The TV was small, but it had about seven different remotes, and it took my extremely competent friends an awful long time to figure out how to get Power Jam playing. I volunteered to help a few times—Lord knows I was good at problem-solving—but Ros insisted that they and Touchstone could figure it out. After about twenty minutes of punching buttons, swearing, and intermittent googling, Ros and an extremely reluctant Touch finally figured out how to play episode three of Power Jam by signing in to one of the nine hundred streaming services using Touchstone’s dad’s password. Episode three, one of the best, was when the story really started to take off, with the introduction of Blade Mendoza, the show’s villain.

“I think this might be my favorite episode,” I said from the couch.

“Duh,” said Ros, tossing Touchstone a bag of gummy bears for them to split. Between the two of them, they could put away an unholy amount of sugar. “That’s why I put it on. Now watch and enjoy.”

I tried to follow their directions. Power Jam was a British TV show about the cutthroat world of Roller Derby that had made its way to the US in the middle of our sophomore year, whereupon Ros and I started watching it and became obsessed. It had everything—extremely hot queer characters, convoluted plotlines, a sense of humor, great costumes, incredible montages of the aforementioned extremely hot queer characters roller-skating passionately and dramatically. The show had been a balm to us after Ros’s dad skipped town, even though the critical reception was not always favorable. Ros’s favorite character was Kenna, the rough-and-tumble captain of the squad played by the smokin’ Ronnie Ruthless (that was her actual real name). Touch, who was a reluctant fan, liked both the tough-as-nails coach and Louisa, Kenna’s wisecracking love interest. But the best character, in my humble opinion, was Blade Mendoza, the villain, played by Oliver Teller. Blade was a bad boy from the wrong side of the rink who was always getting in trouble for punching someone or checking someone too hard, who’d deigned to join the scrappy Roller Derby team called the Soul Crushers after being kicked off the soccer team for stealing his coach’s car and joyriding it into a tree.

On-screen, Blade stumbled from the car. His forehead was split into a gash. His light gray eyes glittered like two agates. He looked back at the wreckage, then down the empty street, then back at the camera, and then he fell into a crouch and grabbed his head in disbelief. Blade was a villain who on the rarest of occasions seemed to have a heart of gold, and even when he performed nefarious deed after nefarious deed, I couldn’t help but love him. Plus, it helped that he was blisteringly hot. On the couch, I tried hard not to drool.