“Sure,” said Rinn. She no longer wondered why people said to never meet your heroes.

15

Handsome, Ruthless, and Stupid

12:22 P.M.

Daniella

Daniella was only stopped once on her way to the break room.

“Excuse me, miss,” said a man in pressed khaki pants and a polo shirt buttoned all the way to the top button.

“Yes?” Daniella had asked with the last of her patience.

“Do you know where I could find some Italian food?”

Daniella had sighed and taken him to the cookbook section. But of course, that wasn’t what the man had been looking for at all.

He’d been in search of actual Italian food. To eat. In a bookstore.

Daniella had almost lost her cool then. But she’d told him to put in Lucia’s in his phone and run off before she’d given the man a lecture that bookstores do not serve pizza. Or pasta. Or ravioli.

Daniella slammed her way into the break room. The force of the door—the sound ricocheted through Daniella’s chest. It was cathartic.

For a moment, Daniella understood why Imogen was constantly making noise. Screeching to a halt on her horrible moped. Stomping her way around the store. Using her whole body to push open a door. It felt good, really, to make noise and be heard. It felt like she was calling on some primal form of existence. I am here. You cannot ignore me. I exist.

Of course, when she got into the break room, Daniella spotted Eli. He was sitting on one of the Golden Girls chairs. There was something so effortless and lazy about the way he sat—legs sprawled and relaxed, arms akimbo and hanging over the armrests while he managed to hold on to a mug of coffee—that Daniella found that the last of her patience had finally faded into nothing.

She was not going to say anything.

Daniella went over to the coffee maker to pour herself a cup of coffee. But, of course, there was only the tiniest of splashes left in the pot. A quarter of an inch or less. She sloshed it around, trying to will the derelict amount of coffee to turn into a viable cup.

Daniella grunted. She felt Eli’s eyes on her, but she didn’t look over at him, she couldn’t look over at him. She was going to make coffee, and she was going to ignore Eli until kingdom come. Until she revealed herself as anachronisticblonde, which, for those of you watching at home, was going to be never. Daniella’s mind kept spinning metaphors, ways in which she could clearly articulate in the most poetic and hateful of ways this simple truth: Daniella Korres was never speaking to Eli ever, ever again. Unto the end of the world.

She didn’t care how dramatic that sounded. It was true.