Elaine was a believer in the fact that honesty could co-exist with the act of self-invention. This belief was necessary, because she both despised lying and was an advocate for self-invention in every form, and so she had assembled a tenuous ideology that accommodated both, at least if she didn’t touch it incautiously.

Still, that meant that there was a depressing incompleteness to the act of becoming someone else. Or at least that was her current theory for why she did not, really, feel like Elaine Carlisle at the moment, and only occasionally felt like Lyonesse, and most of the time felt like Misty Lynn Grundy with new teeth and new tits - a person she loved because she was too good for this, whatever “this” was. Her own mother knew about Elaine, and she wouldn’t have lied about Lyonesse if, God forbid, she was ever confronted about it. What kind of reinvention was it if even your own mother still addressed her hokey birthday cards to the world’s most embarrassing white trash name? What did a driver’s license even mean?

She had approached the problem from various angles. Moving frequently had been one, in an attempt to find herself where no one knew who she had been once. But being chased by phone calls and her own guilt - and her compulsive need to be honest even to first dates - kept it from working as it should. Not even Destiny City had succeeded in furnishing her with the glamour of a new Self - only a sense of lurking danger every time she walked home and dreaded her next encounter with Destiny City Bullshit.

Glamour, she thought, stepping out of her shoes and braving, as she often did, the cold and dirty sidewalks on her bare feet. An appropriate word for what she wanted - some sort of magic that would turn her into something she had always been certain she ought to be, and increasingly felt she never would be.

She was in an especially grim mood. Work was sometimes more grueling than fun, and she hated when they asked her to keep her hair down - the more so for having forgotten to bring a hair tie, some pins, even a ******** pencil to put it back up after she left. The night was unusually blustery, and even tucking her hair - corporate-perfect curls four hours ago, now a thorough rat’s nest - into the collar of her blazer had only succeeded in catching it painfully on her bra strap the next time the wind gusted. She was exhausted, she was cranky, and Doodlebear wasn’t working, so she couldn’t even reserve the bathroom and take a piss in peace.

This wasn’t glamour. This didn’t even feel like the big city. This wasn’t much different from walking down the shitty streets of her podunk hometown on the way back from the little dive that masqueraded inaccurately by the name of a nightclub. The only difference was the Bullshit, which was decidedly of a different and worse flavor here than coyotes in the trash and good ol’ boys smashing mailboxes. She wished, not for the first time, that she had gone to school.

This was always a dangerous line of thought, which usually resulted in her doing a shot of Vodka over the bathroom sink and then ugly crying in bed to nu-metal and falling asleep in her mascara. But misery likes to be fed, and masochistically, she fed it with a little fantasy life where Elaine Carlisle hadn’t even been necessary. Maybe she could be teaching the Mabinogion to a bunch of English majors right now, if she’d gotten her s**t together. Somewhere she didn’t have to worry about Bullshit like magic rabies and girls in miniskirts throwing cars or whatever the ******** happened in this godforsaken city. Married to some old French guy with thinning hair and an obsessive love of her, and maybe a lot of cash. Maybe she could have been - this ******** wind, she thought, aggressively pushing her hair out of her face and only pissing herself off again when it tangled painfully on the fake wedding ring she’d been tasked to wear. Not even that ******** had thought she was someone she wasn’t, and if her hair blew into her face one more time she was going to-

The wind bore her the means of relief like a little miracle just as she felt the stupid, irrational tears stinging her eyes: someone’s Christmas garbage, she thought, littered into the street, probably swarming with germs, but lifted by a blustery cold gust almost into her hands. The red ribbon sailed before her with a strangely compelling beauty in the pale circle of a street light, and without thinking of anything but getting her hair out of her face, she reached out to catch it.

She had been entertaining a fantasy of becoming someone else. But Elaine Carlisle - Lyonesse, Misty Lynn Grundy - acquired a fourth name as she made the biggest mistake of her life and closed her fingers around the red silk ribbon, and realized too late that she had fulfilled her own wish by running blindly into the waiting arms of Bullshit.