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When Miriam Jacobs got out of the hospital, people were talking. She tried her best to ignore them. It was more than reasonable that people would, honestly -- she hadn't missed more than a day of class in ages, and this had taken her out of commission for two. More importantly, it had taken her away from school for two. Miriam never spent nights away from school, not a day before winter or summer holiday and not a day after. It made for a rude awakening as she slung her bookbag over her heavily bandaged shoulders and walked down the hallway between classrooms: people's heads turned to stare at her. Contrary to all her hopes and expectations, she was finding that people did pay attention to what she did.

She thought she was burning alive with embarrassment. Awakening or no awakening, Captain of the Cavaliers or no Captain of the Cavaliers, one thing had not changed about Miriam: she hated attention. More specifically, she hated attention for anything but excelling, and she hated all attention off the fencing field or out of the orchestra pit. It drove her crazy to think people might be talking about her. It drove her crazier to think she'd never know what they were saying.

As such, she got out of third period in dejected spirits with a note to report to the nurse's office every day to have her bandages changed. As if it weren't humiliating enough that Destiny City Hospital had thought she was some kind of self-injurer. Now she'd have to suffer Crystal Academy getting the same impression.

She sat down at her usual lunch table alone and didn't look at anyone, unwrapping her turkey sandwich with what she felt was the maximum dignity with which one could unwrap a turkey sandwich.

Miriam stared at her like a chocolate teapot had just popped into existence next to her and was currently studiously inserting a straw into its milk carton. She might as well have been a chocolate teapot, for all her out-of-placeness. People didn't just sit down at Miriam's table. They just didn't. Miriam was a certified loner and up until now she'd thought she'd put up a very effective invisible force field that had deterred all nosiness, small talk, and worst of all, intrusion. She wondered if the rest of the fencing team had put Larissa up to this, or worse, someone else, or if Larissa had just decided at her own leisure to go and prevail upon Miriam to share her otherwise sacred lunch hour with her and tell her what was going on. That had to be it. She was nosy, that was all. Well, she'd have to get used to disappointment, wouldn't she now.

She popped open her own carton of 2% chocolate milk and took a swig. Then she finished unwrapping her turkey sandwich and tucked a corner of lettuce in that had fallen loose. She did not have a salad. Some people weren't so hoity-toity as to pretend they enjoyed salad. "I'm sure you were," she said coolly. "Tell the team to breathe a sigh of relief. I won't be holding up any of their matches with my -- infirmity."

A corner of Miriam's tray was touching Larissa's. She moved it away and then straightened it so the two trays were parallel. The significance of this reliable bedrock comment completely escaped her; she turned it over in her head with suspicion, looking for any sarcasm with a metal detector and a UV lamp, before running it through an X-ray and being forced to concede that Larissa might not have been sarcastic. She looked at her sideways anyway and then concentrated on her sandwich, taking prim bites out of it so nothing fell out. That was her least favorite thing about sandwiches. Crisis averted for now.

"I've got a textbook," she said, brushing her hair behind her ear coolly (and wondering if any of it was out of place). "I can read. Anyway, I've never found lecture all that helpful." That was a lie, but what else was she supposed to say? "Do you record all your lectures?"

"I -- how do you know what score I got on last semester's Modern History final?" Miriam was looking at her like chalk looked at cheese, but honestly chalk probably didn't look at things, so more like a person looked at an unbelievably hideous deep-sea fish that had just washed up on the shore. With horror, fascination, and a faint air of is that even possible? "Mash-ups? Playli -- I don't even know what you're saying. The words that you're saying. I don't even know what they mean."

In case this wasn't clear enough for Larissa, Miriam added to it, with a righteous air: "Are you stalking me?"

She regretted it a few moments later: regretted it burningly, and felt the burn of the regret make her cringe inwardly with embarrassment. Possibly Larissa Duncan was stalking her, but then again possibly someone was -- extremely unlikely as this was, and Miriam wasn't going to flatter herself that it was true -- trying to make friends with her and she'd just blown it. In usual fashion. But there was only one thing to do from here on out, and it was stand behind what she'd just blurted out. So she kept on glaring. Righteously.

"Wait."

It wasn't often that Miriam said 'wait' to people. It wasn't often at all. Generally 'wait' was reserved for when someone had forgotten their jacket, or forgotten to do something they said they were going to do, or some other altogether ordinary circumstance involving the forgetting of something where calling out 'wait' after them would be entirely appropriate. Not that she called it out, this time: she just said it, eyes fixed on her tray, and let it hang in the air. If Larissa didn't hear it, good; if Larissa chose to ignore it, well, Larissa could choose to ignore it all she wanted, now couldn't she.

Larissa waited. Momentarily, at least. Miriam summoned up millennia of etiquette and a good thirty years of politesse, found they were absolutely no use whatsoever, and gave up. She went back to staring at her tray.

"I didn't say you were stalking me," she said, hapless. "I was just asking whether you were or not."

"Just a minute," Miriam called out, expecting a Zodiac -- a Zodiac would barge in if she didn't say so, she thought a little disparagingly. Though it wasn't true of all the Zodiacs, Libra and Capricorn at least being a little politer than that, it might as well have been true of all the Zodiacs for all Miriam Jacobs cared. She steeled herself for one of Hero Barrett's numerous cronies and rewrapped and re-socked her foot before limping over to answer the door.

She didn't find a Zodiac: in its place, a walking impossibility. "Hi, Larissa," she said after a moment, blinking.

Miriam was busy marveling -- marveling, possibly, at the stuff, or at the fact that "Larissa" scanned so perfectly into the song, or at the situation in general. She herself was wearing her workout clothes, which consisted of a pair of dove-gray drawstring pants and a white T-shirt. Functionally identical to her pajamas. Might have, in fact, just been her pajamas. "Oh," she said intelligently. "I already have a key to the practice room. It's how I practice."

Knowing this was not the most stunning repartee in a long history of stunning repartee, she reached out to take some of the, um, stuff off Larissa's hands: the cups of coffee, at least because those might spill, and then it'd be a spill, and nobody liked spills. "Did you get them all to rhyme yourself?" She stepped aside and motioned for Larissa to come in, in lieu of saying anything about it. "Is that a cheerleading thing?"