[Want me to drop in with cupcakes again?] queries Alice from the lunch line.

[Cupcakes in particular should most likely be a one time thing,] Bella says. [If you have another equally clever idea I'd like to see it - otherwise I'll just sit through this until I'm done eating, I think.]

[That's very like cupcakes, you realize.]

He raises his eyebrows, looks around the table, shrugs, picks up a plain old chocolate chip, and takes a big bite.

Alice smiles brightly at Eric, and with some amusement at Lauren, and with some contempt at Mike, and takes his time finishing his cookie.

"Sure I do," he says. "But none of those assholes ever put me in the hospital. Daddy, on the other hand, dragged me all the way downstairs to the fireplace just so he could beat me with the poker. So all in all I am pretty fucking glad I put him in jail."

"That guy is gonna grow up to hit his wife," Alice remarks as he sits. It's not a fully serious prediction, but it is a comment on what he has seen of Mike's personality.

"He has other characteristics, and his behavior at age seventeen isn't a life sentence, but I do worry you're right," Bella murmurs.

[Yeah, that wouldn't do anything to convince anyone that I'm not sleeping with you,] Bella says. [It annoys me generally to have people believe falsehoods about me that I didn't put there on purpose.]

[Okay,] he says agreeably. [Think I'll blow off the rest of the day and go hang out in my lair. Tell Finch I said hi?]

[Will do. You'll miss me triumphantly kicking ass at badminton, though.]

[Have fun. I'm going to Bio,] Bella says. She does pat him once on the head, when she stands up, like he's a support.

[See ya,] he says, and off he goes, abandoning his box of cookies.

"Yup," Bella says brightly. "So how does badminton work? It involve rackets, right?"

Bella giggles where appropriate. "Sounds simple enough," she says. "Do we get assigned partners or do we pick them?"

"You pick them," says Ms. Finch, "unless that takes too long or involves too much adolescent politics. So far this class hasn't been too bad about teams, though."

"Okay. I just haven't met many people in this class besides Alice - oh, he asked me to call him Alice awhile ago, it's kind of weird - and he's not showing up today, so I'm not sure who to go with," Bella shrugs.

"Alice," she repeats. "Funny. Well, if you can't find a partner once class starts, make pitiful faces at me and I'll get you straightened out."

"Will do," Bella agrees. She experimentally swings her racket a few times. She spends a pentagon on general athleticism so she won't be terribly exhausted by suddenly adding cardio to her day, and one on skill at racket-based sports in general after discovering that "all sports" is too general. She gets a birdie from the pile and starts tapping it up into the air, over and over. "Hee."

Well, some people are naturally talented. Ms. Finch doesn't find Bella too suspicious, and she is shortly distracted by the arrival of the rest of the class, anyway.

It's always nice to see the kiddies having fun.

After class, Bella has no reason to stick around; she puts her equipment away and runs off to call her dad to come get her. (Her car should be fixed soon. If only she'd thought to magic it fixed when it first broke - sure, magic was scarcer then, but it might have taken only a square -)

[Yeah, Charlie just left,] Bella says. [What are you up to?]

[Lots. Finch didn't even seem suspicious. You recovering okay? Mike was pretty awful to you at lunch.]

[I'll be fine,] he says, tucking his hands behind his head and gazing up at the ceiling. [Still kinda feel like shit, but whatever. You wanna hang out?]

[Sure. Be over in a few.] Bella walks out, and once she's deep in the woods turns invisible and takes flight. [If Mike sits at my table again I'm just going to get up and leave, I'm done with him.]

[Good plan,] says Alice.

[Maybe social consequences will have an effect where arguing for human decency didn't. Also it's less work. I think I've settled on soccer,] Bella continues. [The school has a team, the women's teams aren't as generally denigrated as, like, baseball ones, and we're doing it in like a week so I can "learn" it then.] She flies through the rock and down the spiral staircase. "Halloooo!"

"Hi!" he calls from his position on the floor of the sewing room. Then he gets up, walks through the broad arch to meet her at the bottom of the stairs, and hugs her.

Bella hugs him back and pets his hair. "So have you put your sewing room to any use yet?" she asks.

"Not yet," he says. "Haven't figured out if I want to use a pentagon or not."

"I'd say not," Bella says. "If you care about the process, why wouldn't you learn it the usual way? And if you care about the results, actually sewing is redundant - you can just wish clothes into existence." She gestures at her wish-jeans. She's worn no non-wish jeans since she learned she could do that.

"I love you," says Alice. "You make so much more sense than me."

"Yes, yes I do," says Bella merrily, drifting over to the chair in the corner and plopping into it. "It's good that you know that."

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.

Bella finds that amusing. "I wonder," she says very deliberately, "if I'd look nice in all the requisite leather."

"You really fucking would," says Alice, happily.

She laughs. "Well, I wouldn't want to try it in this climate, but anywhere else... maybe this is an argument in favor of Stanford."

"Suddenly I really like Stanford. Where the fuck is Stanford, anyway?"

"Palo Alto, California," Bella says.

"Cool. Good motorcycle weather?"

"I think so. Maybe a little warm for it in summer. But I could go around not wearing a helmet and have plenty of wind in my hair. Or make the leather magically breathable."

"I love how you solve things."

"So do I," says Bella smugly.

Awwwwww. He hugs her leg.

Bella laughs and goes on petting him. "You are a strange, strange creature, Alice."