I could ask her for a dance. The thought appeared as suddenly and disruptively as a wild animal bursting from a bush when startled; it disappeared in much the same way. If anything about tonight got back to his sister, he expected that the idea of his interacting with Rosie would worry her; he'd promised never to let himself get that bad again. A conversation was excusable. He could say, without even lying, that she had approached him and he'd had to respond to be polite. A dance was much harder to explain; a dance was willful self-destruction. He took another drink and looked at some undefined point up and to the right.

"I suppose," he agreed. "Did he do the — broom thing?" Ezra asked, a little haphazard. He hadn't honestly been paying much attention to any of the gimmicks involved in this event, but it seemed the likeliest avenue of conversation since he didn't actually want to talk about her dances with Mr. Delaney and they could not talk about anything real. What did she want? Why had she approached? Were his halfhearted attempts to fill the air with banalities putting her off from bringing it up? He could have just stared her down and waited in silence for her to get to it, except that he lacked the courage for something like that. He was hardly even meeting her eyes now, when they were talking about the broom thing.

---