At one point, Phoebe offered me a second can of seltzer and asked me if I wanted to go pet the goats. While we were there, remarking on the softness of their coats, chatting idly about costume-shop life, admiring Benna’s commitment to monochrome dressing and complaining about one of the Saras eating leftover fish in the shop, Phoebe lobbed a very casual, “So what’s their deal?” my way. The subtext was clear: Who is this intriguing, beguiling, gender-bending person, and how—sweet Jesus, how—do I get them to love me?

I sighed, taking a sip of my seltzer. There were so many places to go from here. I could play dumb—pretend that I’d never noticed that sparkly quality of Ros’s. Another option was the slightly patronizing “Oh, you too?” And then finally, if I wanted to be extremely direct, there was the even more dismissive “They’re not interested—trust me.”

Because Ros really wasn’t interested. It’s not like they’d drawn a hard line in the sand or anything. They’d gone out with a handful of people, and in the winter of tenth grade, they’d even briefly been courted by Leandra Maria Alma-Garcia, a senior two years above us. She was an incredible painter with a tattoo of a watch where all the numbers were scrambled, and the sort of person who everyone, even the teachers, was in love with. Ros broke it off with her—a shock to literally everyone but me.

“She was cool,” Ros had said after the breakup, when we were sprawled on my bed, a bag of sour peach rings between us. Touch was seated in my desk chair, which he wheeled to the edge of the bed to have closer access to the candy. “And like—obviously hot. All we did was kiss, but still.”

I tried to nod along, though I had the feeling we were going somewhere out of my depth.

“But like—the whole time we were together I just kept thinking that I’d rather be hanging out with you and Touch watching Power Jam. You know?”

“No, I don’t know! I would not want to be watching Power Jam,” Touchstone said.

Even I struggled to see how Power Jam could be preferable to hanging with Leandra Maria Alma-Garcia, but I took the compliment. I wanted to say more—that I was jealous of their apathy, that nothing sucked more than having a crush. Mine on Ros was fresh, and it stung every second of every day.

“She was okay,” Ros said. “I don’t know. She did a lot of little things that were nice. Her mom always called me she, and even though they/she is fine, Leandra was always correcting her mom about it, encouraging her to use they. It was nice to have someone stick up for me that way; you know what I mean?”