Rico had never been able to drop his accent, as they said here. With an English mother who had completely assimilated into Brazilian culture, he had grown up perfectly bilingual. Living in Northern California and then London might have altered how he spoke, but you didn’t so much drop accents as pick them up. The belief that the way you spoke was how language was supposed to be spoken and that everyone else had an accent was much like all belief systems: it was a way to benchmark yourself as normal and categorize everyone else as strange, coveted or inferior. Accents were your native garb, and the only way to get one that wasn’t yours was to pick up someone else’s, either by association or because you wanted to sound more like them.

“Soccer, then,” DJ said finally—in the accent that had obviously gotten him the job.

When DJ moved on to the next pair, for all her bravado earlier, Ashna’s body sagged with relief.

She had never been the most social person. Rico hadn’t either. They’d been two self-contained teenagers who had somehow cracked each other’s shells and further destroyed each other’s ability to need other people. This version of her, the one who was so acutely aware of people’s reaction to her, made him want to break her loose.

Once the last of the competitors were introduced, DJ recapped last week’s audience votes, starting with Ashna and Rico’s position at the top. Ashna pushed the loose lock of hair off her face and smiled diffidently. Rico braced himself for the look that told him exactly how much she hated the advantage their viral video had given them. It never came.

If anything, she looked grateful for the advantage. He hadn’t really believed her when she said she was here to win. Now suddenly he did.

DJ moved down the scoreboard and Rico studied the competition. The chefs all looked ready to do battle, keen on winning. The celebrities kept their focus on appearing affable and entertaining and upping their fan base. This was a marketing exercise for everyone. As for Rico, he didn’t have anything left to market, nothing left to prove. He tried that word out in his mind, the one he’d been avoiding: retired.

The only celebrity who seemed somewhat unsure of how to navigate this particular landscape was Song. She beamed at him and he smiled back. Being an outsider was something Rico was intimately familiar with. When he’d moved to California, the first person who had not treated him like he was nothing more than his accent and his looks was Ashna. She had never told him why her family had moved, but he knew it had been devastating to her. Recognizing devastation in each other had been the magic that tied them together.