Page 8 of #Starstruck

Which was another reason to stop being so pathetically hopeful. There was no way Chase Covington would be interested in dating someone who would never sleep with him.

There comes a point in your day when you realize you’re no longer going to be productive. Mine happened at 11:52 this morning when Chase liked my tweet.

I was a font of useless information. The only thing that had ever rivaled my Chase obsession was my love of all things trivia. Trivial Pursuit games ended with me drinking the tears of my fellow players and leaving a trail of their bloodied hearts all over the board.

After my grandparents left the Amish in Pennsylvania and moved out to California, one of the first things they bought was a TV. When I lived with them decades later, they still had that same television. The only program they ever watched wasJeopardy!, and I remember sitting on their uncomfortable couch in between them as they missed so many questions. My guess was that my love for weird cultural minutiae came from them. Alex Trebek was kind of my hero.

So I tweeted out random facts. Which was better than having to hear Lexi say, “If you say one more thing about stoplight colors, I will slip arsenic into your orange juice.”

Twitter was a good outlet for my useless knowledge. And now Chase had liked my post. I again wanted to read meaning into it and again felt that pointless, bubbly excitement that someone so well known and so incredibly hot had noticed me.

It was probably what it felt like if you were a nerd in high school and the quarterback started paying attention to you.

A situation I had absolutely no experience with.

“Are you trying to see if telekinesis exists?”

I blinked a couple of times, caught up in my Chase-centered world. I put my phone down and saw Noah standing at the door to the conference room. “What?”

“I’m pretty sure you have to actually use your hands to fold the papers yourself and stuff them into the envelopes.” He sounded amused, and I was glad I wasn’t in trouble for not doing my unpaid internship.

I wanted to work at the Ocean Life Foundation after graduation, so I came in twice a week to do things like fetch coffee and send out letters asking for donations. Which I was supposed to be doing right now but had stopped to stare at the notification that “Chase Covington liked your tweet.”

I smiled at Noah. He had started at the Foundation three months ago as an intern in the accounting department, which is where I hoped to work. The first thing I noticed was that he had the same name as one of Chase’s characters on this dramedy calledNoah’s Ark, in which his parents had died and Noah had taken over the family farm and raised his two sets of twin brothers and sisters. It had lasted only one season.

Anyway, the real Noah was awkwardly cute. He had sandy-brown hair and dark eyes and was a little bit taller than I was. I’d had a crush on him since he started. We had flirted. (Well, he flirted. I said stupid things.) He was the kind of guy I usually dated.

The anti-Chase.

“Right. I don’t have that X-Men mutation. I can’t stuff envelopes with my mind.” See? Stupid things.

But Noah just kept smiling at me, ignoring my strangeness. “Are you coming to the meeting?”

“The meeting. Yes. I had totally forgotten about it.”

I walked with him, and he asked, “What do you think this month’s theme will be? Dolphins are awesome? Fish are friends, not food? Meat is murder?”

“I’m going with shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll still land among the stars. Or the starfish.” Our supervisor, Stephanie Wheeler, ran these meetings expecting that she would inspire and rally the troops. We were all here because we already wanted to make a difference. Her telling us there was noIinteamdidn’t really do much to up our game.

And none of us was as obsessed with saving ocean wildlife as Stephanie. I had googled her once, and I’d found all kinds of pictures of her from protests, her mouth wide open, midscream. She was the kind of person who thought animal lives were more important than human ones. Which struck me as a tad deranged, but I figured her heart was in the right place.

We were sitting in the back of the larger conference room trading clichéd inspirational quotes when Stephanie’s assistant, Miriam, came by and handed me something metallic. I looked at it. It was a key chain with a shiny blue fish.

“Does this remind you of the rainbow fish?” Noah asked, and it took me a second to place it. My brother, Zander, had gone through a phase where that was his favorite story. It was about a beautiful fish that gave away his shiny, multicolored scales to other fish so they could all be the same. It had always seemed kind of communist to me.

Stephanie called the meeting to order. “As you know, we are only a few months away from our biggest annual fund-raiser. Our charity dinner and silent auction always does very well for us. But this year I thought we should aim higher. I thought we should collect some rainbow fish of our own who can share their scales with us. Add some luster to our event.”

I nodded at Noah, acknowledging his excellent guess about the key chain. He winked back at me.

She turned around and wrote the wordsKevin Baconon the whiteboard. “I’m sure most of you are too young to remember, but has anyone heard of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?”

I knew what that was. But I also knew better than to interrupt Stephanie when she was on a roll.

“It was a theory that everyone in the world is six degrees away from one another. That everybody in this room knows someone who knows someone who knows a celebrity. We’ve been trying for years to get some stars to our dinner, and I think if we can pull it off, it will be our biggest year yet. My challenge to you is to talk to everyone you know and find someone famous we can invite to our fund-raiser!”

Stephanie went on about some of the details and deadlines for the event. My first thought was my mom. She had some notoriety. People didn’t usually recognize her, but when I told them what she had done, everybody immediately knew who I was talking about.

But my boss was probably looking for a different kind of celebrity.

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