Alfie’s friend ends up being a smiley guy called Edmund Ahmad with soft black curls under a cream beanie, dark brown skin, and a contagious sort of laugh. He’s super sweet, and I warm to him pretty fast, but I can’t warm all the way because I realize too late I’m not actually sure what he thinks today is. I’m assuming he doesn’t know that Rose and Alfie are only pretending for the cameras. It’s possible he thinks this is a group hang, but if I were him, and I were asked to go hang with my friend, my friend’s girlfriend, and a “single girl,” I’d think it was a date. And I can’t even figure out a way to ask him if he thinks it is without letting him know why he shouldn’t think that.

The four of us pull over to a bench to put on our skates, and I wrestle with my super-stiff boots. They’re wildly gorgeous. So gorgeous they scare me. What if I mess them up? I don’t have expensive things like this, so usually I don’t need to worry at all.

“Under and over, remember,” Rose says. She starts forward, like she’s going to show me, but then she catches herself.

“I can help,” Edmund offers, kneeling in front of me. “I used to skate all the time.”

Rose glances sideways while Edmund laces me up, and her mouth twitches, but she doesn’t say anything.

“Have you ever skated before?” Edmund asks me.

I almost say yes, but then what if he asks who taught me? And then I’ll have to lie, and what if I accidentally say Molly or Eleanor and it turns out they don’t even know how to skate, and then he asks them, and they’re all like, “What, I can’t skate at all?” and then he realizes I was lying and everything falls apart?

“Only as a kid,” I say, and Rose looks at me sharply.

I’ll explain the lie to her later. God, this is already a headache.

They’ve sectioned off a whole area of the lake with traffic cones for the four of us to hog by ourselves. On the other side of the cones, skaters are doing laps arm in arm, or showing off their spins in the center, or … crowding near the cones to gawk at us like we’re zoo animals. Gawking at Rose, really. Several people are calling her name and waving to her, and she waves back with a bright smile. The security team gestures for the crowd to keep moving. Even though most of them aren’t looking at me, my whole face is red-hot, and I kind of wish I could be anywhere else in the world than right here.