“There’s also a gift shop where you can buy Lovesick Falls water for like five bucks a pop if you’re feeling desperate,” said Phoebe, and though she sounded disparaging, like Who on earth would buy that water?, I confess I would have paid quadruple that if it meant my feelings about Ros would just go away. Ros, for the record, was still standing in the street, looking at their feet, inspecting the ragged hems of their new pants.

“Where are you guys off to?” Touchstone said.

“I’m headed home,” said Phoebe.

“And I’m going to go practice,” said Audrey, indicating her unicycle. “You’re welcome to come if you want, Andrew. We’ve got a clown unit coming up in Young People’s Workshop.”

At this offer, Touchstone shot a glance at me and Ros.

“We take a rain check on the spring?” he asked.

“Fine with me,” I said, though part of me was still hoping I might be able, at some point, to take a drink from the spring and solve my Ros problem. “Ros?”

They nodded, and so Touchstone bid us farewell and walked off with Audrey and Phoebe.

“Well, good for Touchstone,” I said. “Honestly it seems like a match made in clown heaven. Clown heaven. Cleaven.”

“Why did you say that?” Ros said.

“Why, you think hown is better? Hown is definitely better.”

“Celia. Why did you tell everyone that I was talking to Jess Orlando?”

“Because you were talking to Jess Orlando,” I said.

It was so odd saying her name: like it was someone we already knew, someone we were intimately acquainted with. Someone we’d already been arguing about for months.

“Yeah,” Ros said. “But it was, like… the way you said it. Like you were mad.”

“I’m not mad,” I said, readjusting the straps on my backpack. “Why would I be mad?”

This was, of course, the very question I’d been asking myself the second I started feeling mad. Because of course I was mad that Ros had been talking to Jess Orlando. I didn’t like that I was mad, and it didn’t feel right, and I wasn’t about to tell Ros that I was mad, but that didn’t stop me from being mad. I was mad, and I didn’t know what to do with it. So I’d eaten some pancakes and bought a whole bunch of books and waited for the feeling to go away, which I was still waiting for it to do.

“I don’t know,” Ros said slowly. “You tell me.”

“Not mad,” I said. “Should we get ice cream or something?”

They put a hand to their stomach. They looked so cool in their new pants. “I feel like we just had pancakes,” they said.