An interview. It wasn’t something Riri would have agreed to a few years ago --- in all honesty, she wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to it now. She wasn’t a people person, wasn’t someone who understood the right thing to do or say in order to be liked. That had always been Natalie’s strong suit, not Riri’s. She’d watched her best friend sweet talk every person they met, watched her smile and bat her lashes into free food from food trucks and better seats at the movies and the occasional ticket to whatever event she was going to drag Riri to that week. For a long time, Riri wondered if she ought to be jealous of Natalie’s charm, but she never had been. She’d figured as long as she had Natalie with her, she didn’t need charm of her own.
But Natalie wasn’t with her now, and Riri never had developed any kind of people skills. The interview was a bad idea. She knew that. She also knew that Natalie would have told her to do it. And she’d never been good at saying no to the voice in her head that sounded like her best friend, so here she was, sitting in a chair with Karen Page across from her and her hands clutched in her lap. “So, um... How does this work? I mean, I --- I know how an interview works in the broad sense. You ask questions, I answer them. I get that much. But how --- Are we starting? Is this the start?”