Welcome to Gaia! ::

If anyone noticed or cared about my absence from school for those several days -- excepting that airhead, Ms. Lindy -- they made no sign of it. I went to classes, kept to myself, and pointedly ignored or insulted those who made any effort to ingratiate themselves to me. People like Jace I avoided entirely. It was not difficult once I gleaned the proper way to keep my head down. I faded into the backdrop of the school day, just a friendless girl in a pink dress. I even found a way out of Lindy's classroom entirely: James Taylor, legally my guardian, was easily convinced into signing a form when I told him things he wanted to hear. He was "protecting me" the way he thought a legal guardian should. Gullible t**t.

It was boring. It was so boring I could have slept during classes and been none the worse for wear, but I sat there with my wigs and my hats in the back of the room and stared straight ahead, perfectly ahead, trying to bore a spot in the whiteboards with my eyes. If I focused on one point and one point entirely to the exclusion of all else, then maybe, just maybe, it would melt. Or my brain would run out my ears.

Other children gossiped and laughed on the playground. I said nothing. I knew all the dirtiest little secrets of their family backgrounds anyway, all those misbegotten trysts of unfaithful parents caught on surveillance cameras, every letter in every divorce settlement from before I was "born," birth records and adoption certificates and death certificates. I said nothing. It was my information and I intended to keep that way. I watched with careful eye for irony as the child who was bullied at home (hospital records, the picture made clear when all the different files from all the different hospitals were lined up next to each other as they were in my head) picked on his classmates, as the only child berated siblings for the failures of one another while all the while she really just wished she had someone at home to play with. I had goddamned therapist notes on some of my fellow classmates, and on so many of their parents. And it bored me.

But I did it. I sat there and listened to tedious repetition from the teachers' mouths as they droned on facts I already know all in search of that stupid certification that really meant very little in the real world. In the end, who you are when you are all grown up is more largely dependent on who your parents are, the people in your social circle, and your financial background. Yes, there are some who rise above their social class of origin, but for most, people's stories are already written. For the most part they do what they know and what is handed to them. They do it because it is easy and they are told to do it by their friends, by their families, by their guardians. And myself? I was in this regard no better than the cattle which surrounded me for I was sitting in the same classroom as the rest of me, doing what they had told me to do.

All of the knowledge in the universe could not break this pattern. I was proof of this. I had all the knowledge in the world and I still sat in the classroom waiting for that piece of paper which would mean nothing because when I graduated I would end up in the same place as the rest of them: getting a job through sheer random coincidence as part of a cattle call, or taking the job that was handed to me by a relative, a relative's acquaintance, or a friend. Then I would become the person who handed the job to the next generation. Everything changes, but in the end it is always the same.

If only I could have weaseled my way out of math class. "Show your work" was the constant admonition, and I, accustomed to simply writing down the answer, resisted. There would be that edge of disappointment in Dr. Darnell's voice as she marked my papers down for failure to follow instructions and then I would be left trying to explain to Reginald why someone who had all the answers was pulling a D in her mathematics course.

"If you know the answers, you must know the process by which those answers are arrived at," said Reginald.

I was feeling careless and sounding it, too. "If you mean I have a record of the proper equations necessary to get to the final end result and give a complete answer, that is correct." We were sitting in my kitchen, Reginald fretting over my latest test paper. The correct answers were all written down, but the space left for showing one's work was blank. Reginald was himself a mathematician and by all accounting a rather good and respected one at that, so I suspect my failure to conform to this subject was an issue of personal pride for him as much as anything else.

"Then why don't you write them down? The equations which belong in the answers?"

I had enough presence of mind to roll my eyes. "Because it doesn't matter how I arrive at my answers, it only matters that I have the answers."

Reginald exploded: "It does matter! It matters more how you arrive at the answer than it does whether or not the answer is correct!"

He had, of course, been trying to convince me of this for as long as he had known me. All I said was, "I disagree." You could labor for eighty years over a problem and if you arrived at the wrong answer there would be no point.

Reginald, for his part, never seemed to tire of this argument. "The logic you apply to something, the reasoning, is important!" He sprayed a bit of saliva in his anger.

"Not if the answer is wrong," I said coolly.

"Even if it's wrong! Especially if it's wrong! Ylaine, there are more important things in life than being RIGHT!"

He was so passionate, so incensed, so full of life and vigor. I envied him that, a little. I also felt inward smugness at the fact that as much as he was saying otherwise, he clearly cared an awful lot about being right on this occasion.

"You're wrong," I said.

Reginald beat himself upon the forehead. I went on:

"That's just a saying used as refuge by people who are often wrong."

Whatever else I might have been doing in my life, there was always one thing I made time for, and that was shopping.

Once a week, or twice, or three times if I could manage it, I would grab the best available male candidate for accompaniment and set out for the stores. Given that I was the only permanent female resident at the hotel, where men were concerned I had an ample supply. His job was to carry things and say nice things about me. Mine was to do all the real work required for shopping.

Sam, of course, was my most frequent companion. He would come whenever I told him to and offer meaningless compliments as I tried clothes on. I was always quick to correct him. "No," I would say, "this is not nice, it is ill-fitting on the bodice." And he would apologize and I would roll my eyes and sigh.

