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It was difficult to imagine what could have caused Genevieve Prideux to sit down on a bench, pull her knees to her chest, and stare sadly out at the occupants of the small dog park. It was not uncommon to find her there, muddy up to the knees and playing with a dog whose owner had a paper to read or a message to text. It was just difficult to think of something that could keep her glued to the bench while a dozen french bulldogs and pomeranians yapped playfully at the tails of great danes and german shepherds. There were ears to be scratched, toys to be thrown, and a dozen

When it came down to it, it was all Charys Murphy's fault.

It had been Charys Murphy who had told her the previous afternoon of the game that accompanied Jenny's favorite song, the song she hummed happily during their shared walk from English to Math. Charys had told her of the magical unicorn adventure where she could make wishes come true with only a Z key and a space bar. Jenny had been nothing short of delighted. Of course, she knew she couldn't really make wishes come true – that would have been silly! - but a game with unicorns, stars, and her favorite Erasure song? She had all but run home, flung her backpack down on the kitchen table, and booted up the old PC her family shared.

It had taken Jenny all of ten seconds to run head-first into the white star barriers without properly dashing first, effectively blowing up her unicorn avatar and ending her game of Robot Unicorn Attack with the lowest score in human history. She had left the computer with the music still looping in the background, grabbed her jacket and a pack of Looney Tunes gummy snack, and headed to the dog park. The entire way she carried a rarely-seen frown that had very little to do with the game and a hell of a lot to do with her perpetual failure at being an average seventeen year old girl.

“Stupid game,” Jenny murmured as she ripped open the corner of her snack, dropping a foot from the bench to toe the dirt. She didn't mean it, really. It was a delightful game, and in the back of her mind a voice nagged at her to say so aloud. Jenny ignored it, and earned a small, rebellious smile for her efforts. She had only a few seconds to cherish her wild and crazy disobedience of conscience before the feeling of a cold, wet nose pressed against her bare knee made her squeal like a four year old. Jenny, only halfway through her battle with the shiny snack wrapping, ripped the package wide open, sending Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck raining down to the dirt. Tweety rolled to a stop between two of the bench planks by her side.

By the time it was all said and done, Jenny was on all fours on the bench like some kind of terrified cat, watching as the wiry-haired wolfhound scooped up Bugs and Daffy with an absurdly long tongue. It sniffed at the dirt and meager grass of early Spring, pawing at a thin patch of grass until it was able to devour Sylvester as well. Apparently unsatisfied, it turned its attention on Jenny. With a few sniffs and an excited bark, the wolfhound rested its chin on the edge of the bench. It was large enough that it had to lay down to do so. It stared up at her with big, sad eyes and let out a begging noise, lifting a paw to scratch at the edge of the bench.

Jenny was smiling, but looked terribly confused. The dog sniffed twice, looked at the bench, and rolled its eyes back up to her.

“Oh!” She said with sudden understanding, “You want this?” Jenny plucked the yellow gummy from the bench, rolling it between thumb and forefinger.

Whine.

“It's my last one, you know.”

Whiiiiine.

“Oh, all right,” she said, forcing a sigh that gave away her complete lack of exasperation. She held Tweety out for the slaughter, laughing while the dog devoured the tiny yellow head whole.

Jenny was charmed immediately.

You might say that this meant something, because Genevieve Prideux was not easily charmed. You might also make yourself a filthy liar in the process, because anyone who had ever spent more than five minutes with the double-bunned, wide-eyed Energizer Bunny of a girl knew that she could be charmed by a fence post and carry on an hour long conversation with it as well.

Jenny climbed down from the bench as though she were climbing down from a dangerous ledge, gripping the back with both hands as she gingerly set the soles of her lacy flats on the ground near Brillo's head. It took all of thirty seconds before she was kneeling on the ground, opposite the man whose words were causing her cheeks to hurt from grinning too much. Fingernails found their way behind one of Brillo's ears, but her focus now seemed primarily on her owner.

“I'd let her eat me out of house and home, I'm sure she would- Oh! You don't feed her chocolate, do you?” Jenny looked sincerely concerned, those china blue eyes wide. “Chocolate makes their brains explode. I heard Robbie Finster fed his mom's Akita,” – Evita! – “chocolate, and BOOM!” Jenny made a grand display of placing the back of her hand against one ear and waggling her fingers to mimic her brains pouring out. As though to really drive the whole death point home, she flopped over sideways in a dramatic reenactment of chocolate-induced brain explosion fatality.

For someone who had just climbed down from a bench as though the sidewalk was made of lava, she seemed not to care that her face was now lying in the dirt, a blade of grass halfway up one nostril. Despite her best efforts and plentiful theatrics, it was not convincing death. Dead people did not open one eye to see if they were being watched.

“It's true.”

Jenny, still playing dead, reached out to scratch under Brillo's chin.

A doctor?

A doctor, he said? Oh, how charming!

For a moment, Jenny was lost as she picture Gene running alongside gurneys loaded with dying children and wounded soldiers, yelling things like 'stat!' and 'twenty cc's of acetylsuphylmethyltrexomaniodionideadrenalinezophyl!' Only his introduction, accompanied by the outstretched hand, pulled her back to reality. A reality in which she noticed that his hair was just super perfect.

“I would have been,” she said, and sounded truly regretful, “But when I offered to read her lines Mr. Gordon said I was too young to die. I told him that it's all just pretend, but he said...” Jenny trailed off, looking up in the way you do when you've forgotten something, and eventually shrugged. “He said something. Charys Murphy said Lancelot is kind of a douche, anyways, but I think she was just being nice. I didn't want to be Lady Shalott anyyways.”

Anyone with a brain could tell that yes, she really did. Just like she'd wanted to be Maureen, Glinda, Tracy Turnblad, and Cosette.

It said a lot about Jenny Prideux that she wanted to be Cosette.

When offered his hand, Jenny flushed an impressive shade of red. She stared from one of her hands to the other, biting her lower lip in obvious frustration. After a long moment of trying to pull away one hand, promptly returning it when Brillo whined, trying to pull away the other hand and deciding which one resulted in less whining, she pulled away the hand Brillo was licking and wiped it off on her skirt. Jenny raised it to her face, sniffed it once, and made a strange face.

She took his hand anyways, “Genevieve. All of my friends call me Jenny-V!”

This was a lie. Jenny had one friend and that was Charys, who usually called her 'Stop Doing That.'

“You can call me Jenny-V!”