5
“Excuse me, what?” I said, forcing out a laugh to cover the icy chill that had just run down my spine. The kind of chill that means: she’s about to say something insane. “I think I misheard you.”
“Zane Ryder,” Tess repeated, as if she were invoking the name of a Greek god. “The rockstar.”
“I know who Zane Ryder is…” I answered slowly, the way you speak to a psychiatric patient. “But I was really hoping I’d misunderstood.”
“Bea, come on. If he’s not the greatest doomed artist of our time, then who is?”
“But… but… Zane Ryder?” I stammered. “Did you steep your brain in tequila and drink it as a cocktail?”
“I don’t see why you’re so disappointed,” she shot back, offended. “I’ve got a manual for seducing doomed artists. What am I supposed to do with it, huh? Use it on Jack—the forty-five-year-old who still lives with his parents and plays ‘Smoke on the Water’ in his buddies’ garage? ”
“So you’ve decided… to seduce Zane Ryder?” I asked, enunciating each word like a verbal comprehension test.
“Yes.”
She said it straight to my face, without a flicker of hesitation—like she was saying yes to a coffee date, not to conquering a living legend.
“You, Tess Martini—Brooklyn girl with a mortgage on your washing machine and a bank balance in the triple digits—have decided to climb Everest. Barehanded. In flip-flops.”
She lifted the book above her head with the expression of a nineteenth-century heroine and declared: “And I’ve got the perfect guide to get me there!”
“I thought you didn’t even like Zane Ryder. Not as a musician, not as a man.”
“True. As a musician, he doesn’t thrill me. His stuff… meh. No bite. And as a man… let’s just say my taste leans more toward cardigan-wearing librarians with emotional baggage. But let’s not forget the real goal here: making Chad boil with envy.”
“Chad doesn’t even deserve the thought of you climbing Everest just to get revenge on him.”
“Bea, picture it: he wakes up, opens Instagram, and BAM! Photo-scoops everywhere: Zane Ryder and me kissing on the beach, on a yacht, under the blazing stage lights. His brain would explode like a microwave with a spoon inside. His eyes would spin like slot machines, smoke pouring from his ears, and before he could even say ‘wait a sec,’ they’d strap him into a straightjacket and wheel him away. ”
“Who cares what Chad feels? He can take his ego and book it a one-way vacation to Mars!”
“No, no, no. He has to pay. He has to suffer. And what punishment could be more divine than seeing me— me! —on the arm of the sexiest, richest, most virile rockstar on the hemisphere? As Frank Sinatra said: the best revenge is massive success. ”
“Yeah, but I doubt Frank Sinatra was picturing himself naked with a guitarist in snakeskin pants… And besides—how do you even plan on getting close to someone like Zane Ryder?” I asked, spreading my arms as if I were physically trying to embrace the entire concept of absurdity.
“I don’t know yet, Bea. Yesterday I was just a humble librarian with the self-esteem of a broken cookie at the bottom of the box. But after reading the Countess’s precious teachings… I’ll know exactly what to do.”
“And the fact that no one has ever checked that book out doesn’t raise… oh, I don’t know, a couple of red flags?”
“Of course not. That’s the ultimate proof!
Proof that none of our library patrons ever had the guts to go after a poet of Ryder’s caliber.
And you know why? Because they never dared.
None of them got their hands on Jim Morrison, John Lennon, or Kurt Cobain.
But maybe—just maybe—if they’d read this book instead of letting it gather dust… they would have.”
She stepped closer, eyes shining, brandishing the tome like it was the Holy Grail.
“Don’t you see, Bea? The secret knowledge of one of history’s greatest seductresses has been sitting there all along, graciously provided by the New York Department of Education, and not a single woman had the guts to claim it.
Too busy reading historical romances with dukes and damsels!
Too fenced in by their own mental cages.
But not me. I’m the first who dared. And tonight…
the Contessa and I… we’ve officially teamed up. ”
Part of my brain still believed—or maybe just desperately hoped—that she was joking.
That maybe she’d read the book, laugh at it, daydream a little about seducing a celebrity just to spite her idiot ex…
but deep down, she’d know it was all laughably impossible.
Therapeutic fantasy, really. A hallucinatory coping mechanism.
A weird but harmless distraction—until something else came along.
A stray puppy to rescue, an unexpected promotion, or—more likely—a new fling with a sexy bartender.
“Fine, do what you want,” I said, throwing up my hands in surrender. “But let me remind you: the best revenge is indifference.”
She fixed me with a glint of megalomaniac genius in her eyes. “No. The best revenge is indifference while I’m seated on the throne, next to the King, as the entire kingdom cheers my name. That’s real indifference.”
With a sweeping gesture of the book—like she was wielding some ancient scepter passed down through generations of drama queens—she marched out of the room with imperial strides, leaving me alone to reflect on two things: first, my roommate was officially losing her mind; second…
her madness was starting to feel disturbingly contagious.