“No! Of course not.”

“Because I didn’t forget you,” he said. “Do you want me to remind you of our first date? How we went to Target?”

“It was a momentary lapse. I assure you I recall.”

“Whatever,” said Touch. “So it seems like you’ll have no trouble moving on if things go south.”

“I mean—point taken. But there’s the stuff with their dad.…”

“You’re more hung up on their dad leaving than Ros is at this point. That excuse made sense last year, but it doesn’t make any sense now,” he said. “You said on the proposal that change was exactly what we needed. Isn’t it better to know?”

“Why are you pushing this?”

He shrugged, turned back to the party.

“I just think it’s better sometimes to have answers,” he said. “That way you can move on with your life.”

My voice cracked. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“You’re telling me that you, Miss Color-Coded Pencil Case, haven’t thought exactly of what you’d say to them?”

Okay. So maybe I had some idea of what I would say to them. Lately, I’d taken to studying the speeches in Power Jam as a starting place. It was ridiculous, I knew—and, like, how often were Ros and I going to find ourselves caught in a rainstorm on roller skates—but it was a starting place, a container for all the things I wanted to say. I still didn’t know what the words were, exactly, but I could feel them, at the base of my throat, and I pictured them like a jumble of letters that would somehow magically organize themselves on the way out of my mouth and arrive in the right way, and Ros would hear them and know we were meant to be, and we’d kiss in the rain on our roller skates.

“The right words are never just going to come,” Touch said.

“Yeah,” I said. “But—”

I didn’t get to finish my sentence, though, because someone below us yelled out, “STOP!”

We had the best seats in the house to watch the fight. If you could even call it that.

It went like this: An ogre-like dude rushed toward a girl half his size, windmilling his arms wildly; someone tried to hold him back, but he broke free; she sidestepped him, looking so bored that in my memory she actually yawned, though that can’t possibly be true. Her left fist cut through the air—the speed! The control!—and cracked the guy on the nose. He cried out and hit the ground, clutching his face.

“My nose is broken!” the ogre cried out.

“It’s not,” she said. “Trust me.”

She shook out her hand once—and then it was over.