And they go home. "By the time you wake up tomorrow Winona'll be at work and I'll probably already be at the base gearing up and getting in a helicopter. Do you want to plan on getting breakfast - lunch? - brunch at a restaurant or figure out how to fix something here?"

Restaurant sounds easier.

"All right. If you run out of money Winona can give you more. There's a bunch of different restaurants on the street you hit if you go that way, same street the theater's on. Avoid Trattorio's, they're ridiculously expensive, we can go there sometime if you want but let's make it a whole family kinda thing."

All right, that sounds like she can figure it out okay.

That thing where they leave money behind on the table sometimes, what's that about?

"Tipping. You read about percentages on Wikipedia yet?"

Nope.

"Percent means out of a hundred. A dollar's a hundred cents, so one percent of a dollar is one cent, and ten percent of two dollars is twenty cents, and twenty percent of twenty dollars is four dollars, make sense?"

She has to think about that for a minute, but nods.

"It's customary to leave ten to twenty percent of the price of your meal on the table, if you're paying cash, with the higher end being if you like how your waiter did their job.'

Okay, she can do that.

"Cool. Uh, if you're out and someone says 'shouldn't you be in school' you probably just wanna tell them 'I changed districts recently but I have some school visits lined up' or something like that."

She doesn't understand that enough to repeat it back - what's a district?

"People who go to public school go to one nearby. All the people who are nearby a particular school live in that school's district."

So what she wants to say is that she just moved here and hasn't picked one yet, okay.

"Yeah, pretty much. And I'm gonna write down Winona's number - I won't be able to answer the phone - for you to show them if anybody wants to talk to a grownup about you." Julie does this.

She stashes it in her bag.

This all sounds pretty doable, she should be fine.

"Good. If you do get more overwhelmed than you expect to, you can call Winona and she can have you in the office at least once or twice."

She doesn't think her telepathy works with phones. But she can just go home, that should be fine.

"If you call her she'll recognize the home number and know it's you even if you can't say anything," clarifies Julie.

Ah. Yeah, okay.

"Can you do something like 'tap once for yes and twice for no', if she needs to ask questions?"

Yeah. Or she can repeat things back if they're short and the sounds aren't hard.

"Good, we can let her know that before I'm gone then."

Okay. (Hug.)

Hug!

Winona is briefed on the plan when she returns.

And the next morning, the house is all Denice's.