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One of Jace's hands planted over Irelia's hip and she loomed up in her face. Jacoba was way too wont to get all up in other people's grills when she felt strongly about something, no concept of personal space, faces only a couple of inches apart and so close that the sheep-girl could count her eyelashes. "No," she said. "No no no no, no way. Please, God. Don't say you're joining Wisp's League of Extraordinary Feebs. Chris Deakon, like, totally indulges her into doing whatever her brain cell desires, and I cannot see you get dweeb rubbed off on you by that bunch of losers. Ditch 'em and come live with me in the forest. It'll be spoooky. We can be bandits."

Because Jace was Jace, she thought that straddling another person and flinging yourself into their personal touch-bubble meant that this question was totally out of the blue and kind of threw her off her stride. She tilted her head, strands of red hair falling in her face, looking slightly bewildered. "Kissed?" she said. "Like, on the cheek, by Harper, it was totally gay. Did he kiss you? I know he put his goopy man-lips on Manuela."

"You're way cooler than Manuela," said Jace immediately. "And, like, you're..." It sounded weird the moment it came out her mouth, but she forged on. "Shut up, but you're kind of pretty, you know? Like, you're interesting-pretty. Wisp and Delilah and those girls just look stupid. You have, like... eyes."

Preteen compliments. They made the heart beat faster, obviously.

"And I like your hair," she said, and she reached out and plucked at a curl. "So shut up."

Jace's unfortunate secret weakness was that she blushed like a fire engine: it crept up her neck until her face was approximately the same colour as her hair, bright red, and she punched Irelia back hard. "Shut up," she said, but she sounded embarrassed and pleased, and as she had not taunted Irelia for hitting like a girl the punch must have impressed her as well. Nobody had ever complimented Jace on her looks. Privately, Jace thought that she looked a little tough, and hearing it from the other girl's lips made her ego swell grotesquely. She tossed her hair back, and she smirked.

"Anyway, Manuela looks like a Barbie doll," she said, "like, Malibu Bighair. You look fierce."

"Nah," Jace said contemplatively. "I watched Rocky and it was pretty gay."

Stabbing a finger into the area of the sheep-girl's collarbones, the redhead's eyebrows knitted together hilariously as she jabbed again for emphasis. "Hey. Hey, what about you. Have you ever been kissed. I mean, like at all."

So was Jace: but really, Jace was Jace. It was hard to tell her age. She was skinny and tough, wiry, more than a little boyish, and cared as little about romance as she cared as much about baseball. Kissing, to her, was something that gave you mono. She just sounded puzzled: "Do you want someone to kiss you?"

"They didn't have anyone kissing in Lion King," Jace pointed out, face a few inches from Irelia's. "Because that's gay."

Actually it was just perverse, but she was trying to get around to that.

"Is your dad really literally gay?" It was weird, being that close to somebody: close enough so that you could, like, see into their pores, see the rings around the irises of their eyes, the fine hair that curled up from people's temples. On Irelia's the corkscrew curls started almost immediately, thick and brown. Jace still didn't move. "Like, man-kissing?"