Alice sits very quietly the whole time, gazing adoringly up at Bella. She is just so great, okay? Okay.

Alice, naturally, follows.

[Now I have an hour to wander around looking at stuff and grab lunch,] Bella says, [and then I'm supposed to meet the soccer coach real quick because I don't have enough of a game record to substantiate my claims of fantastic talent, and then I audition for the orchestra conductor.] She hefts her bag, which contains her flute, and swings it onto her back.

[Maybe. They're paying me lots of attention, so they at least think I'm in, but there could be bad luck, or a necessary recommender who takes a dislike to me, or a dozen more ridiculously qualified people who play basketball and violin and also spent two years working with tsunami victims or something.]

It's kind of a ridiculous system, when he thinks about it.

[Hmm?] She's admiring buildings, and the nice weather. [Ridiculous how?]

[I dunno, the whole getting-into-college process? Like, what does working with tsunami victims have to do with it?]

[So if you were running a school and ten thousand people applied and you could only take two thousand, which ones would you take?]

[I wouldn't run a fucking school,] says Alice. [And if I did, I'd pick people for terrible reasons. But we scrounge up enough high schools for everybody somehow; why not enough colleges? There's even less people!]

[Well, yes,] Bella says. [I assure you that if I went to a tiny, terrible community college in Port Angeles, all I would have to demonstrate would be basic literacy. Maybe they'd want to make sure I could add. The good schools are good because they're selective - people want to go there so they can get the best teachers, and fraternize with the best classmates. There aren't enough bests to go around for everyone.]

[I still think it's weird,] Alice maintains. He doesn't have a solution, but he doesn't see why that should stop him.

Bella snorts quietly. [Well, that's the system, so I'm gaming it.] There's a dining hall over there; she decides to see if they'll feed her or if she has to be a student.

Alice tags along. When it occurs to him that any food he conjures will get a free ride on his invisibility as long as he doesn't drop it, he spends a square on a turkey sandwich.

Bella pays for a one-meal pass to the dining hall and tastes small dollops of various offerings from the buffets. [Well. Nothing phenomenal here. The macaroni and the lemon pie is okay though.]

[Meh,] says Alice. [I'll stick with my invisible lunch.]

[Enjoy,] Bella says lightly. [Man, the weather is nice here. It's like I've time-traveled to a land in which it is already spring.]

[It's pretty great,] he agrees. [Snow's fun, too, though.]

[Well, I imagine I'll visit Charlie some holidays, when I'm not going to see Renée instead.]

[Well, she looks a lot like me, but we're not that similar in personality] Bella says. [She has no long-term attention span. I think the only reason she can teach kindergarten is that she gets to forget she was doing it once a year. Hobbies and stuff she's intense about for a few months, then drops. In a lot of ways she's very childlike - she used to screw up things like depositing her paychecks, never bad enough that we went hungry or couldn't pay the mortgage if the bank called to yell at her, but bad enough to be scary, so I learned how to help her with that sort of thing as soon as I could. She's good at her job, she's never embarrassed not to know how to do something new, she's often very insightful about people and how they relate to each other while completely missing plenty of relevant implications of whatever she's spotted.]

That is a pleasing notion to contemplate! He bounces happily after her.