“Well…um, I wont tell your boss you said that. And yes, please” Dana replied, becoming more comfortable in front of this girl… Alice. She noticed Alice looking her up and down, and suddenly remembered her less than attractive appearance.

“*****. Um… I’m sorry about what I look like. I mean, not what I look like… but um… my appearance,” she blurted out, as Alice fell apart in giggles. “See my car broke down ages away, near Layton Avenue and I had to run here. Why are you laughing?” Dana suddenly asked, shocking herself with her bluntness.

“I’m laughing at you. Don’t get so stressed, you look really good. Anyway, you weren’t the one making faces into a spoon, where you?” Alice replied, laughing, but she soon stopped when she realised Dana wasn’t laughing along with her joke. It wasn’t that Dana didn’t find it funny; it’s just that she didn’t actually hear it. She was too caught up in what Alice had said beforehand, ‘You look really good.’ Yep, she was that retarded that she was already falling for this girl, who she had known for, what? 5 minutes. Good one Dane.

“Ok, let’s move on…” Alice stated, a little annoyed that Dana hadn’t found her joke funny. She sat down and took out her notebook which she had scribbled a few questions in just before leaving for the interview.

“Hmm, ok. Miss Fairbanks, you recently moved to L.A, how do you like it so far?” Alice asked in her most professional tone before looking up at a rather startled Dana.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, genuinely concerned.

“Oh, nothing. I just… I’ve never done this before,” Dana replied sheepishly, looking down to cover the fact she had begun to blush. A fact which Alice had already spotted, and thought extremely attractive.

“You haven’t? Well it’s a piece of cake,” Alice stated, hoping to convince Dana to lighten up just a little. She found Dana to be pretty fantastic and her semi-clumsy attitude adorable, but wished she would relax just a little. “You’re worried about your ‘professional image,’ aren’t you?” Dana couldn’t help but smile at the way Alice used her fingers to quote.

“Yeah I guess I am. Everyone just says it’s such an important aspect of my career, and I have no idea what to do. I apparently cant act normally because it looks too goofy for a professional tennis player, but I have no idea how to cultivate this perfect image either.” She suddenly realised she had poured her darkest (well one of her darkest) fears to a person, no a journalist, she hardly knew. “*****, please don’t put that in the interview. Please.” Alice hadn’t the chance to reassure her before she was cut off by Dana. “If it’s a matter of money, I’m sure my manager can sort some kind of deal out with you… compensation. You journalists do that right?” The words were piling out of Dana’s mouth before she could think, and she only realised the brutality of her words when she saw Alice visibly cringe, hurt by her assumptions that she was no more than just another lousy ‘journalist.’ And it did hurt, Alice had never thought strangers words would hurt so much, but the brutal honesty present in Dana’s voice had made Alice’s body ache all over, and for once in her life she was lost for words.

Dana choked. Badly. She knew it, and at that moment she would have given almost anything to rewind to just a few minutes before she deeply insulted Alice. ‘Apologise. Dammit Dana apologise!’ but she could do nothing of the sort, opting instead for throwing some money on the coffee table, mumbling an incoherent goodbye and running out of The Planet into a massive thunderstorm. Alice sighed, grabbed her belongings and ran out to follow the tennis player. She may have hurt her, but Alice knew Dana was something out of the ordinary, and she wasn’t about to let that go without a fight.