one day in earth science class hadn’t been totally bogus.

Not that Daniella thought science was totally bogus. It was, in its purest form, observations based in math, which Daniella loved. But there was something about learning a thing and feeling its effects on her face that made the idea of that science feel real to her. The lake effect was true because she was sitting on a roof and the air hadn’t stagnated. The climate was changing because the winters in Chicago were whiplashing between relatively mild to polar vortex. Daniella shivered. But it wasn’t from thinking of winter or polar vortexes or snowstorms. It wasn’t even from the breeze, because that was a comforting thing, keeping the sweat from accumulating under her armpits and beneath her bra. Keeping the mosquitoes off her face.

But the shiver went through her whole body again. She had to let it out somehow.

And, finally, Daniella said it, because she needed to tell someone, even if she was mostly just telling herself. All she needed was for that shiver to stop. Needed it to never take hold of her again. “Brock Harvey attacked me in the break room like a creepy psychopath.”

“Jesus,” said Eli.

Daniella laughed. It wasn’t funny, she knew. But somehow, his anger gave her license to laugh, to giggle. To release all of that pent-up energy in a strange bubble of joy rather than the cracking release of rage that Daniella had let out on Rinn. “It’s fine.”