Ros shrugged. “I’m not really in the mood,” they said. “I’m gonna go lie down for a while or something.”

They beat a retreat to our room, and no sooner had they closed the door than Touchstone looked at me and said, “Woowwwwwww.” I furiously hushed him. Sound traveled all too easily in the Lily Pad. He rolled his eyes and wrote on the back of the chore wheel beneath Ros’s poem.

That was messed, he wrote.

Oh, shut up, I mouthed.

Is that stuff about Jess even true?

It could be, I wrote.

He took the pen from me and wrote, Celia Gilbert = next Machiavelli?

I shoved him off the barstool, and he landed with a yelp.

Talking Ros out of things with Jess wasn’t Machiavellian. I didn’t think so, at least. I really didn’t want Ros to get hurt. But I kept thinking about that, even long after we’d left Lovesick. What does that even mean, not wanting someone to get hurt? It was so hollow. Meaningless. Completely out of touch with reality. People get hurt all the time. Even in fairy tales, people bleed: They cut off their heels to fit into shoes and get their eyes pecked out by birds. Hurt is inevitable—if it wasn’t Jess, it would’ve been someone or something else. What was I saying? That I didn’t want Ros to experience life?

And besides: I may have been worried about Ros, but what I was really worried about was myself. I was worried, not even three weeks into our summer, whether our friendship would survive this, this Jess Orlando, and what this summer would mean for us. Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d just said, I love you, and I’m glad you’re my friend. Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d just said, I’m worried we’re growing apart. Or perhaps: I’m worried you’re going to leave me behind.

Maybe I should’ve been less worried about who might hurt Ros, and who might hurt me, and more worried about who I might hurt.

I scratched out what Touchstone had written and rehung the chore wheel. I’d pressed so hard with the pen that it puckered through on the reverse side, like something living that was trapped inside and trying to get out.

Footnotes

12 Fans had all kinds of theories that this girl, whose character was called Eva, was going to come back in season three, if the show ever got renewed for a third season, and complicate the love triangle between Blade, Kenna, and Louisa. Eva was a rugby player whose team shared the weight room with the Soul Crushers and who had a flirty verbal sparring match with Blade over who could lift more weight (the answer was Eva, by quite a lot).