Lenga-chan had seen couples do this. At ice rinks. Where mutual affection and consent were involved. And sometimes one pair of hands was free. All of which were unlike now, so perhaps she hadn’t seen anybody do this after all.

“Let go!” She struggled to get her hands out of Jake’s, but the boy only laughed at her efforts and held tighter.

“Isn’t this fun?” Lenga would have loved to punch him in the face, but of course her hands couldn’t.

Suddenly they passed over a bump, and their hands came apart. Immediately Lenga slipped, her legs rolling out of control into two different directions. The subsequent mishappery was rather blurry, but the end result was her on the ground doing a non-perfect horizontal split and her arms rather intertwined. Her hat was on the ground and the sleeves of her sweatshirt had gotten all out of order. Generally, she was a mess.

Jake, on the other hand, had somehow ended up leaning serenely against a wall fifty feet away.

“How I detest that man,” she muttered.