Now that sounded very fishy to me. Not mackerel-fishy — the good kind of fishy — but fishy nonetheless.

  Winona didn’t seem so bothered about it though. “It’s one week, or less,” she murmured. “If this turns out to be Irish Navajo’s breakout hit, then I can hold my nose around Felicity for it.”

  I smiled. “I can do the same with Benjamin too,” I said.

  “You still don’t like him?” she asked.

  “Seeing him give my best friend a makeover that didn’t suit her hardly warmed me up to him,” I replied.

  Winona, thankfully, was back to her usual self of using oversized, politically incorrect trucker shirts as pyjamas. The comment made her frown.

  “What? Didn’t like the crop tops?”

  “I do, but…”

  “But?”

  “It’s not Winona-Winona,” I said.

  She huffed. Then she took her hands to her chest and pressed her breasts together. She really did have huge breasts for a Native woman.

  “Well, I thought it was good to put emphasis on my best features for once.”

  “You think you’re too plain most of the time?”

  “Isn’t that what you said once?”

  Yes, I had. Not in those exact words, but I’d told her in the cafeteria before her fateful first attempt at seducing Benjamin that she had to sex herself up a bit if she wanted any man to look at her. She couldn’t spend her life wrapped up in tweed jackets or big, bulky combat boots if she wanted to be a man’s undying muse.

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  I wish I hadn’t. Because it had worked. Benjamin had taken notice of her, which had led to him striking up a friendship with Winona, which had led to him taking an interest in her life and this underground band she was in, which had led to him deciding he was going to kill two birds with one stone and make a music video for Irish Navajo as part of his final-year project.

  If only I’d kept my big mouth shut, then Winona would’ve been in my grasp. The crush I had on her was getting contagious. I hadn’t felt much of these same, innocent feelings since I’d crushed on cartoon characters in my youth like Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot or Ahsoka Tano from Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

  Robots, Togrutas, and Native American girls. I had the oddest taste in women in the entire known universe.

  “Yes, I did,” I mumbled.

  She huffed again. “Thought so. So you shouldn’t mind if the crop top becomes a permanent fixture in Irish Navajo’s wardrobe.”

  “Well, just so long as I don’t have to wear it, you go right on ahead.”

  She was still slipping away from me. The Winona I knew. The one I’d been friends with and had now fallen in love with.

  “Wait a minute,” Winona started rubbing at her temples to speed up her thinking power. “Don’t people in a duet band wear the same clothes together?”

  I stomped my foot down in joking frustration. “Winona, if you ever again suggest I wear a crop top, I will…”

  “You’ll what?”

  I didn’t have an answer. I mean, I was hardly going to hatch a nefarious scheme to hurt my crush, was I?

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I thought that too,” she said, wrapping her arms around my waist as I cooked our scrambled eggs at the kitchen counter. We really did seem to live a domesticated life already.

  “You know, if you act like this around Ms Fancy Fencer, you might get a reputation for being a simpering dolt on campus.”

  She tightened her grip around me, and I started to redden — and not just because of her unnaturally strong grip.

  “Maybe you have that already,” she added.

  “Yes,” I managed to get out. “Still beats being known as the only sex-crazed Navajo girl on campus.”

  She laughed. “You had a hand in that!”

  And I started to laugh too, and I felt the Winona I knew come back into my company. Most of our morning afterwards was spent laughing about this silly bet and all the stories we had to share because of it.