"Alice?" says Bella, amused. "We can both fly. If you don't mean you want to move in with me and Charlie - and I think that might be a bit much for Charlie - then 'where I am' can be a pretty big radius. Build an underground lair. Live in a floating invisible castle in the clouds. Make the inside of a tree bigger than the outside. Set up housekeeping in the temporally bizarre hill. Get a house in Port Angeles and show up to art class on alternate Tuesdays. If you're attached to the house in particular, we have to figure out how to pry your dad out of it, and that's gonna be more complicated."

"I don't," he says slowly, working it out for himself as he goes, "want to be—here, and him also here. I want him to be where I'm not. And I do kinda wanna keep going to Art," and maybe gym and Home Ec, "and if I skipped out on him he'd already throw a pretty big shitfit, and if I skipped out on him and kept going to class he'd throw a way bigger one and it'd probably get all over everything and you don't like collateral damage and I don't like it when it happens to people I like." (Bella, Ms. Finch, Hilary.) "I mean, if we try something else and it doesn't work, underground lair all the way. Or whatever."

"What kind of shitfit? Absent any plausible deniability, even rich people get convicted," Bella says.

"Got a teacher fired once because I had a crush on him," Alice recalls: he doesn't know details, but he knows he was about fifteen and his father was very happy that Junior was actually going to class for once until he found out why. And then that teacher was no longer employed at that school. Broke his fifteen-year-old heart, and also cured him of his nascent interest in algebra.

"It would be useful to know how he did that. Absent that information we'll just have to be conservative, I suppose. Hmm." Think, think. "What's your patience level here? I wonder if we could just make him psychically allergic to you to the point where he moves away without realizing why."

"...Psychically allergic?" he asks warily; no meaning he can think up for the phrase leads anywhere good in his head. It's not like his father currently likes him or gains any enjoyment from his existence. Making his father like him even less just doesn't seem like a good plan.

"Not a matter of making him like you less. Just a matter of him being more comfortable the farther away from you he happens to be - subtly. Certainly it would get sharply worse if he considered something as drastic as interacting with you in any way."

"Okay." Bella doesn't think he actually understood the idea, but there's more where that came from anyway. "New angle. What is it that he does that takes him away on lengthy trips? Turn that up to eleven, he has to move, you happen to not be interested in moving, reason-to-move is still turned up to eleven so he goes."

"He's not gonna let go of me," says Alice. "Like, fuck, I am literally the worst son he could possibly have had, I could not get any less like his ideal offspring unless I openly wore dresses" (which he's into) "and did drugs" (which he isn't particularly), "and he hangs onto me tooth and claw because I'm his flesh and blood" (the phrase echoes in his head in his father's voice) "and it's his responsibility" (that word does the same) "to deal with me. Even though he obviously can't. Unless we do some serious brainwishing, in which case fuck it, might as well drop him off a cliff, he is gonna keep being a pain in my ass until he is in jail or thinks I'm dead."

"The mechanism by which he would attempt to not-let-go matters," Bella says. "If he attempts it by defending himself in a court of law against abuse charges we have limited ability to substantiate, that's one thing. If he attempts it by kidnapping you and taking you across state lines, that's another."

"Okay," says Alice. "I don't actually—wait, yeah, I do know why he keeps fucking off. He's just visiting his old buddies in New York. Probably not something we can wish up more urgency for. I don't know what he'd do," he says, shrugging. "I know he only breaks the law when he thinks he can get away with it. He's been pretty good so far about knowing when that is. But I don't, like, have a list of all the subtly vicious things a really rich guy can do when he's pissed off."

"Right." Bella's massaging her own forehead with thumb and forefinger. "Right. Okay. Maybe we should tell Charlie and go from there. He's got a reasonable shot at understanding that he can't necessarily forge ahead blind without getting you hurt - he probably at least knows the judges around here and can get us a clear picture of which of them are corrupt asses - and the last time anyone tried to bribe Charlie personally he arrested him on the spot and that's a matter of public record. We can fuck with relevant attorneys - I don't think I want to brainwash them, but I have fewer qualms about their notes disappearing and their neighborhood dogs suddenly being very agitated every night at two in the morning."

"So we talk to Charlie," Bella says, but she's still frowning. "And if he says there's nothing he can do that you think has an acceptable margin of safety - then - hm." She looks up and makes eye contact. "How weird would your mom and Hilary find it if your dad just forgot you exist and could not be reminded or notice your presence in any way? Would this cause a lot of changes in his behavior, or by making yourself sufficiently actually scarce could this just seem like him deciding he doesn't want to be bothered anymore? Also, is there any risk that in this case he'd start going after someone else?"

"I have not a flicker of conscience with also sterilizing the bastard," Bella says helpfully.

Alice grins. "Yeah, that's better."

"But your mom would notice something is up. How bad would that be?" Bella says. "What would she do?"

"...I don't really know," he says. "I mean, she's been pretty fucking clear that she wants me gone," no specific memories accompany that, just a vague sense that it has been repeatedly confirmed, "so it's not like she'd be unhappy. But I don't know if she'd care that he'd gone totally bugfuck overnight," because 'totally bugfuck' is an accurate measure of how far he would have to depart from his usual behaviour in order to act like he'd forgotten his own son, "or what she'd do about it if she did. Uh," because this seems like relevant information now, "he gets really pissy if anybody mentions divorce when they're both in the room, and she never seems to notice." As he recalls, Bella has witnessed one such instance for herself.

"Huh." Bella chews her lip. "This is looking like, maybe not a dead end, but a risky avenue. Let's see what else I can think of." Think, think, think. "In jail and dead are probably the best places to put him, I'm not quite frustrated enough to vote for dead yet... has he done anything else illegal you happen to know about or suspect?"

"It almost certainly depends on how he did it. Maybe all the algebra was hiding a sordid double life and your father was just motivated to dig it up." She sighs. "And we're back to involving Charlie."

"But," Bella says, "we do need a contingency plan for what happens if Charlie is more cavalier about the possibility of a failed charge than us - or if we agree on the risk and then it doesn't pan out." Pause. "Would the mere fact of a trial having occurred be a plausible trigger for your dad to pretend you didn't exist, so we can fall back on that? I mean, I don't think he's been publicly accused before, has he?"