I don't like Sloan Andrews. But maybe I want to sleep with her. I meet her at her neighborhood coffee shop, one of her usual hangouts – or so she says. The bartender doesn't seem to recognize her either as a customer or as one of the five teenagers who defeated the Dark almost a decade ago. Which, to be honest, seems unbelievable to me, because apart from being famous worldwide, Sloan Andrews resembles that perfect, spotless, stunning image that makes you want to dirty it. If she's wearing makeup, I can't see it; I only see her clear skin and her large blue eyes, a living advertisement for cosmetics. She wears a Cubs team cap when she walks in, with her long brown ponytail passing through the opening, a tight gray t-shirt in the right spots, ripped jeans revealing long, well-shaped legs, and a pair of sneakers. It's the kind of clothes that say she doesn't care about fashion, or even about the long, slender body that fills them.

And that's the thing with Sloan: I believe it. I believe she doesn't care about anything, let alone meeting me. She didn't even want to give the interview. She only agreed, she said, because her boyfriend, Matthew Wicks, another of the Chosen, asked her to promote his new book – The Choice Continues (coming out on February 3). In our initial discussions about this interview, she didn't have many ideas about where I could meet her. Although everyone in Chicago already knows where Sloan lives – on the north side of Uptown, a few blocks from Lake Shore Drive – she flatly refused to let me see her apartment. "I don't go anywhere," she wrote. "When I go somewhere, people approach me. So, if you don't want to run after me, either we'll go to Java Joe or nowhere." I'm not sure I can take notes and run at the same time, so I agreed on Java Joe.