“You saw dollar signs,” he says, the words cutting clean through my self-justifications. “A way to pay off your debts. To everyone but me, apparently.”
And there it is—the truth bomb that obliterates my last defensive position. I did see dollar signs. I saw rent money and food that wasn’t shelter donations and maybe even a future where I wasn’t one bad day away from sleeping on a park bench.
I never saw him at all.
I take a breath, and suddenly I’m that girl who once wrote twelve pages on Taco Bell’s socioeconomic marketing strategy at 3:00 a.m. while hopped up on gas station energy drinks. Words spill out like I’m being waterboarded with my own anxiety.
“You’re right. I should have researched. I mean, I once tracked the correlation between Mercury retrograde and Starbucks’ seasonal menu releases across three fiscal quarters. I made a PowerPoint. With animations. Transitions that swooped and sparkled. I color-coded the data points to match their seasonal cup designs and created custom graphs showing how pumpkin spice sales spike during certain astrological alignments. I presented it to my roommate’s astrology club at 2:00 a.m. and they gave me a standing ovation.”
He blinks.
I wait for a response, but silence is spilling out of him like a broken faucet that only drips awkwardness.
Say something.Put me out of my misery.
He doesn’t. Giovanni Bavga isn’t a prince. Men like him don’tsavewomen. They claim them. Consume them. Devour, undo, and ruin them.
So what else can I do but keep spamming him with my irrelevant thoughts?
“But your restaurant? Something actually relevant to my life right now? Basic operating hours that would have prevented me from showing up like some desperate, unprepared mess? Nope. Total fail. Catastrophic oversight. I apparently saved all my investigative skills for completely useless trivia instead of, youknow, the one thing that might have made me look competent in front of you.”
We stare at each other. His indifference crashing into my desperation.
Come on, bro. Throw me a fucking bone!
“I’m usually so detail-oriented. I can tell you why birds started getting the worm early – did you know that proverb dates back to 1636? Something about medieval plowmen? I once spent three days tracing the etymology of that phrase through seventeen different historical texts just to win an argument with my roommate about whether it was originally about actual birds or just a farming metaphor. I created a timeline with primary sources and everything. The library staff knew me by name because I kept requesting obscure linguistic journals from their special collections. I even contacted a professor at Oxford who specializes in seventeenth-century English colloquialisms. All this research energy, all these obsessive tendencies that could have been channeled into something useful like, oh I don’t know, checking your restaurant’s hours or preparing for this interview properly. But no, I chose to become an expert on avian-based idioms instead of securing my financial future.”
Nothing?Nothing? How in the hell does he not react to an utter meltdown about ancient vernacular? I can’t take it. My filter completely dissolves. My internal monologue bursts forth into being like a ghost from another dimension being made manifest upon the striking of the witching hour.
The carefully constructed dam between my thoughts and my mouth crumbles entirely, words rushing out in a torrent that I’m powerless to stop. It’s as if the pressure of this moment—the weight of Giovanni’s silent judgment, the desperate need for this job, and my own mounting anxiety—has corroded whatever thin membrane usually separates what I think from what I say.
Each syllable spills out unchecked, unfiltered, unrestrained, flowing directly from the chaotic whirlpool of my mind straight past my lips without so much as a courtesy pause for editing or social appropriateness.
Finally—I get to the point.
“Look.” I blow out a breath, creating a wind so forceful, my hair flutters up into the air. “I don’t unravel,OK? I’m not a girl who unravels!” I gesture at myself with both hands, full theater-kid energy now, “Iravelthe fuck out of things. I get shit done. I?—”
I… kind of give up.
Because the silence is stretching between us like some kind of psychological taffy, and I’m running out of oxygen and sanity in equal measure.
I rewind back to the beginning. Square my shoulders. Tilt my chin up. And wait for my judgment while Giovanni Bavga watches me with all the emotion of a security camera.
5
She’s the kind of girl who… ravels?
If I were the type to laugh, this would be the moment. That’s how ridiculous that statement is.
Emmaleen Rourke, The Girl WhoRavels.
Sorry, Little Miss Take, I just don’t see it.
Watching her dissolve into whatever this verbal hemorrhage is feels like witnessing an amateur magician’s tablecloth trick—except the tablecloth is her composure, and she’s dragging every piece of mental dinnerware down with it.
The performance is almost mesmerizing in its catastrophic momentum, each new tangent creating fresh debris in the wreckage of what might have been begging.
Mercury retrograde and Starbucks. PowerPoint. Birds. Worms. Etymology. The desperate, scattered connections of a mind frantically trying to assemble order from chaos, like watching someone attempt to alphabetize a library during an earthquake.