We finished filming at about two thirty in the morning. For the first time ever, I uploaded the video directly onto my social media. On the part of the internet that knew Ezra the Person, not Ezward the Enigma.

I tagged Willow and pressed post.

“Is anyone else as not tired as me?” said Willow. She was still in full costume, of course. Thick emo hair slicked back. Fake, out-of-control, bushy eyebrows (leftovers of Malvolio’s, dyed black). Crinkly, vaguely hostile “old man” face. She was dressed in her loosest black clothes, swaddled in a black cape.

The cape was hers. Don’t ask me why or how she owned a black cape.

“I’m not ti… hired,” said Imogen—yawning, and stretching like the world’s longest cat, and smiling sleepily.

“Great, it’s settled,” said Willow. “We’re watching a movie.”

We watched Splatter. The original. I wish I could tell you that it was less terrible than the sequels, but it really wasn’t. It was so bad. I loved it.

Jane Jenkins was still in high school. It was prom night. And she was in for a rude, gory, breathtakingly violent awakening.

About ten minutes into the movie, Willow fell asleep. Just completely conked out—head hanging, snoring violently, there was a little bit of a drool situation threatening to transpire on the bottom of her lip. It was highlighted perfectly against the glow of the TV.

“Wow,” I said. “That didn’t take long.”

Imogen didn’t say anything. I turned—expecting to find her asleep on my other side.

She was looking directly at me. One side of her face pale in the TV’s glow, the other dark, all of it very intense.

“Oh, hey,” I said. “Is… everything okay?”

“Can I kiss you?” she said.

She literally asked me permission for this. Like I might say no or something.

“As an experiment,” she added, after I failed to respond. “In the name of science.”

“Well, if it’s for science—” I started to say.

And she kissed me.

I’d tell you how it was, but this was the sort of kiss that seals space and time and reality in its sphere. I was on a different planet. In an alternate dimension where anything was possible, and nothing was hopeless. When her lips finally broke away from mine, I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Ezra? What’s that?

Imogen smiled.

Then rested her head on my shoulder.

“So…” I said, “experimentally speaking… how was…”

“Further study is necessary,” she said.

“Further study?”

“More experiments are required.”

“More experiments?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, nodding seriously. “So many experiments. A wide variety, for sure. It’ll probably be an ongoing study. It could take a substantial amount of time. You know, before we come to any conclusive evidence. For science.”

I could feel her smiling into my angora sweater.