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Suffice to say, after a few days (okay, a few hours) Wisp Darnell had forgotten all about the mean little boy in the shirt who had told her her shoes were stupid: she had tried to communicate to Chris exactly what had happened but got muddled up with it. She had been much more fascinated by the fact that - if she concentrated very hard on a colour she liked that was right next to her - she could rub that colour onto something, like a piece of paper, or her shorts, or the wall (which made her mommy yell a lot). This usually made her extremely tired and needing to have about double the naptimes that other people got, but Evan and Xi were very nice about people needing double naptimes. It was in Wisp's nature to force away and forget anything that had made her miserable. Later on her mother would call her emotionally constipated, but that was much later on.

So the next time she saw Tenebras Merroth, she vaguely remembered meeting him, and somehow felt a little bit doubtful deep in her heart, but waved to him anyway because he was all alone and new in the daycare. By that point she and Chris were big fish in the daycare center and had been there a terribly long time, so she considered it her duty to tell everyone else where the playhouse was and things like that.

Just as comically as the first time, Wisp's jaw hung open: and then she was overset by a terrible, terrible wave of un-Wispy rage. Merroth's ragging against her shoes and her face and her in general came back to her all in one terrible, awful blur, and she clenched her little fists together. This boy was mean! He was not a great person! He was a terrible, horrible person, who had been mean about her shoes, the special shoes that Missy and Mommy had picked out! It was too much to bear.

She looked around for Chris, but - hopelessly - Chris had been pulled away to get towelled dry, as he had been involved in an accident at the water table and there was a lot of Chris to get wet. Wisp pulled herself up and marched over to Merroth in the corner, hands at her hips, half-expecting an immediate apology (nobody could be that mean, right?)

"Don't you blow's raspberries at me, mean boy," she said.

Wisp was just as confused as any little girl would be upon encountering you're fat for the first time. Fat? Was fat bad? Was she fat at all? Were all little girls fat, maybe? She didn't really understand fat, especially with her little traces of chubby bracelets of baby pudge. "You're dumb!" she said indignantly, and Jace's favourite word: "Jerk!"

Of course she didn't: was isosceles some kind of food, or something? It was a long, complicated word. Maybe it was another language. Wisp's cheeks got very red. "I do too!" she hurled back, not qualifying it with what the word actually meant. "You're dumb! I bet you don't know what..." What was the most complicated word in her repetoire? "... chart-reuse is!" (The tiny blonde knew just about every colour in the Crayola line, a prodigious feat.)

"It is NOT," the little girl opposite him said triumphantly. "It is a colour you are stupid!" She didn't understand at all what the 'alcohol' and 'proof' stuff meant, but she knew that he was WRONG! "You think you're so smart but you is not! Nya nya!"

Wisp had never been so cruel in her life. Jace would have been impressed.

"Noooooo you are so wrong." She was giggling now, with a really genuine side of smugness. Everyone knew chartreuse was a colour. Her mother had sat her down and helped her pronounce all the colour words that she was having trouble with. "You can go ask an ADULT 'n they will say so. You can't dwink it. So there!"

Wisp sucked in her lungs and shouted as loud as she could: "MIS-TER XIIIIIIIIII!"

As this had been shouted in a tone that probably should have been reserved for emergencies like "I am bleeding out my eyes and ears", "a dinosaur has entered the nursery", "communism has attacked my friends", it didn't take long for the bound-mouthed Chinese man to come lumbering over to both children. He scratched his head, knuckles absently brushing alongside his horns, and tilted his head. "Tummy ache?" he suggested. "About to hurl?"

"No!" the small blonde girl said. "Mister Xi what is chartreuse it is not a drink right it is a colour."

Of all the questions that the nursery caregiver had been asked, it took him a while to actually digest that one. "Uh," he said. "Well, it's both, actually. Well, uh, you two keep on playing nicely and... terrifying me, that's great. Keep it up." (He took this point in time to back away.)

Stunned silence enveloped Wisp. It was a drink, too? She was wrong? But - however fluffy the small girl was - she was not entirely stupid, so she roused up the courage to say, "Ha!"

At first, the little girl was too shocked to cry out. Nobody had ever hurt her in her life: even Jace never inflicted any physical injuries on her, and Jace had far more opportunity and motive than most. Rather than shrilling in pain, Wisp gave a low cry of anger - how dare he pull her pretty ponytail; Evan had done it for her that morning! - and focused unconsciously on the first thing she saw, the bright blue of her denims. She swiped out and mashed her hand triumphantly down his boring white shirt, leaving a big smear of blue colour behind!