Jill's hair is damp and curly with rain, she is laughing fit to burst at some flippant remark about Rillian, she smells sweet, like peppermint, and for the first time, Eustace contemplates possibility.

He really isn't the sort of soppy fellow prone to developing the type of irrational syndrome the girls at his school call a "crush" (ugh, the very word make him want to write strongly-worded letters to the Head). No. Eustace, however, does believe that exploration of opportunities, when said opportunities make themselves known, is a very rational, reasonable thing to do. A year ago he would've classed the question "What if Jill Pole and I fell in love?" in the same category of insanity as the question "What if a magical world, of which my cousins are legendary sovereigns of old, exists?"He still does, actually. But a year can allow for quite a substantial change in perspective.

Nothing is impossible anymore.

Eustace has an idea that Jill is not entirely averse to the possibility brewing in his mind; in fact, from the way she laughs just a little too long at his jokes--isn't that what girls do when they like a bloke?

But it is all profitless speculation until he tests his hypothesis like a scientist proper. And every scientist begins with observation of his subject.

Eustace, unfortunately for both his pride and for his scientific ambitions, is not subtle. He doesn't know how to be. He watches Jill so fixedly and for such long spans of time that she actually asks him, bewildered, if she has suddenly grown a unibrow. He stammers out a no--her eyebrows are actually quite perfect in form, he thinks, but that part doesn't make it out of his mouth--but she still looks at him askance all day.

Not even Jill herself can keep Eustace from his study of Jill, however, and he ploughs on, determinedly harvesting golden scraps of evidence--how she never smiles at other boys in quite the way she smiles at him, how she always saves her mother's ginger cookies for him, unasked, because they're his favorite--and slowly his evidence crystallises into tentative theory and then into shakier fact.

Experimentation is the next step in every good scientist's procedure, Eustace knows, but he is so involved in his subject that he is not sure he can do it. The stakes are rather higher than what he's used to (there's no irony there, none at all).

"Pole--Jill . . ." he tugs at his tie, which seems to be strangling him. She seems puzzled and not a little amused, her eyebrow quirked just so--it is the eyebrow that gives him strength. Focusing on it and nothing else, he goes on as best he can.

"I've been wondering--thinking--about, well . . . possibilities." It didn't sound so stupid in his head.

"Rather an ambitious topic." Her voice is light as can be, but he knows her well enough to tell that she is most definitely paying attention; her shoes scuff subtly against the pavement. Her colour is high, as he imagines his must be.

"Yes, well . . ." his mind seems to be paralysed with fear (or something very like it, he amends quickly; girls don't like cowards, and a coward he is not). He has ventured far beyond the realm of the theoretical now.

"Yes, Eustace?" She waits, toe tapping almost imperceptibly, and he diverts his attention away from her forehead for a moment, long enough to lock eyes with her. There is something urgent stirring in their dark depths, and the room reels topsy-turvy ; he doesn't quite understand, although he think he might if he let himself. It is too much; his eyes dart away, returning his gaze to her comparatively passionless eyebrow.

"Oh--nothing. You know me, always thinking rubbish," he backtracks, laughing nervously, and for once she does not join in.

"Sometimes I believe that you think too much and do too little," she says, and it comes out more heated than playful, as perhaps she intended; the freckles on her nose are sharp and he feels perspiration slicking down his neck. Her eyes--he cannot look at her eyes again, because he knows he will not like what he sees. Her eyebrow, her pretty eyebrow, drawn down in an angry tremulous line, is all that he can take.