Sugarcoat shoved her way to calculus in a daze, unable to integrate herself into the flow of hallway traffic or derive a better route. She had much more important matters occupying her mind.
Once she dropped into a chair hard enough to make it creak, a voice broke through the stupor. "You look worse than I felt on tranquilizers," Sour Sweet said from the seat next to her. "What's up?"
Staring up at the ceiling, Sugarcoat said the only thing she could think of. "Moondancer kissed me."
"Moondancer kissed you?" Sour said skeptically.
"Moondancer kissed me." Sugar confirmed.
Sour gasped, suddenly beaming. "Moondancer kissed you!"
Sugar turned, trying to communicate everything the three words couldn't with her haunted stare. "Moondancer kissed me."
"Oh." The smile collapsed. "I think I see the problem."
Sugarcoat just nodded. She didn't trust herself to say anything other than the thought echoing through her head.
Sour stuck out a hand. She probably meant to reassure Sugarcoat, but going by how she kept clenching and twisting her fingers, she didn't seem sure what kind of gesture would do that. Finally, she shrugged, awkwardly patted Sugarcoat's shoulder, and said, "Well, hold out until lunch. We're figure this out one way or another."
The murmuring around them took on a greater intensity. Sugarcoat noticed how many of their classmates looked in her direction. She held back a groan. By lunch, there would be no telling what the Crystal Prep rumor mill would do with this grist.
Thankfully, Ms. Curl Vector chose that moment to enter the room, silencing the students with a single look. Even Sugarcoat managed to shift some focus to the class.
Moondancer kissed me.
Some.
Lemon Zest was the common thread that tied together what she insisted on calling "the Shadow Elements." In Sugarcoat's case, they knew each other through their mothers, Honey Glaze being the head chef at Gourmand, the crown jewel of Zesty Gourmand's culinary empire. With any other student at Crystal Prep, that would have made Sugarcoat Lemon's subordinate. Instead, they'd been something like friends even before the Games.
"Moondancer kissed me."
"Nice."
There were still times when Sugarcoat wondered how they'd managed that.
"Sugar? You really gonna leave me hanging?" Lemon shook her extended, still unbumped fist.
Sugarcoat glared at the offending hand like it had been dipped in filth. "I think we both know the answer to that."
Lemon sighed and crossed her arms. "It's a special occasion. Thought you might be a bro for once."
"We're both girls."
"Broness transcends gender. Thus spake Broseidon."
Sugarcoat rolled her eyes. "Are you done with the tangles of irony and sincerity yet?"
"Habitrapped reader. I am forever a tangle buddy." Lemon intertwined her fingers and wriggled them, which probably emphasized the point in her eyes.
"Especially with Sunny Flare," Sugarcoat snarled out.
"You really wanna go down that road? I figured you brought up your mirakuru romansu 'cause you were flipping out in your own understated way and wanted advice, not just to brag 'n' rag. Though, again, nice. Legit happy for you two." After a moment, Lemon's smile slipped. "Are... are you not legit happy for you two?"
Sugarcoat looked away, thoughts retracing a path they'd been carving all morning. "She was acting like you."
"That being cause for concern would normally be kind of insulting, but this is Moondancer we're talking about, so I see your point. You got a plan yet?"
Sugarcoat's head darted back up. More than a dozen other students looked away and did their best to look like they hadn't been eavesdropping. "For the rumor mill? No. For Moondancer herself? We share our next class. I can always just ask her what's going on."
"Speaking as her apparent role model, be prepared for a lot of obfuscating dumbassery if she doesn't want to talk about it. Or for smooches." Lemon poked Sugarcoat's temple, pulling back before the other girl could grab at her finger. "Seems like that did a good job of short-circuiting your headmeats."
"She caught me off-guard the first time. I know what I'm dealing with now."
