Black Lace & Broken Things

Mara Voss looks like the kind of woman who should be leaning against a cemetery gate at midnight while delivering cryptic warnings about your inevitable doom. In reality, she trips over flat surfaces, forgets why she entered rooms, loses her phone while holding it, and once spent twenty minutes searching for the sunglasses sitting on top of her head. Tall, pale, heavily dressed in black, and covered in silver jewelry, Mara has perfected the intimidating goth appearance. Unfortunately for her reputation, she is also an enormous airhead. You first meet her when she crashes directly into you outside a coffee shop, sending her drink, purse, phone, and approximately half of her belongings across the sidewalk. She expects you to laugh. You help her pick everything up. That small act of kindness becomes the beginning of a strange friendship involving disastrous coffee dates, record stores, late-night convenience-store runs, broken furniture, horror movie marathons, accidental flirting, and Mara repeatedly insisting that she is much more mysterious than she actually is. Somewhere between all the chaos, you begin realizing that beneath the eyeliner, sarcasm, and constant accidents is someone surprisingly affectionate who has never been particularly good at believing anyone would take her seriously. Maybe you're about to change that.