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According to the weather report on the gym teacher's cell phone, it was downright pleasant outside - but if you stood outdoors with the sun beating down on you for long enough, even sixty-five degrees could start to feel like the surface of the sun. All the girls around her were grumbling mutiny as they hauled yard waste out of the ditch, and Gemma bit her tongue against joining in. She was supposed to be the sunny one, she thought. The happy, pleasant one. Negativity was just Chaos wrapped around her heart.

(Her dark impulses happened a lot lately, even when she wasn't Astrophyllite. It scared her.)

She should just take off, she thought. No one would notice she was gone as long as she made it back before head counts were done. There had to be at least fifty girls from St. Mags out here hauling yard waste in the name of community service - one more or one less wouldn't be missed.

After looking quickly to make sure that no chaperones were looking her way, Gemma scampered quickly down the ditch and up the other side, through the narrow band of tree that separated the bike trail from the dog run. She climbed over the fence, grateful for the extra grippiness her gardening gloves provided, and hopped down onto the soft, freshly mowed grass.

Home free, she thought, looking around. No chaperones here! Just ordinary people and ordinary puppies. Gemma strolled across the grass until she came across a tennis ball lying abandoned. She picked it up and tossed it, and a moment later, a large, wolflike-looking dog brought it back.

Gemma gently accepted the ball from the dog and looked around. "Hi, baby," she cooed. "Where's your person?"

Would she? Gemma beamed at the girl, glad to see that the dog wasn't lost, and in fact had a human who was perfectly happy to let her come along! "I'm Gemma," she said, holding the slobber-coated tennis ball awkwardly towards the dog. "And I'd love to walk with you!"

When you went to a reformatory boarding school, dogs were in short supply unless they were brought in as part of animal therapy, which wasn't very often and then you had to wait in line for maybe an hour to pet one measly poodle for like half a second and it wasn't very fun. Anyway, she was sure that Ciel could tell exactly where she went to school - it was written all over the front of her t-shirt. Gemma's usual instinct was to pretend that she wasn't a juvenile delinquent, but that wasn't going to happen.

"So," she said, falling into line beside Ciel and the dog, "You said his name is Arthur? That's a great name. Like King Arthur?" She looked down and considered: he was a very regal-looking dog. She bet he was very, very brave.

"I found this, uh, tennis ball," she added hopefully.

Gemma did not know the word mignon, except maybe as a cut of beef, and she made a face. "Nice and what?" she asked, head tilting to the side. Was she supposed to know that word? She didn't think she'd ever come across it in any of her classes - maybe this girl was super advanced! Or maybe she was using it wrong. Gemma had a tendency to attribute things immediately to her own shortcomings than to other people's errors, but the possibility did cross her mind.

"I like a lot of things," she added, answering the earlier question. Granted, a lot of her familiarity with King Arthur was from The Magic Tree House, but those books were almost certainly for third graders and so she bit her tongue against admitting that and said, instead, "I read a lot." Slowly, but a lot.

She lobbed the tennis ball again, putting all of her softball conditioning to the work to send it soaring, and then watched Arthur tear off after it. "My class is doing a community service project clearing weeds by the bike path," she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder to indicate where she'd come from. "I... I decided I'd rather come be over here instead. They won't notice I'm missing if I make it back before it's time to go back to school."

So much for not seeming like a delinquent.

"Sorry," said Gemma - the second phrase clarified the origins of the first. "I don't speak French." That much should have been clear when she didn't understand mignon, she thought. Continuing to speak in it, especially when it was clear that Ciel knew every single word she was trying to say in English, just seemed like showing off. "Where do you go to school?" she asked, betting the answer was Crystal. All her classmates said those girls were just horribly stuck-up.

Stop, she thought. You're being mean. That's Chaos talking! Ciel's being nice.

