passion. I mean, it’s pretty cool. What’s not to love about this?” She pointed
 
 down at her shoes, which were bright red with little bats on the front. “I
 
 designed these bad boys myself. Freaking cool, if I do say so.”
 
 Arabella liked them. She liked Tina too, though her high scho
 
 ol version
 
 of herself would have targeted her like she was a freaking bullseye.
 
 So…back to that mistake.
 
 It turned out that June Erickson, the girl she’d bullied in high school
 
 unmercifully and with zero remorse because she was a teenage turdbag, was
 
 now a CEO. Of the very company she’d had been hired at. How about them
 
 apples? Yeah, she was seriously screwed.
 
 After hours spent trying to figure out how to turn down the new position,
 
 Arabella knew she was going to have to take it, at least until something else
 
 came along. She had bills to pay and her parents were depending on her.
 
 After they’d declared bankruptcy and her dad had barely avoided jail time
 
 for the damn scheme he’d been involved in running, they’d turned to her.
 
 Katrina, Arabella’s younger sister, wasn’t an option. She was still in
 
 college. She’d had to extend her four-year plan into a six- or eight-year
 
 plan, given that she no longer had a fund to help her pay for tuition. She had
 
 to work part time and go to school part time. If Arabella wanted to keep the
 
 small bungalow where she and her parents lived—her mom and dad in the
 
 basement while she took the top floor—she needed a job and she needed
 
 one fast.
 
 “Okay. This is it. I hope you like it. I think they look classy, with all that
 
 glass, but some people hate it. It makes them feel all exposed and open.”
 
 The office building was located in downtown Cincinnati. June was an
 
 Ohio success story, it turned out. She was making change happen all over
 
 the world with her innovative ideas and she’d never moved to New York,
 
 LA, London, or any other big, popular, metropolitan city where smart,
 
 successful people usually ended up. She’d stayed right there, and her shoes