"You look bored to fucking tears," observes Alice.

"I'm not crying, and even if I were, I've never produced tears that talented," deadpans Bella. "Hello."

"If anything were up, would I be bored?" she says quizzically.

"I'll give you that," he concedes. "Whatcha gonna do about it?"

"Plan a weekend book-shopping trip in unreasonable detail, I think. I may be able to wrangle an invitation to come do my homework at Angela's house, and her brothers could be entertaining little critters, I won't know until I meet them. Why?"

"Well, I was gonna start thinking up suggestions, but I guess you're covered."

"If you have suggestions, by all means supply them. Expending limited social capital and slowly developing an obsessive personality disorder aren't exactly my entertainments of choice," says Bella, sitting up.

"Um... you could take a tour of my stupidly huge house, that'd probably burn a few hours," he says. "I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you're not a fan of climbing trees... pun not intended but totally hilarious and I don't regret it for a second."

"I am indeed not a fan of treeclimbing - your house, huh." Bella considers this. She reaches into her pocket for her notebook, and flips through it. She looks between it and Alice a few times. Then she opens up her phone and dials Charlie's number without completing the call yet. "I'm going to try an experiment," she says.

"...O...kaaay," says Alice, clearly lost.

Bella poises her thumb over the send button, looks Alice in the eye, and carefully pronounces the word, "Freak."

Bella blinks, rereads her notes, draws a question mark next to the plus sign, puts the notebook away, and says, "Okay, I think it's probably safe for me to go to your house, but no on the marrying you."

"Dad will," he says, "I guarantee you. Probably Mom and Hilary, too."

"Then all right, I'll come over," she says, getting to her feet now that her legs are not so uncomfortably leaden. "Is it a long drive?"

"Go ahead."

"You have interesting conversations with your mother," Bella says. "I take it I'm driving you there?"

"Yep," he says. "That okay? We could also walk, but that might take a while, and y'know. Your car."

"Yes, my car." Bella heads for the door. "I'm sort of curious why you had to so vehemently deny girlfriendhood. If I'd said 'by all means let us elope' a moment ago what would you have told her?"

"That you were my fiancee," cheerfully.

"You do know how to get to your house, right?" Bella asks, heading towards the parking lot. "I imagine if you're generally driven to and fro it might not sink in." She trips on an uneven paver in the sidewalk and catches herself before splatting on the sidewalk.

"Okay." They reach her parking spot; Bella unlocks the car. "Which way do I turn when I pull out, then?"

"Left," he says after glancing toward the parking lot's exit.

Bella starts up the car. She buckles her seatbelt, and watches him expectantly.

"You're really very casual with your safety," she mutters, and she pulls out and turns left.

"So I call you Delaney in front of them?" Bella says, amenable. "Okay. What about non-jokes about you getting beat up?"

"...Non-jokes like what?" he says. "I mean, almost certainly no, but like what?"

"Well, 'He keeps provoking guys who are bigger than him into repeatedly punching him in the face' isn't very funny," Bella says. "Unless I was doing an impression of a cartoon character and the context was exactly right in some unfathomable way."

"Yeah, trust me, they know that," he says. "They don't need to hear it again. You will get kicked out of the house and I will get to listen to Dad tell me I have shitty taste in friends."

"Thank you."

"I did say it was stupidly huge," he reminds her. Cheerfully.

"I don't suppose you have six brothers and sisters to justify the size of the place?"

"Nope. Only child. I mean, if you had a kid like me would you ever want another one?"

"That's no guarantee. Perhaps you were a perfectly charming two-year-old, or you're the youngest among several very dissimilar offspring."

"I have been a total shit all my life," he says with some amount of pride.

"How impressive. Personally, I have no memories before age four, and any information about the time before that is contaminated by my parents wanting to assure me that I had nothing to do with the divorce," says Bella, getting out of the car. "I notice you didn't explicitly deny older siblings, though."

"Well, my parents are still together," he says, following, "although if they split they'd probably both take great joy in blaming me, don't tell them I said that. And nope, like I said, only child."

"It's just that I already have reason to believe you're willing to lie to me," shrugs Bella, starting towards the house. "As long as that persists I'll make you give me some information in several pieces, to make that more difficult. Do we just walk in or does having a guest mean knocking?"

"I like you," Alice concludes. "You're twisty. And me not having a key means knocking," he says as he reaches for the doorbell.

"You haven't got a key? Why not?"

"Feel free to ask my dad. I'm kidding, don't ask my dad."

"I'm asking you."

"And I," he says, "am not the one who didn't give me one."

"Yeah, my dad gave me a key, but you wouldn't have to ask him to find out his motivations."

