“I think more than a few of us get it,” Tristan said. “Losing years or losing time because we have to deal with shit other people don’t, and falling behind because of it.”

Sveta nodded. “My boyfriend is out and around and he’s doing great work. He’s been doing it for a while. He tried to build something with the Irregulars and it went bad. But now he’s out there again and he’s with the team, the top team I know about, he’s doing amazing stuff. I don’t know if I can ever catch up, but I don’t want to not try. I don’t want to let the gap widen.”

“It can’t be just about him, you know,” I said. “I think that would be more poison than help for a relationship.”

“It’s not. Well, I mean, it is, but it’s not about him in a him-and-me romantic sense, it’s about me and him—sorry, I’m not making sense.”

“I’m following okay,” I said.

Mrs. Yamada said, “Just take your time, find the words.”

“Back long before I even knew him, he was my reference point for figuring out where we are. We being the C-fifty-threes. If he was popular then we all had a shot at getting more popularity. That was something I could hope I could have one day. And I didn’t have a lot of hope, so it was important.”

I reached over, and gave her arm a solid pat. I was still holding her hand.

“And we spent part of the summer touring other worlds. We were looking for our places of birth, but mostly we were looking for mine. I’m one of the only ones who remembers mine.”

She moved one hand over to tap a finger against her forearm. In dark green, almost invisible as a series of dark green images between dark blue sky and dark blue waves, framed by leaping fish in neon orange, were a series of huts.

“I was waiting for some updates on my body and so we just had me in my hamster ball, and Weld is so great, so patient… but I don’t like being that dependent. I want to be self-sufficient and I want to do it by being a hero.”

“I think that’s kind of the opposite of the toxic path,” Tristan said. “You’ve talked about it before, Sveta, how you’re worried about how your world revolves around him.”