Lemon bit her lip. "Yeah, see, that's the problem. What you're dealing with is easy; you're dealing with a Moondancer who's comfortable in her own skin. What you need to ask yourself is whether anyone, Moon Unit included, knows how to deal with her."
That left Sugarcoat speechlessly deep in thought until the class began.
Sugarcoat had never understood dread. Fearing the inevitable had always seemed like a pointless waste of effort to her. After all, it was inevitable. No amount of worry on her part would change that. And if it could, then whatever concerned her wasn't inevitable and she could focus on constructive efforts to effect that change rather than pointless anxiety.
As she walked to her third period class, she finally grasped the concept. If nothing else, love was a very educational experience.
"Sugar!"
Contrary to what certain girls might think, it wasn't the unexpected hug that left Sugarcoat stock-still. The reason went far deeper than that.
In Lemon Zest's theological headcanon—her term, which she insisted that the Church of the Divine Bacon Horse encouraged—Sugarcoat was Brutal Honesty, speaking the truth without thought or regard to whether anyone wanted to hear it. She recognized that she wasn't the most tactful person in the world, but she'd learned to watch her tongue at least a little around Moondancer.
But as the half-remembered Harmony school lesson said, Honesty was truth, not fact. It was what someone sincerely believed, not objective reality. At that moment, two subjectively true beliefs ran through Sugarcoat's mind and into a head-on collision:
This is wrong.
This is nice.
And once again, Sugarcoat stood dumbstruck, unable to reconcile them.
Moondancer stared in to her eyes, concern clear in her own. "Sugar? Are you okay?"
"I..." She wanted to say yes. At least nod. But she couldn't bring herself to do something so transparently false. After a deep breath, she managed, "It can wait."
She'd deal with it at lunch, she told herself.
"So after a good ten minutes of trying to help this guy, he finally tells me what book he's looking for, and it's about horoscopes. I tell him we've been looking in the wrong section all this time, and he just looks at me like I told him there's no such thing as the Tooth Fairy and says, 'Astronomy and astrology are different things?'"
Most of the lunch table burst into laughter. Sugarcoat looked to Indigo Zap for solidarity.
Indigo looked back, scowling. "She had me up until the tooth fairies. I've met one. They use pliers. You don't want to know what they do with the teeth."
"I'm horrified, yet intrigued," said Lemon.
"Of course you are." Sunny and Sugarcoat shared a surprised look at their accidental chorus.
Then Moondancer giggled, and Sugarcoat remembered just what she was dealing with.
"Sugarcoat?" She blinked and turned her attention to Second Person. "Are you okay?"
"Aw, Sugar's fine!" Moondancer latched onto her arm much the same Sour Sweet clung to Second's. "Right, dear?"
While Sugarcoat had been adapting to the touches and cuddles, the pet name locked up her thought processes once more.
"See? Perfectly fine!"
Lemon snorted. "Yeah, 'cause nothing says 'I'm okay with this' quite like paralyzing horror."
"I'm... surprised, is all." Technically true. Very technically true. But true enough that Sugarcoat could get it past her lips.
The others shared several looks. They clearly didn't believe Sugarcoat, which was entirely fair given how she didn't believe herself. But the conversation turned to the first play of the year and Sunny Flare's ongoing struggles to get the rest of Crystal Prep's performers up to her exacting standards.
Sugarcoat told herself she'd steer it back to Moondancer's change once she got her arm back.
Moondancer clung to it until the bell rang.
The rest of the day passed in a blur. Sugarcoat couldn't say what her teachers thought of her performance. She barely even remembered what classes she attended. Her mind was too full of Moondancer and all the myriad magical ways she might have changed to register much of anything else.
With the last bell of the day, that haze cleared into anger. She prided herself on her intellect just as much as any top student at Crystal Prep—with the possible exception of Lemon Zest—and being so thoroughly indisposed for even one day was unacceptable. She marched to a familiar locker, once more heedless of the hallway traffic. But this time they made room for her, or got shoved out of the way like they were air themselves.