"Well," says Bella, with a shrug and a smile. "I just moved here, days ago, so it didn't take long once someone he clicks with better came along. It is a very small school." She decides the current avenue of conversation might lead to awkward tiptoeing around how she met Alice. "You have a beautiful home," she says instead.

"That hadn't come up yet," Bella says. "I can call and ask if my dad's up for fending for himself, but when it's not an emergency that can take a couple tries during the day." She produces her phone.

"You're welcome to stay as long as you like," Mrs. Hammond says encouragingly. Alice gives her a quizzical look, like he can't figure out what is going on in her head.

Bella dials the phone. The police station secretary-type-person picks up, but is able to relay a conversation between her and her paperwork-laden father. Bella's side of the conversation sounds like this: "Hi, Mr. Jenkins. Yeah, it's me - is my dad in? It's not an emergency, no, I know the number for that. Just a quick question. At a friend's house, they've invited me to stay for dinner. Yeah, I can hold. ... Great, tell him I'll see him sometime tonight after dinner, then."

"I can eat most anything that a typical member of my culture can," Bella says agreeably. "Lobster's one of those things. I'd be fumbling for excuses if it was snails."

"I think I learned Chopsticks and some churchbell-related song before I lost interest in walking four blocks to piano lessons," Bella says. "What's the difference between playing the piano, badly, and not playing the piano?"

"I think it has something to do with the number of lessons you sit through before your case is declared hopeless," says Mrs. Hammond. "Sit through or run away from, as the case may be." Alice laughs.

"Well," Bella says. "This I may have to hear."

"I'll just go and distract my husband," Mrs. Hammond says with a wink, and turns to head up the unnecessarily pretty stairs. Alice leads Bella through an unnecessarily pretty archway to an unnecessarily pretty sitting room, where there sits a piano whose beauty is wholly justifiable.

Bella touches the piano. "This is gorgeous. How did it get through the door?"

"You know, I don't have a clue," he says thoughtfully. "By the time I got here, it was there already."

"Someone else moved ahead of time to prep the place?" Bella asks. "Or it came with the house?"

"First one," he says. "It's the same piano from back home, I'm pretty sure. And this place needed a lot of prep, the way I hear it. For all I know, they dragged it in through a wall."

"Ooh, giant fixer-upper. How will you get it out if you move again? I suppose you could remove the enormous window." She pauses. "Why'd you move here to begin with?"

"Tell you later," he promises, easily. "Wanna hear me totally fuck up some Mozart?"

Bella listens critically. "It's possible you'd be better suited to jazz piano," she opines. "You're allowed to pretend you missed notes on purpose there."

"Now that sounds more my style," he says, cheerfully.

Bella reaches over and picks her way choppily through "Chopsticks", making mistakes on half the notes and correcting by ear. "There," she says. "That's what I know."

Laughing, Alice applauds.

"What else is there in this house?" Bella inquires. "Rooms. I bet you have rooms here. And," she adds, "an underground lair, and secret passages."

"We have tons of rooms!" he vouchsafes. "I'll show you all of 'em except, like, my parents' bedrooms. I'll even show you the underground lair."

Bella keeps to a leisurely pace, looking at pretty things. She likes pretty things. She also doesn't think there's really a lair. "Who does the decorating? Is that one of your parents or a staff thing?"

"Hm, this is a basement. I don't yet know if it's a lair," Bella says, going down the stairs and trailing her fingertips over the pretty wall. "You know, if you asked the part of my brain that generates stereotypes where you ought to live, it would have proposed next door to a gang hideout and across the street from someplace severely rent-controlled, but in its own way this works too."

"We could make one up," he suggests brightly, apparently deciding the question was rhetorical.

"No. No we could not. I'm rightly banned from all forms of moving around short of walking, and only may walk because I'd probably do more damage in a wheelchair."

"I didn't say we could play it," he points out. "—Do you swim?"

"I can dog-paddle well enough to not drown while I wait to be rescued," Bella says. "It turns out you cannot breathe water safely. General human failing." She looks around at the pillars. "I don't think I've ever invented a sport before."

"Neither have I," says Alice. "Betcha it won't be boring, though."

"Alrighty." She looks around again. "Two teams is standard. Who wants to be standard, I ask you. Three? Four? Five's probably unwieldy."

"And we can make them all the same size. Or not, but let's anyway, as if we deviate from all the standards no one will ever play and I will lose my opportunity to make a million dollars in speaking engagements as the inventor. Five to a team should be manageable. And the object is to get a ball, or two or three, to make a specific number of bounces off of pillars? Like pinball."

