Big, sparkly, glitter-drenched thank yous to all the readers who have embraced the Heroine Complex series so enthusiastically—I love your cosplays, I love your fan art, I love your collage aesthetic inspiration pin boards, I love you. And it’s because of you that this series is continuing past the first trilogy, with more adventures for Evie, Annie, and Bea (and all their friends!) on the horizon. I hope you’re as excited as I am to follow my girls on their next epic quest.
Thanks, as always, to all my badass superhero teams: the Girl Gang, the Shamers, the Ripped Bodice writing crew, NOFXGVN, Heroine Club, the Cluster, and the incredible Asian American arts community of LA. I am honored to be in your company.
Thank you to my agent, Diana Fox, and my editors, Betsy Wollheim and Katie Hoffman, for always working tirelessly to help me make these books the best they can be. (Special thanks to Katie for knowing the power of a well-timed sign bunny.) Thank you to Alexis Nixon for all your publicity magic and SDCC superheroing, to Josh Starr for keeping everything on track and answering my weird questions with “NOT a weird question,” and to everyone at DAW, Fox Literary, and Penguin Random House for all the care you put into getting these books out to the world.
Thank you to Rebekah Weatherspoon for being the best deadline buddy ever—we got our airplane pants, we got our Sprite, let’s go. And for the record, I made it through because of that Tina Knowles quote.
Thank you to the proprietors of The Ripped Bodice, Bea and Leah Koch: your store, your pink couch, and you have all been there for me in more ways than I can count. It’s Lit is not exactly your store, but its positive attributes (i.e. the parts that aren’t infested with demonic porcelain unicorns) certainly took root there. And thanks to Fitzwilliam Waffles for allowing me to be so inspired by both your appearance and your demeanor—you are a natural star.
Thank you to Jenn Fujikawa and Tom Wong for always understanding me the very most—you are my favorite twins and I love you. Thank you to Jenny Yang for talking all-caps FEELINGS with me, to Andrea Letamendi for insightful Red Robin lunches that always make me cry (in a good way!), and to Christine Dinh and Mel Caylo for all those weekends of shoe shopping and brunch.
Thank you to Jason Chan for taking care of my girls again and making them look exactly as they should on the cover.
Thank you to Keiko Agena, Julia Cho, and Will Choi for being awesome friends and for your brilliant dramatic readings of these characters—that’s how I hear them now in my head. Thank you to Amber Benson and Seanan McGuire, the most magical of magical girls. Thank you to Cindy Pon for being there for several crucial moments and for always being a rock star.
And thank you to everyone who fed this book in so many ways: Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Amy Ratcliffe, Christy Black, Sarah Watson, Liza Palmer, Erik Patterson, Phil Yu, Naomi Ko, Naomi Hirahara, Diya Mishra, Michi Trota, Alisha Rai, Sonjia Hyon, Jenelle Riley, Nick Brandt, Janet Eckford, and the Okamoto family (and the NERD HERD). Thank you to all the bookstores and booksellers who hosted me last year, especially Maryelizabeth Yturralde at Mysterious Galaxy and Jude Feldman at Borderlands—you are both so wonderful.
Thank you to my family for being my family: Dad, Steve, Marjorie, Alice, Philip, and all the other Kuhns, Yoneyamas, Chens, and Coffeys.
Thank you to Jeff Chen for everything—I will always share my okonomiyaki with you.
This book was, for many reasons, tough to write. Like Bea, I ultimately found hope in watching the people I love push past seemingly insurmountable odds to do the right thing. Thank you, everyone, for that.