Anita glares at them as if they’d just hawked and spat. I’ve seen that look a million times in the hallways given by a popular girl to a band geek when he gets too familiar in front of her clique. She turns back to Raffe, her face melting into a radiant smile. She puts her hand on his arm as he’s about to take off his pants.

And that’s all the excuse I need.

I grab the sudsy shirt out of the gray water and throw it at her.

It makes a plop noise when it lands on her face, wrapping around her hair. Her perfect hair clumps into a stringy mass, and her mascara smears as the cloth slides wetly down her blouse. She emits a high-pitched squeal that turns every head within earshot.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say in a sugary voice. “Did you not like that? I thought that’s what you wanted. I mean, why else would you be putting your paws on my man?”

The small crowd around us grows by the second. Oh, yeah, baby. Step right up. Come see the freak show. Raffe fades into the growing crowd, discreetly buttoning up his shirt. And I thought he looked grim at my last fight.

Anita’s enormous eyes look up helplessly at Raffe. She looks like a distressed kitten, bewildered and hurt. Poor thing. I have second thoughts about whether I can do this.

Then she looks at me. It’s amazing how quickly her face can change, depending on who she’s looking at. She looks spitting-mad. As she stalks toward me, mad turns into rage.

It’s impressive how vicious a pretty woman can look when she sets her mind to it. Either she’s one hell of an actress, or Dee-Dum had a double agenda when they set this up. I’ll bet she doesn’t even know about the fight. Why share the profits when you can get revenge instead? I’m sure this wasn’t the first time Anita has snubbed Dee-Dum. Not that I believe for a second that their feelings were hurt.

“You think anything you do would get a guy like him to look at you twice?” Anita flings the wet shirt back at me. “You’d be lucky to get a one-legged grandpa to be interested in you.”

Okay. Turns out I can do this.

I lean a little to make sure the shirt hits me.

Then, we go at it in all our feminine glory. Hair pulling, face slapping, shirt ripping, nail-scratching. We squeal like cheerleaders who fell into a mud pit.

As we stumble around in our drunken dance, we bump into a wash basin. It comes crashing down, spraying the whole area with water.

She trips over it while clinging onto me, and we come tumbling down. Our bodies contort around each other as we roll in the mud around the wash basins.