"Brilliant," Alice pronounces. "Three teams, three balls, have to use another team's ball to score? And maybe you only get points for the number of bounces past what your team's already got, so it starts out easy and gets ridiculous."

"In what sense does a team own a ball if they can't use 'their' ball to score?" inquires Bella. "And if I understand you right, it gets too ridiculous - I don't think I know anyone who could except by astonishing fluke get a ball to bounce off three pillars in a single throw, so this would hold down everyone to two points and they'd spend the entire rest of the game on defense thereafter." She tilts her head. "Unless there are other ways to score, too."

"The same way a team owns a goal in, like, anything else?" he says. "And maybe you count up separately per ball, so that gives everybody four points with no ridiculous throws, I meant that word when I said it, but they'll be tough to get because now everybody's fighting like cats over everybody else's balls, and wow that got dirty fast."

"Yeah, good plan. And the first team to four points wins. Or five if we wanna force everybody to be ridiculous at least once a game."

"Five points or - two hours followed by sudden death in case of tie? Will people generally tolerate playing a sport for that length of time?"

"Sure they will. You can make it an hour and a half, that's about how long a game of soccer takes, I think."

"So if someone gets five points, game ends, they win - if no one does, then whoever has the most points at an hour and a half wins - if two or three teams are tied at that time, whoever scores the next point wins." She chews her lip a little. "But if two or three are tied at four points, then they have to be ridiculous in sudden death mode. So if the tie is at four, they only have to make a two-bounce?"

"Well, if you wanna make it easy on 'em, sure," he says generously.

"I just have some compassion for the people in the stands, sitting there for six hours waiting for someone to pull off a triple," she shrugs.

"Aren't you nice. Okay, I'll give it to ya," he says, making a gesture as though handing her an invisible object - perhaps the rulebook for this mythical game.

"I'm going to start writing this down," she announces, and pulls out her notebook. She starts writing down a summary of the rules they've worked out so far. "So," she adds, glancing at an earlier note to self. "Why'd you move here?"

"It came to me in a dream," Bella says agreeably. "An extremely secret dream."

"The parents don't let me touch actual money. I wanted some. Plus it was fun." His hand drops away from the scar; he shrugs. "Mostly, anyway."

"I suppose if there's a clientele at all here it would be smaller," Bella says. "If I'd had to guess what you'd do if itching for income I would have guessed something like "steal any of several hundred knicknacks in the house and hock it", but perhaps that's not even mostly fun? Or substantially more hazardous?"

"One, there are way, way more guys in New York who want to get their dicks wet and don't really care how than there are valuable little goodies in even my stupidly huge house," he says. "Two, it is way, way easier to get caught stealing from my own house than it is to get caught being fucked in an alley. And yeah, three, it's not as much fun."

"So if that fellow from the cafeteria brawl the other day had discreetly taken you up on your offer and indiscreetly informed anyone afterwards, you'd be moving to - I don't even know what's next down on the ladder from Forks. Siberia?"

"Probably," he agrees. "Or I would've bitten it off and then I'd have a whole different set of problems."

Bella crosses her eyes trying to erase the mental image. "Rather." She brushes her hair back from her face. "What do you do with money, when you have it, that they don't want you to do?"

"Buy stuff I actually want."

"Such as?"

"Well, I was saving up for a sewing machine," he offers as an example.

That seems utterly harmless. "Your parents wouldn't let you have a sewing machine?"

"Nope."

"And yet," Bella continues, "you formed the expectation that if you acquired one, they wouldn't instantly assume bad things about how - and would let you keep it?"

"I was kinda hoping they wouldn't find out," he says. "For a while. Long enough to be worth it."

"What would you sew?" she asks, leaning against the nearest column and sliding to sit on the floor.

"Is that why they wouldn't want you to have a sewing machine, I wonder," says Bella dryly.

"Kind of icing on the cake as far as things Delaney Hammond Junior is not supposed to wanna do," he says with a shrug.

"What's your plan?" she asks. "Do you have the grades to get into college without being financially dependent on them, when I'm told you don't even show up to class? Have you considered getting a non-hooking job? How old are you now, for that matter?" She looks at the ceiling. "Or is it your life's ambition to do something just scandalous enough that you can't be bought out of jail, and you're on a long hunt for where that line is so you can poke a toe over?"

"If I wanted to be in jail, I'd walk into school and kill somebody," he says, like it's so obvious he doesn't have to think about it. "I don't wanna be in jail. I don't wanna be dead, either. Killing yourself's easier than killing somebody else; you're guaranteed one less person trying to stop you." He shrugs again. "Shit, if I had a plan, I'd be out of here by now."

"Well, it looks like you're better at those than I am," Alice observes.

