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[Transcript]

        “...W-well. It’ll be better than before, at least,” Gage mumbled, tracing the edge of Davy’s business card inside his pocket. “Better than boring old Mayview.”

        Paige’s expression was inscrutable and excruciating. She stared at him, as if expecting something more, but pride and shame kept Gage’s half-planned apology trapped in the pit in his stomach. Paige sighed and looked away.

        “...It’s just more of the same,” she said, descending back into her dolor.

        Gage frowned, grazed by her distaste for Davy’s plan.

        “What, you’ll miss the sun?” he balked.

        Paige’s blue eyes pierced him once again.

        “Don’t you? Don’t you ever? Don’t you always?”

        Gage blinked, taken aback by her sudden proximity.

        “Change the name, change the rich scumbag in charge—that doesn’t change anything. Don’t you get it? This whole town is cursed... just like us.” Paige shook her head. “Eternal life? We’ll never live to see twenty. You and I and Youthy, we’ve been stagnating for years.”

        Though her sharp nails dug into their skin, Paige’s folded arms refused to scratch, healing even that faint blemish in an instant.

        “...I know I’m cold, Gage,” she said. “I didn’t need you to tell me. I don’t trust people. Give them an inch, or a smile, or a glimpse of your heart with your guard down—” Paige trailed off, drowned out by a new wave of cheers as Razor Rex took center stage. “You think I want to be like that forever? To live like that forever? I don’t. But every time I try to change, I fall right back into the habit. Like I’m trapped in my shell. Like I can’t grow up. Like I’m stuck as the same me in this awful town forever.”

        Gage felt her words resonate with a feeling he’d buried deep down. Adulthood was something he envied, resented, a suit that he couldn’t fill out, as if the years he’d been undead for hadn’t added to the years that he had lived. But even still...

        “...Is that so bad?”

        When time had frozen for Paige, she’d been living out the last months of a gap year. She’d had promise, a portfolio, a golden ticket out of Mayview. Gage had never had a future, even with his heart still beating. What had been a first job for Paige had been a dead end for a dropout punk like him; she would have forgotten him and Youth Culture the second that they stopped sharing shifts and sneaking smoke breaks on the clock.

        “How could it not be?” Paige snapped back.

        “Well, ’cause I—” Gage’s fist closed tight around Davy’s card, crumpling it inside his pocket. “I friggin’... like you how you are! Y-y’know?”

        The roar of the crowd and Razor Rex’s unnecessary pyrotechnics filled the harrowing seconds of silence extending between them.

        “...You didn’t sound like much of a fan before,” Paige said at last, staring at her missing reflection in the ballroom’s polished floor.

        “Y-yeah, well. I can be a stubborn jerk, too.”

        “What do you mean, too? Now I’m ice cold and a stubborn jerk?”

        “N-no!” Gage sputtered, but when he looked at Paige, he saw that she was smiling.

        “...I do care about you, you know,” Paige said quietly, “and Youthy, too. You had it wrong. I’ve never thought my hands were clean.”

        Between her fingers, Gage noticed at last, Paige was slowly turning a gaudy gold diamond ring that he had never seen before. Her gaze drifted to it now, lingered upon it, then rose up to the stage... where the Witch smiled silently back.