"I can show you. You might be a slow typist if you have to hunt and peck but you only need to type the name of the thing you wanna look up."

Okay.

Julie finishes her third slice of pizza and produces her laptop and shows Denice how to look things up on Wikipedia, such as "salt".

Very cool. Why are some of the words blue?

"Those are links. If you touch this patch on the computer you can move this arrow, and then you push the button hiding under the patch, and voilà."

Oh, cool.

And now she's lost in the depths of Wikipedia, perhaps never to be seen again.

Julie and Winona giggle a little. Julie amuses herself in non-computer ways till she wants the computer back at about nine thirty to check her email. "Don't stay up too late," she advises, "you'll be all groggy tomorrow."

Getting up in the morning is hard no matter what she does, but she'll try.

"Huh, that might mean you need sleep drugs or one of those apnea masks or something," remarks Julie.

Or, just, go to sleep when it feels like time to sleep and wake up when it feels like time to be awake, even if those are weird times, that worked fine when she tried it.

"- oh," says Winona, "you mean in the morning as opposed to the afternoon, not just that getting up is always hard?"

Yeah. She doesn't get tired until really late and even if she goes to sleep before she's tired she's always tired in the morning, afternoons and stuff are fine.

"That's gonna make school hard," muses Julie.

"There's probably some provision for it, I think this falls under the disability category," Winona says.

"You okay there, Janet?" asks Julie.

School is scary.

"Yours sounds like it was a real rotten school," says Julie. "We don't have the resources to homeschool you for the next five years, though, even if you keep liking Wikipedia this much the whole time - I'm gone for days in a row killing kaiju and Winona's only working from home now because we're on vacation, usually she needs to be in the office during the day. There are lots of kinds of schools and we don't have to stop looking till we find one you're okay with. I'm just not aware of any that start in the afternoon and aren't kindergartens."

She gets up and retreats to the living room, where she curls up small on the couch.

Neither one chases her right away, but Winona peeks in from the door after a few minutes.

She notices: Hey.

"Hey. Do you want to talk about it?"

Not really.

She's going to have to tell them about where she's from. She doesn't want to but they're going to figure it out anyway. It's - it could be worse; they can't make her go back and that would be the worst thing, if they could. But it could still be pretty bad.

"We aren't going to send you back. Whatever it was, even if it looks like a perfectly nice place from the outside, obviously messed you up pretty bad."

Yeah, it did.

She's not the kind of person who's allowed to just be okay, according to a lot of people. (And now she's crying, just a little.)

Winona goes over and hugs her.