Bella pets him some more. "I mentioned to Finch that you asked me to call you Alice, by the way."

"Dunno. I guess she'll surprise us. I downloaded some college applications today," she remarks.

"Cool. Which ones?"

"All the Ivies - I have preferences among them, but any I can get into this year is noticeably preferable to any that won't take me until next year if at all - and the public universities here and in Florida, since I could claim residency in either now that my mom and Phil moved to Jacksonville. And MIT, because that's good in its own right and right near Harvard. I might not send in applications for all of them; I'll have to take a second look at the requirements and the average test scores and stuff."

"All kindsa places we might end up," Alice says contemplatively. He likes the uncertainty of it.

"Enh, it's mostly concentrated in New England," Bella says. "It's possible I should throw in Stanford though. Why can't all the useful people go to one place?" she sighs.

"Where would be the fun in that? Anyway, betcha you'll find enough useful people, wherever you end up."

"It's not all about a critical mass of useful people - it's also bad to have any major useful-people gaps. If I go to Harvard and then someone from Stanford with whom I have no mutual friends makes more money than God, I'm in trouble; if I go to Yale and someone from - from the University of Tokyo invents a proprietary technology that interacts badly with magic and I have no way to get in touch with them and influence that nonmagically, then I'm also in trouble. But I can't be everywhere yet and the world is big."

"There's already lotsa people you don't know who have more money than God, though," says Alice.

"Yes, I know. I hope to meet people who know their cousins' kids or something," Bella says.

"...You know my mom," he observes. "And my mom knows a lot of rich people."

"That's potentially useful, yes, but does she have parties where I could sidle up to same and comment on the hors d'oeuvres and then say hey, have you heard about this project I'm helping to run?"

"Maybe! Who the fuck knows what she's gonna do now?"

"Fair enough," Bella laughs.

"You could always suggest it to her and see what happens."

Bella nods. "Next time I see her. How have things at the house been?"

"Good! Man, I did not know how much fun life could be without that asshole in it."

Bella grins. "Awesome." Pause. "You remembered to call Hilary and tell her not to bother picking you up from school, right?"

"Yup! She said from here on out I might as well just call her when I want a ride."

Bella snickers. "So are you going to just fly everywhere now?"

"Why the fuck not?"

"I'm starting to wonder if my car's a lost cause. They've hung onto it for a long time now; they should have had time to get whatever parts they needed. I'd fly everywhere too but eventually somebody would wonder why I didn't have a vehicle in the parking lot. If it didn't rain so much here I'd get a motorcycle. Maybe I'll do that if there's better weather where I go to college..."

"Sounds like fun," he says. By which he means it sounds hot.