Hayley Stark's defense lawyer

Satin clicks her tongue and waves a dismissive hand at him, her glittery purple nail polish shimmering and sparkling in the light of late afternoon sun pouring into the twins' pod through the open window. "Of course you do, honey! You just don't know it yet!"

"Okay, I don't need any new clothes," he tries again, louder and a little bit firmer this time, too. He doesn't really know what makes him think they'll listen to him now when they've been gleefully ignoring him for the last couple hours, but maybe that's just some of Poppy's endless optimism rubbing off on him. "I've got plenty of clothes. I'm totally good on clothes, I'm telling you."

"Okay, we've been over this," Chenille rolls her big, baby-doll blue eyes at him, rubbing at her temple with two fingers like she's trying to fight off a migraine. "If it's made out of grass, patched all to hair, or some weird and unholy combination of the two, it doesn't count. Got it?"

"This is not grass!" Branch tugs at the hem of his vest to emphasize his point. "It's leaves!"

"I don't care what it is! It's horrible!" Chenille folds her arms over her chest with a faint clink of all the seven billion bracelets dangling on her dainty wrists. "My eyes are bleeding just looking at you right now!"

"You think I want to look like you guys?" Branch gives her sparkling white dress a pointed glance—which is probably kind of a low blow, but he's too annoyed to care right now. "No thanks."

"At least my clothes aren't drabber than a rainy day in Bergentown!" Chenille jabs a perfectly-manicured finger at him. "I mean, for hair's sake, Branch! Do you even know what colors are? Or is your brain still too grey for you to—?!"

"Okay, okay!" Satin waves her hands around in the air, like she's trying to get rid of a bad smell before it can spread throughout the pod. "Look, we're all just really frustrated, and we're saying things in the heat of the moment that we don't actually mean. Your clothes are gorgeous, Chen, everyone knows that, and Branch, your outfit is—" her purple button nose scrunches up in a disgusted little wrinkle, "—fine. You know, for the roughing-it-in-the-woods lone-wolf survivalist shtick you do."

"Wow," Branch says dryly. "I'm overwhelmed. Do you flatter everyone like this when you're trying to offload clothes on them, or am I just lucky?"

"But," Satin adds, sharper now, with a shut the hair up look at him, "we just think it'd be a good idea for you to have some nice—I-I mean! More nice outfits! For! You know! Parties! And things like that! What do you say, Branch?"

"I've been to plenty of parties in this before, and the world hasn't ended yet." He stands up and brushes a trail of shimmering silver sequins off the front of his shorts with the palm of his hand. "Think I'll stick with what I've got, thanks."

"Oh, come on!" Chenille pushes herself to her feet, too, planting her hands on her hips. "Get real! You can't seriously tell me you want to go out on dates like that!"

There's a long and silent second where it's literally all Branch can do to blink blankly back at her as he tries his best to work out what on earth has apparently convinced her that anyone in this entire village would ever willingly go out on a date with him, because he seriously can't come up with a single troll—which is pretty fair, he has to say, because there isn't anyone in the village he'd ever willingly go out on a date with, either, so it all kind of evens out in the end.

(Right on cue, a hundred thousand Poppy-centric thoughts flood his traitorous brain—her smile like the sun and her eyes like the stars, crinkling up at the corners when she laughs at her own dumb jokes long before she ever reaches the punchline, her overenthusiastic voice so loud in his ear as she rambles happily on about Smidge's half-birthday party, and Mr. Dinkles' new puffy purple parka, and DJ Suki's latest playlist, her hands warm and firm around his as she drags him along behind her, off on yet another wild and crazy misadventure—and his face flushes red-hot with the realization that yes, there is one single troll in this village who he would willingly go out on a date with.

But it doesn't really matter, does it? Because there's no way a girl like that would ever want to be with a guy like him.)

"R-Right, yeah," he pushes out a scoff and rolls his eyes, his arms coming up on blind reflex to cross themselves over his chest as he tries to shake her from his mind. "Because I'm just totally rolling in the romance over here."

"Aren't you?" Satin arches her brows at him, but a grin is pulling at the corner of her glossy lip like she knows exactly who he's thinking about right now. "What do you call Poppy, then?"

What?!

"What?!" Branch says, out loud—too loud, and too high, all shrill and squeaky and nervous like he's suddenly sixteen all over again. "W-What are you talking about? I don't know what you're talking about!"

"The fact that you're hair over heels in love with Poppy, and knee-deep in denial about it." Satin kneels down to gather up an armful of clothes from the pile, folding them up into neat little squares of colorful fabric. "You're not exactly subtle about it, honey."

