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.