She shakes her head. "Not specific enough. What does out mean? What outcomes qualify?"

"Okay," he says. "If, like, my fairy godmother showed up and whacked me in the face with her magic wand, my three wishes would be: never see my dad again, live by myself until I don't want to, and get to spend all my time making clothes or cooking or, you know, doing fun things."

Bella taps her chin. "You never told me how old you are, did you?"

"Eighteen."

"Age of majority makes a difference," explains Bella, "for some possibilities. If those are really your three wishes: what would happen if you told my dad how your ribs got broken - and suffered through the mess that a trial would admittedly be?"

He closes his eyes and, moderately gently, whacks the back of his head against the wall behind him.

"Was that a demonstration of what you think would happen, or an expression of some manner of emotion?"

"...Little from column A, little from column B... look," he says flatly, "what I think would happen is, it would turn out I'd told your dad a really bad joke. Ha ha. Isn't that funny. Kids these days. 'Cause what you think happened, well, that doesn't happen. Not in families like mine. Not to kids like me. So it didn't. You get what I'm sayin', here?"

Bella rubs her forehead with her thumb. "Well," she says. "You have less reason than I to think highly of my dad's professional capabilities, and perhaps I'm biased anyway. But look, there are other options. You're eighteen. If you want to buy a bus ticket to Nevada and get a job at a brothel, he cannot actually stop you. I'd loan you bus ticket money, if you don't have even that much socked away. Does that count as 'fun'?"

"I tried the running away thing," he says. "It's pretty easy to run away in New York. Not so easy to stay gone."

"It's not running away, when you are eighteen, although you could separately get in trouble for vagrancy or similar and you might be dumped at your parents' house if no one has a better idea of what to do with you. If he is hiring private goons to kidnap you, that is also a matter for the police."

"Look," says Alice. "Illegal stuff isn't magically impossible just because it's illegal. And you know what really, really helps people do illegal stuff and get away with it? Huge. Piles. Of. Money."

"So," Bella says. "What does the scenario in your head look like? Step one, you borrow some cash from me and you buy a bus ticket to Nevada and board a bus that is traveling to Nevada. We don't tell anyone where you're going and because it is January in the Pacific Northwest you can use my ugly knitted face mask that I made when I was nine without arousing particular suspicion. Step two?" she inquires. "Does your dad hire a private investigator and learn your location and hire someone to kidnap you? Does he let out that you're fleeing across state lines after having committed some horrible crime for which there will pretty much be no evidence? Does he bribe all of the brothel operators in the state of Nevada to turn you away, and then all the restaurants in case you look for work as a short-order cook? If you would be specific about the failure mode it is not impossible that it could be patched, but you've already given up."

"Last time, it was the oh no, missing kid deal," says Alice. "He might try that gig again. Or maybe it'll be private investigators. Or I don't fucking know, he'll think of something," he says, "and I don't think you are really thinking about what happens after that, but trust me, I am. And you know, fuck my three wishes, the absolute minimum I want out of my life is that if somebody's gonna beat me to death it'll be somebody else."

"Maybe." He rubs his face with both hands. "As an alternate theory, I propose that I'm just a fuckup."

"Well, that would have been an unguestly thing to say," she mutters.

"The hell does that mean?"

"You've known me a handful of days, we are not even dating, and you're announcing you love me. You don't think for two minutes about whether to commit battery in the cafeteria. You give up before you even begin to come up with ways to get three wishes that do not, strictly speaking, require magic."

"It's not like announcing I love you is really deciding something," he says. "It's just something I noticed. Would you rather I shut up about it?"

"On inspection, it doesn't actually bother me," she shrugs. "But perhaps don't make me explain it to my father by saying it in front of him, should the two of you ever meet." She pauses thoughtfully. "If my mother visits - it's not very likely, but not impossible - then I don't care what she hears. She'd think it was precious."

"If that's the sort of thing yours would do, mine might humor her, but that's not her personal hobby, and she'd actually believe me if I explained that we are only friends and not intending to be future co-parents. Renée'd be more likely to demand your astrological information, or corresponding nonsense for whatever spiritual belief has captured her attention that month."

"Pretty sure Mom's just thinking if I get a steady girlfriend she might finally get rid of me," he says, with no particularly intense emotion attached. "Who knows, might even work. Although Dad probably already thinks we're fucking down here, so he might decide I'm never allowed to see you again. Or congratulate me on a job well done. Sometimes I just don't know which way he's gonna jump."

"Do we need to go upstairs to forestall potential disaster?" Bella inquires. "Also, there's a route to consider: marry a rich foreign national who needs a green card and has lots of money."

