I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. It wasn’t like Jess was famous—best-case scenario, I’d find something like her Instagram page or a bio on the Hidden Fern website. And even then, what was I hoping for? I wanted confirmation from the outside world that Jess really was the villain I was making her out to be in my head. I wanted something along the lines of Jess’s favorite plants are lilies and succulents, and, oh yeah, your friend should definitely steer clear.

I had to wade through a bunch of results—Jess Orlando the marketing executive, Jess Orlando with the vegetarian blog—in order to actually get to anything on the actual Jess Orlando in question, and even then, there wasn’t the definitive answer I was looking for. As a child participating in a youth boxing tournament, she’d defeated someone 3–0 in Ring B. When she was in sixth grade, she won honorable mention for a local middle school poetry contest for a poem entitled “My Fists.” (Great, I thought. Poetry—another thing in common with Ros.) The juiciest bit of information was a small featurette in the Lovesick Falls Gazette about her being the only girl on the boys’ wrestling team. “I’d tell other girls to try for things they want,” Jess was quoted as saying in the article. “There’s nothing that says girls can’t fight.”

Well, plenty of people did say that, but I saw her point.

There was no social media I could find.

There was no bio on the Hidden Fern website.

There were no news stories about violent behavior at wrestling matches; no criminal record, either.

Nothing about her—or her brother—being a well-known asshole.

Nothing about her being personally responsible for climate change or drinking the blood of innocents.

I put my head down on the desk, feeling more depressed than Jacques. Jess just seemed like a normal person. There was, tragic though it may have been, no reason for Ros not to be with her.

In an effort to cheer myself up, I put on one of my favorite episodes of Power Jam on one of the big shop computers, where the jammer and the blocker you’ve been rooting for the whole time finally kiss in this madly passionate, perfect way at the team’s away match at regionals. The episode is extremely idealized and unrealistic, and even though they lose the match, you feel like they won because these two finally, finally got together.