“When you were Wynonna, I never saw you cry,” I said, as if my point wasn’t clear. “You were always too busy acting tough and being a badass.”

“You never saw me cry,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t cry.”

I stared at her in gaping astonishment. “Are you saying this”—I gestured to myself—“is normal?”

“I mean, sure, you don’t act like I acted. But that’s all it was—an act. You act how I felt. Most days, I wanted to cry. Shit, most days I succeeded—but alone, in my bedroom, with no witnesses. The whole badass, tough-girl routine was usually a smoke screen to hide the fact that I was so fucking sad and miserable.”

“Are you sad and miserable now?”

“I’m human. What human isn’t sad and miserable?”

A little Nietzschean, but okay. I moved on to my next point.

“I miss my parents,” I said. “And I still care about Willow. If I was turning into you, my feelings for them should be disappearing, right? But if anything, being you—being away from my family—has just made those feelings more intense.”

“Okay,” said Wynezra. “I don’t have an argument for that. I’m not trying to argue with you. I still have the same feelings for my mom. I was just sharing an observation, that’s all.”

God, arguing with Wynezra was the worst. She had become logical to a fault, arguing with such objectivity, it felt like she was emotionally removed from the conversation, which made me want to punch her in the face. I’d like to see her emotionally remove herself from that! It was like arguing with… with…

I felt the air vacuum softly out of my lungs.

It was like arguing with Ezra Slevin.

The hardest thing about Wynonna being so nice to me was that the one nice thing I was attempting to do for her had inadvertently turned into a humongous, backstabbing sort of secret.

After school, I met up with Roscoe.

At Sonic.

For slushies.

Sonic and slushies had kind of become our thing. So much so that Roscoe stopped asking me what I wanted. I always ordered the same thing, and he always beat me there anyway. He’d usually call to confirm I was on my way, and by the time I arrived, my Strawberry Real Fruit Slush was waiting for me.

For himself, he ordered the Green Apple Slush with rainbow candy. The man was a child.

On weekdays, Roscoe usually worked evenings. He was a chef, after all, and a damn good one. Too good to be wasted on the lunch menu. So, this tiny hour between school and work was an ideal time to work on Operation: Reunite Roscoe with Wynonna.

Except Wynonna and I weren’t swapping back.

And maybe we were turning into each other.