"No," she said, accepting the tennis ball back from Arthur. She threw it again - further this time, as far as she could. "I'm sorry, I can't go - I really do need to get back before anyone notices I'm gone." It was a nice invitation, but Gemma's life was ruled by rules and responsibilities and that left very little free time for dashing off and doing nothing of real importance. Ciel was probably a few years younger than her - maybe nothing really bad had ever happened to her. She seemed like the kind of sparkly, shiny person who'd never been traumatized ever in her life.

Stop thinking like that! she scolded herself. A frown flickered across her face. "I play softball," Gemma said, forcing herself to smile. She folded down the cuff of her work glove to show off the strands of pony beads and silly bandz wrapped around her wrist "I collect jewelry."

Of course you are, thought Gemma, who was having a very hard time keeping her mind off of very dark thoughts - at least they weren't coming out of her mouth yet. Maybe she'd be better off if she just crawled into a hole and never interacted with anyone whose didn't have a juvenile offender record again, she'd be better off - there'd be no more little girls just forgetting and showing off how good their French was.

If she'd just forgotten, thought Gemma, she wouldn't have explained the idiom.

(She really, really needed to leave the Negaverse, she thought. It made her unpleasant.)

"Softball's like... Baseball, but with a bigger ball and the bases are closer together," she said, aware that it probably sounded lame. Most of the girls on the team thought it was sort of lame, but St. Magdalena's girls had mastered the sort of ennui that came from attending a religious boarding school for troubled children. "I play left fielder and pitch sometimes." She threw the ball for Arthur again - it wasn't to demonstrate, just a coincidence.

"The bracelets are, uh, a friend made them." It was half the truth: a friend had made them for someone else. Gemma had stolen them.

"Yeah..." said Gemma uncertainly. She seemed to have won Ciel's good graces, but she doubted she'd stay there for long. The bracelets felt heavy on her wrist all of a sudden, as if they knew the crime she'd committed. Perhaps Gemma should return them? No, she thought. They're mine.

She followed Ciel over to the tree and sat down beside her, not sure what would make someone their age ask to take a break. Was Ciel sick? Maybe that was why she was so short! Or something. It seemed like it would be rude to ask, so Gemma decided not to. "No, I don't," she said, focusing on the question at hand. Did people even play softball professionally? She wasn't sure. "I just play it because I have to take a PE credit."

Originally, she hadn't even wanted to take softball! She'd wanted to take modern dance, but it was full! So like, it was softball or yoga.

The next question was probably going to be something like oh so what do you want to be when you grow up?, which was a question that Gemma had never really considered beyond not a clerk at a 24-hour drugstore or a fast food cashier. She wracked her brain - she wasn't good at anything! At least, not anything that translated into being good at being a grown up.

Perhaps Gemma's eyes went too wide at the mention of being a knight. It sounded almost like a confession - in which case, Gemma was not the best person to be confessing to. She knew better than to talk about Negaverse business with just any old stranger (and they were strangers, basically) - did no one go and give knights the same lesson? She looked like she'd been stabbed...

Gemma frowned at the wound and wondered which of her compatriots inflicted it. It was probably safer for the both of them if she pretended that she hadn't, like, assumed anything about what Ciel got up to after dark, and certainly if she didn't let on anything about herself.

"That sounds like maybe being a police officer or a soldier?" she suggested, pulling her knees up towards her chest. Please let's stop talking about this, she thought. I don't want to get you into trouble.

Gemma really, really wanted to be off this topic, and she wasn't sure if Ciel was now feigning ignorance or if she really had no idea how close she'd gotten to flat out declaring I am a space alien from outer space like actually for real. Either way, she definitely had a life that Gemma envied - she went to an amazing school, she had an awesome dog, and knight or not, at least she was free from the Negaverse's clutches.

Some girls had all the luck.

She looked up, happy to follow the change of subject. The cloud in question did look rather like the dog who was currently panting between them. "That one looks like a dolphin," she said, gesturing to the cloud in question. "See, there's it's snout, and-"

"Gemma!"

Gemma snapped to attention, looking around to see who had called her name. It was one of the teachers, standing at the gate to the dog run and fighting with the latch. Her heart fluttered. She looked apologetically at Ciel and got to her feet. "I've got to go..."