"And you're... you kill these things. With our gym teacher. Who is not really a gym teacher."

"I mean, he is. I assume they're paying him and stuff."

"You know what I mean."

So she answers questions in broad strokes; she doesn't say much of anything about Alex except that he's a monster hunter, but she does answer questions about various kinds of monsters and respond to various objections that monsters are mostly not real.

She eventually hits on what happened to Willow and Jesse the other day, and then the bell rings, and that pretty much ends the conversation.

She stops by for training after journalism club.

"I want you to practice navigating with my senses, it's useful when it's dark out. We should be able to practice in the gym."

"Cool. Sounds good."

She thinks she's managing to keep her distraction level at 'only sort of kind of distracted by unprocessed emotions', but it's worse than usual.

He notices. 

"Should we wrap up early?"

"I dunno. We don't have to, I can keep going."

"I didn't ask that. It's pretty bad, the first time someone dies in close enough proximity that it feels like maybe you coulda been there."

"I guess." She pauses. " - but I couldn't've been. I don't know how I could have - I can't, actually, keep everyone in this town from dying. Not if the Hellmouth is going to keep attracting new weird things, even if we figure out how to manage the vampires. So it's going to happen again."

"Yeah."

"So I need to be able to deal. I just need to figure out how to do that. Consistently."

"I guess. But that doesn't have to mean running around in the dark right now, if you wanna be doing something else."

"I guess." She sits down on the bleachers. "I don't know what I want to be doing right now. Dealing. But I don't know how to make that one happen. Struggling to come up with a second choice."

"Hey, you're dealing. You're here. You sat through all that school."

"I guess.

"D'you think you could show me how to make stuff out of dandelions?"

"Yeah, I can do that."

And she makes a lopsided little basket, and she goes home later, and she practices, and she reads, and she writes, and she does (some of) her homework, and she goes to Mass, and she answers increasingly complicated questions for Dennis, and she deals.

Cheerleading tryouts are the next week. Karen wouldn't normally be there, but someone has to cover it for the paper, and most of the other people on the school paper staff are not super up for doing things. 

A girl bursts into flames during them. She's not dead, but the burns are going to prevent her from doing anything sport-like for quite some time.

"So I feel like this falls under the umbrella of 'weird stuff'," she says, after going to find Alex for their usual practice time.

"Yeah, sure sounds like it. A spell, maybe? Probably? I can ask for someone to look into spells to make people burst into flames."

"Why some random cheerleader, though? Do the forces of darkness not have better things to do?"

"Super unclear what the forces of darkness want these days, and I bet half the shit in Sunnydale isn't even them."

She sighs. "All right. Should we be... how do you prepare for more students bursting into flames, even?"

"Good question. We can check that all the fire extinguishers work. We can look up what spells it might be, they'll have counters. I can start reading everyone's minds to see if someone is contemplating how they're going to light students on fire at random."

"That sounds rude," says Karen, uncertainly. "I guess it's less rude than being lit on fire, but it's going to affect a lot more people. But we don't want anyone to die because you didn't..."

"Yeah, we don't normally do it for exactly that reason. ....I thought about saying 'if someone dies I'll do that' but then I thought about how I'd feel about it if someone died and then I did that and found a fire demon living under the gym and mad about the banging sounds, or whatever."