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She just wanted some ******** french fries but like everything else in her shitty, awful life things just couldn't be like they were when she was last in the Real-Life Human World. No. Instead of talking to people she now had to somehow navigate a machine and there were ******** calorie counts everywhere and prices had changed so much and anyway that's how Lady ended up having a panic attack outside a McDonalds at 11:45PM at night. It was past curfew but she didn't even give a s**t. There was no space left in her head for shits to give. She was caught up giving shits about completely different stuff like apparently having a doctorate in folkloric studies.

So, anyway, she was focused on her complete mental breakdown over french fries when Thorne literally stumbled over her. This didn't hurt, even though it maybe should've, mostly because he stopped right before making contact.

Lady took a minute to try to inhale before trying to talk, but all she ended up doing was choking out a miserable cough. This happened twice more before she finally managed, "I don't ******** know how to ******** order," and then put her face back on her knees and tried breathing through her hands again.

"There's a ******** Starbucks here?" Thorne's assurance maybe doesn't work out the way he wants it to. Starbucks is like... A Salem thing. A Boston thing. It has no place in Ashdown, Massachusetts. It's an invader. Lady looks at him miserably, and then nods. Her full-out teen gangliness is more obvious than ever when she stands up, long-limbed and two inches taller than Thorne. "I just wanted to get French fries," she says, miserable, so ******** miserable. "I have... I have stupid homework. For tutoring. So I can go back to school."

Which sucks.

"I've got tutors," says Lady. "Buncha old people." Not old people like Thorne. Thorne Got It, didn't he? "I don't even want to go back to school. What's the point? I don't have any of the stuff you need, I'm fake." At least Thorne gets to go back to his life, as messed up as it might have been. Lady doesn't even know where to begin becoming Tate again, if she even could. "I mean, if you're any good at English or history, I suck at everything that's not math."

She finds a table for them, one of the booths in the way back corner. It's entirely weird to be ordering at the McDonalds and going to sit down and wait for her food. Why is this happening to her?

"I had a panic attack in the mall the other day," she says. "Over a shirt."

"It's okay if I go with Aleksy," she says. "He's my brother. I'm four minutes older than him. Only I guess... not anymore." Lady shrugs and sticks four fries in her mouth at once. Her Melany-taught manners are gone. But she'd never tried to fight like Thorne and Shiloh had, it'd all been a grand adventure until suddenly it wasn't anymore.

"I used to write music," she tells Thorne. "I sing, sometimes. I mean, all the time. I wanted to do something with that. She used to have me sing for her while she worked. She said I was good at it. I can play the violin and the piano and the guitar..."

"Four minutes older and nine years younger," says Lady gloomily. "I mean, I could do anything for three months, this just feels like excessive."

She shrugs. "I was never very good at school," she says. "If I was gonna make music into, like, my job I'd probably just do it." Thorne still nets a smile at the compliment. "Maybe I'll play you one of my songs sometime, once I find a piano." Or bought the shitty $60 Casio keyboard she'd seen in an electronics repair shop window. That and a pair of earbuds and she could be in business...

Another mouthful of fries, and she says, "So like, what's up with you and my brother?" Like that was any kind of sensible segue. Really Lady just wanted the attention off her and onto Thorne. "He spent like three days freaking out 'cause he hadn't seen you or something."

"I gotta," she says, "have you seen Lyoshka? He's knee high to a grasshopper." Lady tries the fries-in-the-ice-cream thing. It's alright, she decides, so she does it again. "I dunno. I'm glad you're friends." She has a dimple in one cheek when she smiles, a trait she doesn't share with her brother at all. "Don't tell him I told you. He'll be pissed."

She goes back to her fries. The set of her shoulders is looser now. This is more like what she remembers, though in Melany's household they would have been working, doing something--meals were taken in silence if they were taken in a group at all--and now they were just. Here. "He likes you too," she says. She's a little jealous. Sure, she knew Aleksy first, but Thorne, oh, Thorne knows her brother as he is now. Not as he was almost a decade ago, when he was younger and angrier. "A lot."

Lady has finished her fries. She breaks down the pouches, flattening them between her palms. "He shaved his head once when we were fifteen," she says, "With, like, a razor like girls use for their legs. It used to be down to like, here." She gestures around the small of her own back. "Father was pissed. I kind of was, too, since he didn't let me help." She touches her own hair self-consciously. It's a fair river of copper-red, brighter than her brother's and straight as a pin. But the sides and back are shaved. She palms at the fuzz there: it's getting long. "I don't know what to do about my hair," she says. "She always picked it for me. The style.

"Lace says she's not dead. That she's in the human world, right now." Lady doesn't shudder. She's quite still: a fawn faced with an unknown predator. "I'm scared I'll see her if I go somewhere alone, and--I was with her for so long, what if I just--I'm scared."

"It'd be so easy to go back," says Lady. "Sometimes I think I want to go back. It was... fun, for a while. I, you know, someone cared about me and where I was going and how my education was. She loved me."

She doesn't say It was fake because Thorne knows.

"Do you think Aleksy would help me with my hair?" She plays with it, still, tying tiny and complicated knots in the copper locks. Her knuckles go white as she pulls the strands of her hair tight. "I, um. I can't do it by myself." There's a question inherent in that: will you help me. But, like a true Spektor, she doesn't have the nerve to ask.

Lady does reach across the table to ruffle Thorne's hair. "You're not alone," she repeats back to him. "I won't let her get you."