"And you can't, like - friendships have to survive debt changing directions because sometimes it'll do that. And hopefully you'll still be pretty much trying to achieve the same things, and still like each other. I don't know if there's a human equivalent - if you were trying to teach him to do something you knew how to do, say, you'd give him lots of instructions but just because you were the person who knew how to do that particular thing."

"Teaching somebody is different, it's not - you're not doing it for yourself. And humans don't do the debt thing. Or possibly only do it about things that are - uh, not killing zombies. And it just - feels really incorrect to say that he should do a bunch of stuff for me just because I killed a zombie."

"Is it more correct to say he should do a bunch of stuff for you because he is a fairy?"

"I guess that's less terrible," she says, although she is kind of suspicious about it.

"Well, he is a fairy and that's really the underlying thing."

"...okay. If I do your Spanish homework will we be even?"

"You could ask another question if you want."

"....I don't think I know what questions to ask to figure out anything else I wanna know."

"Okay. Then you should only do, like, four pages of my Spanish homework."

"You have four pages of Spanish homework? - fine. I'll get it to you tomorrow."

"Thank you."

"Yeah. Thanks for the moderately enlightening conversation."

Karen is not, in fact, in Spanish. She is in Latin. She is definitely not in third-or-whatever-year of Spanish.

Her plan for dealing with this is to spend all night looking up every piece of unfamiliar grammar and vocabulary in the textbook and on the internet, laboriously figuring out how to write passable sentences that fit the given parameters.

She is way more careful than she ever is about her own homework.

She does not get any sleep.

He sleeps fine. He makes breakfast in the morning.

That's great, because she's incredibly tired. Way too tired to make breakfast, let alone have any complicated conversations about anything else. She writes absolute nonsense on her geometry homework while she eats, wondering whether her math teacher thinks that she's just, like, really really stupid, or incredibly stubborn, or incapable of reading English, or what.

"You okay?"

"I made poor decisions. Probably."

"Could always skip school."

"No, then people would come looking for me, and they'd figure out I don't have any parents to report me to, and somebody would call CPS, and I don't know what happens from there but I'm worried I won't like it."

"We could go to fairyland."

"What?"

"Instead of school. And hang out there for a couple days and you could get all caught up on your homework and then we could come back and it'd be no time at all, since fairies are fast."

" - what, before school? And still make it there in time?"

"Fairyland's fast."

"Are we gonna, like, end up indebted to different fairies and then have to go to their houses and not go home until we've paid it back?"

"We shouldn't talk to fairies or take their stuff, and we should bring our own food."