"Might be a good idea," he acknowledges of the first thing. Of the second: "Why, you know any of those?"

"No, not personally, but I bet you there's a website for that." She gets up. "Let's see the rest of the house."

"Sure," he says agreeably, and precedes her up the stairs.

Bella follows after, shaking her head once to herself.

"He thinks we're fornicating?" she whispers back. "Also, how did we avoid hearing it? Did we leave the basement one minute in the future and slam the door doing so?"

Bella mimes clapping, silently, and goes to stand near the piano herself.

"We aren't dating," Bella confirms. "As a general habit I don't date at all, in fact."

Bella cocks her head and looks politely, inquisitively, and above all with an innocent bemusedness, at Mr. Hammond.

Bella turns a bright smile on Mrs. Hammond. "Does this mean you'll be finishing up the tour of the house for me?" she asks.

"Makes sense to me," agrees Bella.

"Perfect. Come along," she says, and leads the way to the stairs. Alice falls in behind her, duckling-fashion.

Bella too channels a duckling. She may as well carry on playing "slightly dim"; Alice will not be fooled, and it's possible that Mrs. Hammond is less oblivious than she appears and talks to her husband about things.

Bella listens attentively. There's nothing else to do, and useful information can crop up pretty much anywhere. She even asks questions about the more interesting objects, and the less complete stories.

Apparently the peculiar shape of the wall in one of the spacious upstairs guest rooms is because it conceals the chimney of a recently demolished fireplace— "it just wasn't modern enough," Mrs. Hammond flutters, and goes on to describe the origin of the wallpaper. Alice seems more amused than the situation really warrants.

"Make sure they didn't swap the lobster for snails," says Bella with a faint smile.

"I'm not dating him," Bella says. "If you think he likes me, perhaps you're right, but I really don't generally date, and he hasn't asked me on anything more datelike than this visit." She tilts her head. "Why?"

Mrs. Hammond sighs. "I just think it would really do him some good to get out of this house once in a while." Wryly, "And somehow I just don't see him going to a friend's house to study."

"Maybe not to study," Bella shrugs. "I could have him over just to hang out."

"I would be very grateful," says Mrs. Hammond. She looks... forlorn. Forlorn is a good word. "I had such hopes for him, once upon a time."

"Oh?" Bella asks softly.

"He's a little old to be managed now, anyway," Bella says. She pauses, and takes a risk - "I'm a little surprised he still lives at home. Some parents would have sent him to boarding school or something."

"My husband doesn't believe in foisting his problems off on other people," Mrs. Hammond murmurs, very neutrally.

Bella nods slowly. "Some parents would have kicked him out of the house on his eighteenth birthday," she says.

"Some parents, yes," she says, looking down at her skirt and smoothing it out again with exquisite care. "Not these ones."

"He seems to," Mrs. Hammond observes. "Sometimes, I have to say, I really wonder how."

"Excellent," says Bella. "Not-snails are my favorite thing."

Bella trots after Alice. She is rather hungry.

Bella's willing to eat in silence, especially if the food's tasty.

The food is exquisite, actually. Alice and his mother both utter non-verbal expressions of delight; Mr. Hammond just looks inscrutable.

Oooh. Bella joins in the delighted expressions. She wonders if Hilary cooks or if there is a separate cook. If Hilary cooks, perhaps she can convince Charlie to marry her.

"Good, isn't it?" Alice murmurs after a few minutes. "Our housekeeper is the best."

"She's called Hilary, is that right?" Bella says. "I think she's made friends with my dad."

"It's a pretty friendly town. I've been coming for summers all my life, but only started to make friends my own age when I came during a school year," Bella says chattily. Slightly dim, slightly dim. "My dad's friends don't have kids, except for some much younger than I am."

Bella glances at Alice, and at Mr. Hammond, and slowly relates things that anyone in the room could learn by asking anyone who has heard that Bella even exists. "My parents split up when I was very young. Until recently, I lived with my mom most of the time, and my dad during summers. Now I live here, because my mom is going to be traveling a lot with my new stepdad."

"That must be hard for you," Mrs. Hammond says sympathetically. "I'm glad you're settling in and making friends."

"Thank you," Bella says, because a slightly dim person wouldn't announce it was actually completely up to me and I'm having a pretty easy time of it all things considered.

Alice relaxes a little; apparently the danger has passed. Mrs. Hammond smiles vaguely and returns to her dinner.

There is, as it happens! Four identical slices from a tiny, alarmingly rich chocolate cake. Alice grins when he sees it.

"If only," Alice murmurs back.

Bella says nothing. Her mouth is now full of cake.

"Will do," Mrs. Hammond calls after her. Alice waves.