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For once (and the first time in Lilah's short life) Maggie was NOT her good humored, silly self. Her arms were crossed over the sweetheart top of her princess dress.

Lilah, one hand up, with her thumb sticking in her mouth, the other hand gripped Maggie's full skirt. She tried to point, but realizing both hands were occupied, she was suddenly faced with a dilemma of what to do.

Earlier that day a family had come into Maggie's shop. The little boy didn't get any attention from Lilah, but the little girl...Lilah had started at the girls normal clothing, then looked down at her own dress. Not that she didn't like it, but after seeing a few more children come in and out, she started to feel out of place. So she had decided to take matters into her tiny hands. She had stolen away to Maggie's fabric room, and that's where her mother had found her, trying to operate a large pair of scissors on some of her pricier fabric.

Maggie hadn't even yelled, actually quite proud of her new daughter's ingenuity. The reason she was now so irritated was that...she ran a costume shop. She didn't have any "normal" clothes patterns, and apparently little Lilah wanted some normal clothes in her wardrobe. Maggie had never bought clothes before.

She felt a little guilty.

Lilah's thumb was still firmly in her mouth, and she found herself, once again, at the impass of having to removing it, and not wanting to. Finally, deciding it'd be quite rude to just ignore him, she let her hand drop, and tried as inconspicuously as possible to wipe off her thumb behind her back.

"Hi!" she said brightly. "We gettin' clothes!" she added, as though there were other things that could be done in a clothing store.

Maggie grumbled something that sounded like an agreement.

"Is ok," she continued. "Mommah's dress is big, so I was probubly in the way." She had trouble with "probably" and it came out a bit muddled as she spoke.

"You getting clothes too?"

"Yeah!" Lilah agreed emphatically, obviously missing where there could have been sarcasm. "You get clothes at a clothes store!" she nodded, as though it was quite a brilliant deduction. Above her head, Maggie let out a chuckle.

Lilah's eyebrows furrowed briefly. Mommah was always laughing, for some reason, and it was never meanly, Lilah thought. Mommah never laughed AT someone. She just laughed when she couldn't help it. But Lilah had noticed a correlation between when she said something which seemed to prompt it. So now she was trying to decipher what exactly had made her adoptive mother so humored. Why was getting clothes at a clothing store funny?

"I'm dis many soon," here, she held up her hands, to indicate 6. "And den I can know fings."

As if a birthday was a magical fix for being clueless...

"Oh, I'm Lilah!" the little blond girl exclaimed. "I thought a pilot was someone who flew fings," she prattled. "OH!"

Lilah grabbed Pilot's hand and pulled him over to a rack with t-shirts. She wasn't really shy about things like that, even with people she had just met. It hadn't really occurred to her either, that he was bigger and probably not at all interested in what she was going to show him. The shirt was pink and had a piece of cake with two small eyes and a big smile.

"Lookie," she said, pointing at it. "Isn't food with faces cute??"

Lilah was babbling on, her little mind whirling to a hundred different things. She barely knew what she was saying now, and it should have been pretty obvious to an onlooker that she had quite a short attention span.

"...and it falled in the pond!" she finished one of her lengthy stories. (Maggie had yet to make it through the entire story and so still had no idea what "it" was and how it came to be at the bottom of whatever pond she had found.)

She had already forgotten about the t-shirt with the food face.

"What kind of clothes are you here for?" she asked. It didn't seem like the place for him to come for clothes. At least, not the section they were currently standing in, anyway.

"Oh, normal clothes," Lilah said, looking around. She lowered her voice, conspiratorial-like. "Did you know most people DON'T wear bawlgowns?" she asked. It had come as a shock to her.

Before he could answer, she looked across the room. Although it was a clothing store, they seemed to know their target audience well, and had a small play area set up.

"BALL!" she cried, zooming over to the corner and grabbing a medium sized red bouncing ball. She didn't know if Pilot would follow her, so she started to bounce it against the wall.

Lilah nodded. Oh, catch! She knew catch! Berry had taught her how to play catch, only her and Berry couldn't play, because Berry was only a couple inches tall. They had tried it with a tiny balloon, but it hadn't worked.

"Okay!" she said. "Ready?" It didn't matter if he was or not, Lilah had already bounced the ball towards him.


On the other side of the store, Maggie was (quite disdainfully) flipping through some kids t-shirts. She picked up a white shirt with a crown screen-printed onto it. "What do you think?" she asked outloud.

It wasn't easily apparent if she realized Lilah was gone and was just asking thin air, or if she thought she was still standing behind her.