He was by no means my only companion. Terry Parsons, that infernal gab who sat behind the reception desk on occasion, would chatter in my ear to my endless chagrin but gave good fashion advice. He had a good eye and a silver tongue. Then there was Emerson, who never had any opinions and hated every minute of going outside, but could be dragged into doing it if he was not in the middle of running some gambling event. When I asked him at the end of an excursion why he went with me if all he was going to do was complain, he shot back, "Why did you invite me when all I do is complain?" I said he was good at carrying things, he said plenty of other men could do that, and we parted angrily. Of course, I asked him again the next chance I had, and every time it went the same, and I always went back.

Then there was Miguel. It was never a good idea to go with Miguel. Invariably he would say something looked nice on me and I would buy it even if I hated it. Even worse, I'd then wear whatever horrid things I had purchased when I went to the kitchens and he'd compliment me again. It was excruciating and embarrassing, yet I still chose to go with Miguel on occasion. The torment was balanced out by how strong and graceful he looked when he carried my bags.

The hotel's location was convenient to several excellent shopping locations, but by and large my favorite place was the thrift store. I had started off shopping in the high-end boutiques, all designer labels and four-thousand-dollar price tags, but soon found that there was a peculiar rush of adrenaline that could only be found in making a find, a real find, in some forgotten little corner of a badly-lit hole in the wall store where you would not expect it.

With my knowledge of all things produced in the world up until the moment of my emergence from my cabbage, I had the best eye. I could spot Versace at a thousand paces, pick up a five dollar purse and know that it retailed for five hundred, and identify a garment by merely glancing at its sleeve hanging on a rack. At first this was all the rush I bothered to realize, but then I discovered what sales were.

There were sales at stores where I shopped, of course, but what I refer to is not a mere discount on some random item of clothing. No, I speak of the battlefield that is a true sale, the kind where women line up at the door and fight over anything they can get their hands on, clawing and screaming in desperation. I stumbled into my first such sale by accident. I simply walked into a boutique and there were two dozen women fighting over shoes. I almost turned around and walked right out, but a woman rushing into the store shoved me.

Sam tried to stop me, of course, but I narrowed my eyes, clenched my teeth, and went charging into the fray after the woman and put my hands on the first thing she did and yanked it from her. I didn't even want those shoes, they were a horrid purple and not my size, but no matter what names the woman called me, I refused to back down, and my vocabulary far surpassed hers. Sam turned positively red at my language. The woman turned to him and told him to control his daughter and I stomped her foot (I was in harmless flats), said a few choice lines that turned the woman as purple as the shoes she wanted, and ran to the register. Sam could only shrug helplessly and say he wasn't my father, but the woman kept yelling at him.

Of course, I did not take kindly to her abuse of Sam. I completed my purchase, ran back, tore open the shoe box, and proceeded to rip the shoes apart. I left the woman standing there in a pile of purple leather shreds. Thinking back on that first sale experience, I still enjoy a feeling of smug satisfaction as I picture the woman's shocked face.

In which a boy playing on the stairwell breaks his arm and Ylaine uses it as an opportunity to skip some class time.

In which Ylaine is followed home and meets a girl she finds interesting and amusing.

In which . . .

The remodel of my living quarters took much less time than anticipated. Reginald, of course, tried to stick his hands into it, but I very firmly refused his advisory advances in favor if my own plan of action. First, I had them begin the principal construction of the walls and shelves in the adjacent room, which took place over the course of a week during the day when I was at school. I would have left Sam to oversee it except he dropped a hammer on his foot even before we began construction and got caught up in his own superstitions to the point where he was afraid to walk within fifty yards of my room during the project lest the walls collapse. "That will not happen!" I informed him, and he hid from me.

That left me few choices and I wound up asking Terry Parsons. It was him, Emerson, or Harry, and I was not asking Harry. Emerson would have probably charged me for his time if he did not outright refuse. Being naturally chipper, Terry, on the other hand, happily agreed without any conditions. It wasn't as if he had anything else to do and he knew who to call in order to arrange the construction crew. He seemed glad to have something to do for a chance besides hang out in the reception area. (I swear to you, he was a man waiting for life to tell him what to do rather than going and figuring it out for himself. Good-natured enough but utterly ineffectual.)

Once the shelves and walls were all completed to my satisfaction I allowed them to install the door. It was an easy enough job to finish in a few hours in the afternoon and I stood there and inspected this final piece of the puzzle falling into place. The last screw was drilled and the workmen stepped back and I allowed myself a smug smile of accomplishment and showed the workers (and Terry, who was blubbering and blustering some happy nonsense about being really proud of the whole thing) out.

I sighed with contentment as I smelled the faint lingering traces of recently-cut wood in the air. I ran my fingers across shelves sanded to smooth perfection and finished off with a neutral paint. I flicked the light switch and listened to the roll of the drawers sliding -- no, gliding! -- open and shut under my touch and I was proud of my achievement. A place for everything and everything in its place. The best part of it was once I had moved all of my clothes and hats and shoes and belts and wigs into my new closet, there was still so much space and I knew exactly what I had to do to fill it. Go on a nice, big shopping trip.