Saturday morning sees Bella with her notebooks about magic all in her knapsack, her medallion safety-pinned by its chain to her bra just in case she trips the wrong way, waiting with Charlie for pickup for the Avalon trip.
"But what will you do without your soul, Darren? Hasn't it been restraining you from mutilating cattle, stranding small children on desert islands, and destroying marriages with the slow advance of corrupting liberal values?"
"I will do all of those things now. And then I will steal all of the toilet paper from the school, too."
Here is the seafood place. Bella parks neatly.
Here is their table for two! Here are menus with food originating from the sea described on them!
Table for two! Darren finds something that seems delicious on the menu to order, and then moves on to looking at Bella with a slightly sappy look on his face.
"Then I'll have to hope it's some silly charity that was, I don't know, having inner city schoolchildren read to cats." Bella orders rainbow trout and then looks back at him happily.
"It's still a little evil to deprive the schoolchildren of the chance to read to cats, just not as evil as taking it from an antimalarial charity or something."
"No, it's a service. Have you met any cats? They fall asleep on people and then don't move," he teases. "Better off not reading to them at all."
"But," she replies when she's caught her breath, "the idea of the reading-to-cats type initiatives, as I understand it, is that the cats are nonjudgmental and helps the kids build confidence in their skills. Cats falling asleep isn't necessarily counterproductive to that."
"But what if they fall asleep on the children and the kids can never move again? It's not worth the risk, Bella!"
"How long will that take, Bella? How long must the children suffer under the wrath of the dozing cats?"
"Except the children, what if their parents show up and they can't go with them because they're trapped?"
"The parents are adults and should have already learned patience, you see." Then she snaps her fingers in sudden remembrance - "Oh, and Charlie didn't turn up anything about weird fires in the region, make of that what you will I suppose."
Except there goes a potential lead for what the heck is after Bella.
A plate of bread! How lovely. Bella butters some and noms it.