Getting dressed to go grocery shopping is a whole thing.

It's not hard to get dressed for dungeons; she loads up on the protective gear, it looks normal in context, putting up with people paying enough attention to note that it looks normal in context is part of her job.  She does the dungeon, she goes to her silo and changes into yoga pants, she hides under a blanket and sends... that guy... an emoji.

The grocery store, though.  Casey tells her she should just order delivery, but they always get things wrong.  He offered to do it himself, but he has his own job, and a girlfriend June has never met, and, like, a life.  He should get to have his life.

She is never getting dressed to the grocery store when she already has backlash, but she picks it up in dribs and drabs, all day long, every day.  Something starts to fall over, and she catches it, and she's a little too fast.  She shows up at an intersection and the light's about to turn and she doesn't fucking think, and she's across the crosswalk in an eyeblink.  She plays a goddamn phone game and it gets faster and she does too, and so help her, she has given up so much, she does not want to give up stupid rhythm games just because she cannot dance to the same music under the stage lights again.  So, she has to get dressed, and go to the grocery store, and know that by the time she gets home with her groceries she will have backlash.  Just a little, but a little's enough to ruin her day if she's struck the wrong balance.

Being perceived is bad, but also being remarkable is bad.  She cannot simply go around in a burqa, not in Toronto.  She has seriously considered moving somewhere that it would be normal to do that, and also she leans very hard on Casey sometimes and he does not want to live in Afghanistan.  Also the partnership arrangements there - or anywhere it would not be weird to go around in a burqa - are probably a nightmare.

Her usual compromise outfit is something like: a long skirt so the outline of her legs isn't obvious, in solid dark grey or denim or brown, black but only if her shirt isn't, neither goth nor flashy.  Long sleeves, in black or white or a light heather grey or eggshell; unless it's really hot out, and then instead a tank top, white again or a summery pale blue or lavender or yellow or the softest pink, under a light, lacy knit sweater, that keeps the eye from landing directly on her arm but hopefully doesn't make anyone wonder if she's sweltering.  A hat, type depending on the weather, all her hair especially the indigo streak tucked up under it, and she mustn't put any flowers on the straw one or appliques on the tuque lest someone comment, even if only to themselves in their minds.  Sunglasses, and relatedly she only goes grocery shopping on bright days.  Surgical mask, which fortunately isn't very marked; people will just think she has a cold, or is worried about catching one, and people drawing any conclusions about her at all is bad but she can live with it as long as the conclusions are boring and don't pick her out from the crowd.

Everything two to five years out of date on the fashion, so she doesn't stand out as too sharp, even though she could be if she wanted to, nor as too countercultural or schlubby.  She has to look like she doesn't spend forty-five minutes composing these outfits, it has to come across like they just naturally fall out of her closet onto her persona as someone who gets things after they're marked down but at least can afford reasonable midrange apparel on sale; and then she has to not wear the same ensemble to the same store twice, ever, because that too could stick out.

She does actually order delivery groceries a lot.  It's just every now and then she has to go in person to get it right.

She is tempted, once a month or so, to wear something nice, to go out looking like she's got a future on stage, like she belongs in a nice Vanity Fairy spread clad in chiffon and glitter and holding a microphone, and to just move really, really slowly, the whole time, so that she can stand it.

And then the next time she does a dungeon she'll hate herself, she will know that dozens of people saw her and might be thinking about her, might be referring to her when doing their own clothes shopping or jerking off about her or might have taken a picture to put on some kind of Humans Of Toronto blog - so she doesn't.  When she's backlashed she already hates herself more than enough for having as much evidence of her existence lying around as she already does.

She would quit.  She could.  She could just never do another dungeon.  She doesn't have to.  She isn't drafted.  But she'd still startle too quickly when there was a loud noise.  She'd still rush through brushing her teeth.  She'd still ever break into a run and get it just a little wrong.  So - might as well be a fucking hero about it.

She gets dressed (white nondescript long sleeve shirt, navy blue skirt with a kick pleat, gray leggings, brown tuque, brown coat) and goes to the grocery store.  She cannot ask the employees where anything is.  She has to go through the self-checkout, and she has learned which brands print their bar codes too small or otherwise confuse the machine.  If it's crowded she has to circle around a few times waiting for a particularly packed aisle to be clear enough.  But it's a tolerable experience and she gets all the right products and brings them home and puts them away.

She has enough money to hire help, but obviously that's out of the question.

