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Jace Darnell and Ignacio Garcia had been friends a very long time; their paths had crossed ever since Jace had been a baby and ever since she had grown up to join their little trio, met in the middle by Antony. They'd been thick as thieves when they were children -- in the unsuspecting, guileless way that children were, even for Antony and Jace back then, who'd thought that they knew it all -- and it was in their teenage years that things apparently got difficult.

She was already eating icecream when he got there, apparently not having waited; frozen yoghurt, it seemed like, splayed back in the old candy-apple booths. They'd been to that icecream store since they were kids, too, and it was done up all 1950s and served pretty adequate milkshakes, and she'd changed from strawberry icecream to strawberry yoghurt in the years gone by. She'd changed to boobs, too; that was Jace for you.

"Kick my guitar out the way," she said, "seat's yours."

"Son, I am ruinous," said his redheaded friend, gesturing with her long-handled icecream spoon. "I bring the rock. My chops are too righteous. Once I move up to electric I'm quitting school and going on the road as a guitar hero; I'm pretty sure that's a legal goddamn career now, Garcia."

Another spoonful. Jace never beat around the bush. "So, by the way, my little sister sucks in a breath whenever we order Mexican, and that's not just because she thinks 'Nacho' is a bad food."

The napkin-shredding was a nervous tic of Iggy's; Jace had seen him do it before to other pieces of paper, to anything he had in-between his fingers, reducing tiny pieces of cloth into string and bits of thread. Component parts. "Wait, wait, hold it," said Jace, and she popped another spoonful of yoghurt into her mouth. "Wisp was acting like she sang a chorus of 'Please Let Me Down Easy' and you let her down, easy, I'm not getting you for doing it -- I mean God I sympathise every moment, Nacho -- but you told Wisp you weren't into her and just didn't feel that way, correct?"

"Wow," said the girl opposite him, impressed. "You are really shitty with women. Seriously, some people actually have to try to be that crappy with girls. It's okay, man; nobody can be as big a pimp as me, but damn. Okay."

The yoghurt was coming to its inevitable end. Jace tilted up the glass it had come in so that it started a glacier trickle towards her mouth. "You seriously telling me you're not interested in chicks at all, though?" she said. "Or guys? I'm open-minded. Just that you kind of missed the Hormone Train, you're taking Asexual Boat to Nourges Bay, Nacho."

"Sounds kinky," was all his friend commented on that. "Look, less on your crazy dog stuff -- I don't know, maybe this is about you being an animal. Maybe you have to -- " Jace had started snickering. "Maybe you have to wait for a chick to be in heat, and then you can stand barking outside her house until her mom sprays you with a hose. Excellent. It's ********' biology."

"What, the teenage urges boat." Jace drummed her fingers on the table; it was her nervous tic, that and cracking her knuckles, which she immediately segued into. Her orange eyes were a bit distant with thinking; the new little horns were a nervous tic too, as she continually rubbed at them with the back of her hand. Maybe they were itchy. "It's not that you're gay, right? Furnisexual? Like socks?"

"Nope," she said. "Proven fact; girls always wash with like, a jillion gingernut soaps -- god even I do it, it's all we have in the shower -- and shampoo three times, and then one time more just in case they didn't shampoo enough, so. Chicks smell better. That doesn't mean anything, man."

"Okay, you're talking magical smell," she said, again proving very little patience or sympathy for the asexual or asexually confused. "Look, Iggs, that so isn't how other teenagers work, okay? I mean holy s**t, you get to teenager and you just start thinking about it all the time, all right?" (Jace made a puffer-fish cross-eyed face at him, apparently meant to represent thinking about it all the time.) "If you say to someone 'Oh I never thought about it,' what that politely means in teenspeak is 'I have never even found you a little bit hot and I wouldn't make out with you if we were the last two people on earth and there aren't any sheep around or any trees and s**t.'"