"The fact that I'm what?!" Is it actually physically possible to die from complete and total humiliation? Because Branch is pretty sure he's currently dying from complete and total humiliation—which would be so much better than this whole conversation, actually! So if he could just go ahead and die from complete and total humiliation this exact second, that would be great! Please and thank you! "I—I am not—I'm not 'hair over heels', or whatever! She's my friend! Just my friend! We're just friends!"

"Oh, you are such a bad liar," Chenille shakes her head, so her shiny silver earrings swing back and forth, but she's laughing, too. "Come on, lover boy! You're blushing!"

"I-I'm not lying!" And now that she's pointed it out, he really wants to put his hands up and hide the vivid blue flush spreading over his face, all the way to the tips of his pointed ears, but he's not about to give her that kind of satisfaction, either. "I'm not in love with her! Seriously! I—I mean, we're like—like, night and day! Why on earth would I be in love with her?!"

Satin and Chenille exchange a single split-second glance, and that's all the time it takes for him to realize he's just made what might be the biggest mistake of his entire life, before they break out in big, identical, way-too-excited grins.

"Because her eyes are like two pools so deep," Satin strikes first, tipping her head back and tossing her arm over her eyes with all the exaggerated, theatrical melodrama of Guy Diamond himself, and why did Branch ever think she was the nicer sister? "You might never come up for air."

"I—I made that up for Bridget! To say to Gristle! On the spot! I didn't mean it! I don't even write poetry!"

"Because her smile—" Chenille totally ignores him, putting a hand over her heart and letting out a long, dreamy sigh, like a lovestruck heroine in a romance novel who's about to fall into a graceful swoon in the arms of Prince Charming, and that is absolutely not the way he acts around Poppy, so she can just shut up, "—makes the sun itself turn jealous."

"Because you can see her true colors."

"And they're beautiful."

"Like a rainbow."

"I—I was just—!" Oh, hair, he really is going to die, isn't he, and he can tell, because his whole face is on fire now, so the rest of him can't be too far behind. "I was just singing the song! That's part of the song! I can't help that! I was just singing the song!"

"Oh, yeah, you sure were," Satin nods fervently. "With an awful lot of feeling. Especially on the I love you."

Okay, the complete and total humiliation is taking way too long to kill him, so if the earth could just suddenly and spontaneously crack open and swallow him up in its fathomless depths, that would be so great! "I didn't—I don't—I didn't mean it like that! I was just saying it as a friend! Friends say that! Friends say I love you!" And then he realizes that he doesn't actually know if friends say I love you or not, because he's never had any friends of his own before, so how can he be sure?

Chenille shoots him a knife-sharp smirk that makes him want to go outside and bury himself in the dirt and die a slow, agonizing death by exposure to the elements. "Oh, not like that, we don't."

"Y-You guys have got this all wrong!" he says, mostly so he doesn't have to respond to that. Is there some sort of secret platonic just-friends way to say I love you? Because no one ever told him that! Why didn't anybody ever tell him that?! Somebody should have told him that! "I don't like her! I'm telling you! For hair's sake, I was just singing the song!"

"Huh," Satin says. "That's too bad. Since, you know, she said it back, and all."

Branch freezes.

And it's like the whole world freezes right along with him, the earth itself grinding to a dead halt in its orbit around the sun so it can hold its breath, waiting for his panicky brain to comprehend exactly what Satin is trying to say to him—since, you know, she said it back, and all, and he knows that's technically true, she technically did say it back, because she finished the song with him, but—

"But," he shakes his head, trying to shake it off. "But she was just—she was just singing the song. Wasn't she?"

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he realizes Chenille is full-on gaping at him, in what looks a lot like utter disbelief, but he's still way too scrambled to care. He's way too scrambled to care about much of anything right now, except the impossible possibility that maybe when Poppy said it back, she meant—

Satin shrugs coolly, like she didn't just singlehandedly turn the entire universe on its head and leave him floundering helplessly in the wreckage of everything he thought he knew. "I'm just saying, there's a reason no one else joined in when you two started singing together. That's all."

Dead silence sweeps over the whole pod for a solid minute and a half as Branch processes this new information at a painfully slow pace.

And then he turns around and scrambles for the door all the way on the other side of the pod, practically tearing it off its hinges in his rush to get out and get to Poppy—he doesn't actually know what he's going to say when he gets there, but for the first time in his life, he's not even worried about that.

"I—I have to—I have to go! Right now!" he calls over his shoulder to the twins as he steps out. "Goodbye!"

"Heck, yeah, you do!" Satin lets out a noise that could possibly be a cheer, and pumps her fist in the air over her head. "Go get her, lover boy!"

Chenille doesn't sound anywhere near as excited. "You're really gonna go for it in those clothes? Branch, come on—!"