She makes herself brunch and practices piano.  She wasn't an instrument person before, she was a singer and a dancer, but she's of the opinion that both of those mediums are much better when there's people doing them together, synchronizing, harmonizing.  Keyboard works fine alone, so she's got a keyboard, and she's gotten pretty good.  She's gotten into composing.

She doesn't use a codename as an esper, but she's going to need one - well, a stage name, for all that she's never going to touch the stage again - when the album drops.  Obviously when she's an esper she's who she is and anybody who identifies her is identifying her even if she made up a secret identity.  But with the album she can at least avoid people correlating the one with the other.  June Yamanaka is an esper.  Stage name to be determined is a composer.  Maybe she'll be able to sell the work.  She'll be the new Max Martin.

In the afternoon she has a dungeon.  Casey talks to her agent for her, and the agent makes calls, and she shows up where she's summoned - an address, an urgency marker, a briefing - with a gear loadout ready for her when she gets there.  She has a car that drives itself.  She isn't very good at driving, and if she were behind the driver's seat, every thought every other person on the road had about the behavior of her car would reflect on her as a person, whereas a self-driving car with someone curled up in back behind the tinted windows could be empty for all anyone else knows.  It takes her where she's going, or else, it follows her there to pick her up and bring her home, if she needs to get there faster at the cost of lasting less time inside.

This dungeon is a steep-banked broad river, with a water wheel and a bunch of boats bobbing up and down crazily in the aggressive current.  The monsters are giant river otters, even more giant than the species called "giant river otters", and they fly, and they're almost as fast as she is.  Almost.  Rhombus is there, and she's set up a force field bottleneck near the water wheel to lead them through: just attract a batch of five or six otters, run them past Rhombus so the force field can decapitate them all, and then go back and do it again, till the monsters are thinned out enough and the dungeon is struggling to replace them and Rhombus alone can be adequate support for the unpowered rescuers.  They've got some folks uniformed like Coast Guard this time.

That's in the briefing, but she processes it down to a tolerable format from there, before that's too aversive.  She's supposed to collect otters and bring them over there.  When she's done, she will leave.  It doesn't matter what will happen to the otters over there, let alone who will do it to them.  As far as she's concerned that's a natural phenomenon.  It doesn't matter if there's victims in the boats or if the Coast Guard will save them later, her job doesn't refer to these facts.  It doesn't matter whether or not everyone's read their briefing and knows to avoid thanking her or smiling at her or waving or calling her name, or not, because both possibilities are bad.

She gets some otters locked onto her and she runs, and they die; and she does it again, and she does it again.

It's time to leave when she starts feeling like she can feel eyes boring through her skin, when she's got tingles going up her spine where phantom fingers are tracing her vertebrae and judging how best to take her to pieces, when she's hearing voices commenting on her running form and her parkour and her hair - she leaves her hair visible, in dungeons, it's slightly better than having a nametag and way better than being confused for a different person who wants to be congratulated and appreciated.  It's definitely time to leave, when she starts thinking the otters are assessing her, are chasing her because they hate her in particular, or because they love her and want her autograph and have told all their otter friends about their deep and abiding fanaticism.  Why did she ever leave her apartment?  Why didn't she stay in and watch TV all afternoon?  She's half a season behind on Who Wants To Be A Rockstar.  Though if she tried right now to watch it she'd feel like the contestants and the studio audience and the judges were all staring right at her through the screen.

So she leaves.  She gets in her car.  She posts an emoji to the place emojis go, and that's the hardest thing she'll do all day.

She disembarks at her silo.  It isn't where she lives, because if it were where she lived, then certain individuals who she is not thinking about at the moment would know a thing about her (i.e. where she lives).  She goes inside.  She makes sure the screen is where it belongs, a stopgap in case some emergency forces her off the couch once she's on it, and she pees, and everybody in the world can watch her do it but she has tried doing dungeons under-hydrated and it's courting death so, fine, fuck it, she gets to hide very soon.  She goes over her stinging eyes and throbbing forehead with a wetwipe.  She's got a little footbath, and she peels out of her socks and puts her feet in it so that she will have unremarkable feet that could belong to anybody by the time anyone is paying any more attention to them than they are right now.  She used to paint her toenails.  No longer.