Finally, she reached her target, and when she slammed the locker next to her emphasis, she left a handprint in the door. "What's going on?"
A crouching Moondancer pulled her head out of what was still a meticulously arranged locker and blinked up at her. "What do you mean?"
"Arcane accident? Experimental mind magic? Did Moondancer hire a member of the Wholesome to stand in for her?" Sugarcoat had thought of many more possibilities, but those seemed the most likely.
Moondancer—possibly—just kept staring. "Sugar, it's me."
"That doesn't mean much when there's a portal to a parallel universe in the suburbs. Which you are you?"
"Me me. Moondancer. Human, to within an acceptable margin of error. Fellow member of the Shot-Down Sparkle Suitors Society." She snarled at the eavesdroppers who had been less-than-subtly edging towards the two. "And don't act like we're the only members here!"
As the other students backed off—to a degree, anyway—Sugarcoat said, "This kind of spontaneous, massive personality shift doesn't happen without some kind of external stimulus. I know you're too smart to try an illegal substance, so it's almost definitely magic."
Moondancer shut her locker and stood. "Can we take this somewhere more private?"
The two stared at each other long enough for Sugarcoat's skin to crawl, but after the day she'd had, that wasn't saying much. "Fine." She marched towards the nearest girls' bathroom.
Moondancer tried to wrap her arm around Sugarcoat's elbow as they went. "Don't."
"What?" said Moon, the picture of innocence.
"Just don't." As they entered the bathroom, a single glare was enough to evict those already in residence. Once they were alone, Sugarcoat turned back to Moondancer, arms crossed. "This whole mess started because of little displays of affection, didn't it? You flinch one day, and the next you kiss me in the hallway like we're in one of those terrible animes Lemon and Sunny watch semi-ironically."
Moondancer looked away, twirling one of her bangs with a finger. "That's certainly one way of looking at it."
"What did you do to yourself?"
"Does it really matter?" She still tried to look everywhere else.
Sugarcoat narrowed her eyes. "I didn't fall in love with a spell."
That got Moondancer to glare back. "If I took a pharmaceutical antidepressant, would you say you didn't fall in love with a pill?"
"If the effects were this drastic, I might. I barely recognize you, and you keep refusing to tell me any details about the treatment. What. Did. You. Do?" With every word, Sugarcoat took another step forward, until she backed Moondancer into the far wall.
The other girl trembled. "I... I thought it would make you happy."
"What would?"
Moondancer shut her eyes and pulled a sky-blue crystal necklace out from under her uniform blouse. "I got it from Ms. Diamond yesterday. It's..." As she trailed off, the crystal flashed. She straightened up and looked Sugarcoat in the eye. "It's an awkwardmarine."
Sugarcoat just stared for a moment. "You're serious."
"She didn't name it."
"And you thought this would make me happy?"
"I just... I can love you this way! Properly! My mind doesn't think unexpected touches are attacks. I can hug you without worrying if I'm doing part of it wrong." Moondancer did just that, her next words half-whispered, half-sobbed into Sugarcoat's ear. "Don't you want this?"
Sugarcoat stood as stiff as a lamppost. All the words that wouldn't come earlier in the day chose then to arrive. "I want you to be happy. You don't need to prove your affection physically if it makes you uncomfortable, nor should you feel forced to. I'm sorry if I made you think you did."
Moondancer released her and maneuvered so Sugarcoat was the one with her back to the wall. "But this way I am comfortable! I am happy! What if I want to be like this?"
"Then that's fine. But you just said why you did this. So do you want it, do you want to want it, or did you just think I wanted it without ever asking me?"
The awkwardmarine strobed at an increasingly irregular rate. Moondancer opened her mouth, but said nothing.
Then, with a sound like stepping on a sheet of ice, the crystal cracked apart.
Moondancer staggered to one side, then ran out of the room, sobbing.
And Sugarcoat felt her heart break like the awkwardmarine.