The silo is kept chilly and dehumidified, especially in the summer.  By the time she's got her feet dried off most of the sweat is evaporated.  (She isn't going to get entirely naked and take a shower like this, while the voices are still whispering behind her neck and under her chin and along her scalp, not unless she falls into a dungeon slime pit or something and has no choice.)  She gets under her blanket, her completely opaque weighted blanket more than big enough to cover her twice over so there's no risk of any of her peeking out.  She finds a position she can stand to stay in, motionless, for hours, lest shifting a knee or rolling to the left attract attention from... anyone.  With her headphones and her tablet.  She makes sure she can feel the air over the soles of her feet where they're sticking out and facing the ceiling.

And then she resolutely ignores everything outside of the glow of her tablet and the thump of music through her headphones where they're clamped over her ears.  She doesn't hear the door open.  She does her best not to pay attention to the cooling of the voices as soon as... somebody... gets close enough, the way they start to soften and slow.  She is certainly not concentrating on her feet.  It would be incredibly weird to concentrate on her feet and so nobody's doing that, definitely, that's not interesting, anyone watching her would be looking at the music, the chords she's putting together in MuseScore, blanket notwithstanding.

Once... somebody... actually touches her, it's impossible not to notice.  It's gentle, it feels lovely and soothing... they might as well be scooping out her heart to sing it a lullaby.  She has convinced herself that moving would attract more attention and she must hold absolutely still.  All her hair is standing on end.  Her heart rate monitor bracelet - it copies the data to Casey and maybe other people he designates and doesn't tell her about so he can call in the cavalry if she goes over her limit in a dungeon - goes crazy, but the emoji is posted in the emoji place and her bracelet also does GPS so hopefully nobody is freaking out, and taking the bracelet off would definitely make them freak out a whole lot immediately, and she mustn't dwell on hoping that they're all elsewhere occupied just because she doesn't actually want anyone to derive even one emoji's worth of information about her status in any way, but there are "safety requirements".

The music.  The music, focus on the piece she's working on.  D minor.  No people anywhere in this tune.  Reprise here a half step up.  Test out the rendering of the drum.  Jazz it up a little bit, more snare here.  Needs a little something.  Re-run the whole thing from the top.  Switch that voice to oboe and it's worse so switch it back.  Hours and hours till her neck is aching from holding up the blanket, even though she nudged most of the weighted filling away from this end of it.  Hours and hours till the song is done for now and she needs to circle back to it in a week and meanwhile work on something else.  This other song has lyrics.  What was she thinking with that rhyme, it's unbearably cliche.  Cut that whole verse.  She can get away with a musical reference to someone else's work here if she's cute enough about it.  She detours into listening to the whole album she wants to call back to, start to finish, and the voice in the songs feels less and less like it's addressing her directly as the songs go by.  Hours and hours and hours, relaxing deeper and deeper into her work, and then the pressure on her feet is gone.  She doesn't move.  She opens a widget that will show her the most recent emoji, and waits: there.  That one means she is alone in her silo.

She sits up and sloughs off the blanket, goes through a series of stretches, denudes the blanket of its cover and herself of her dungeon clothes and throws it all in the washer-dryer, and hits the shower.

She goes home in her self-driving car.

Casey brings her Filipino takeout for dinner tonight, like he always does on Tuesdays, and waits for her to talk first.

When she awakened, she couldn't bear anyone being near her.  She screamed and hid and hit and kicked and wailed and begged.  She tried to take all the ibuprofen in the bottle and banged her head on the side of her bookcase till the vinyl records fell off and held her breath till she passed out.  And her little brother would not leave her.  He chased away their parents, who were older and not up to holding her down themselves, until they agreed to go stay with Aunt Liz; he chased off the paramedics who wanted to keep her in a panopticon full of people who'd professionally evaluate her psyche for seven days; he shooed the angry-about-the-screaming neighbors - and he took the pills away and wrapped her up in his arms even after she blacked his eye and broke his toe, and would not leave her, would not sleep until she slept, and that is why she is alive.  He was there the whole time through the worst of it, and it saved her, so now generally, even when it is very bad, she can believe that it is not dangerous for him to know she exists.  Unpleasant.  But not dangerous.  The sort of thing she can do if she has to, if somebody's got to see her.  She isn't going to hate herself later for having dinner with Casey.  He already knows she's alive.

She is never going to go onstage again.  She isn't going to get married or have kids.  She is going to have to make a production out of getting dressed to go to the grocery store in the drabbest most concealing garments for the rest of her life.  Somebody she doesn't know is going to creep into her silo and step on her feet three times a week for the remainder of her career.

But she can write music, and she can eat chicken adobo with her brother and tell him, "It was a pretty good day."