"Yup!"

Her shift goes by basically uneventfully. She is entitled to a half hour lunch break and may buy food with an employee discount to be deducted from her next paycheck.

Buying food with an employee discount seems worthwhile on consideration! She does that. It is good to be well-fed. Human bodies do all sorts of inconvenient things when you don't feed them. (They also do some inconvenient things when you do feed them; she takes care of some of those on the parts of her lunch break where she is not eating.)

...the sheer delight involved in Bird eating ice cream for the first time may be slightly alarming to passersby.

"Are you okay?" asks Tim From Produce.

"Ice cream is even better than pizza!!!!!!!!"

"Huh, I think ice cream is kind of overrated. I don't have much of a sweet tooth."

"I wonder what it is like to taste things the way you taste things instead of the way I taste things! The way I taste things makes ice cream better than pizza. Currently. I used to taste things a different way than that but it was worse."

"I guess we'll never know," yawns Tim From Produce.

"I already ended up tasting things differently once! It could happen again," says Bird. "But probably not."

"I used to hate broccoli," nods Tim From Produce. "Now I keep having to stop myself from sneaking a floret while I'm working." He finishes his Dr. Pepper and heads back to Produce.

Bird's lunch break ends and she goes back to work. After work she intends to use her employee discount to buy cake mix, and then perhaps she can learn how to bake cupcakes.

She can buy cake mix! The cake mix also calls for an egg and vegetable oil and recommends adding frosting.

That sounds complicated. She will bring the cake mix home to Keith and ask him which other ingredients and/or tools this project needs and which of those ingredients and/or tools he has already.

Keith kisses her when he gets home! He has eggs and vegetable oil but not a cupcake pan or frosting. They can go back out to the grocery store together for those things and anything else Bird would like to have around to eat!

Bird would like to try many new foods! She will accept recommendations but doesn't want to repeat anything unnecessarily during her first few days with access to a grocery store. (She does express a wistful desire for more ice cream, though. But if she eats ice cream now, it will interfere with her ability to try more different novel foods, and what if one of those is even better! No. She will be strong. Novelty above all.)

Keith will try to help her find new things! He is not a man of particularly refined palate himself but perhaps she will be impressed by canned pineapple and cinnamon bread and storebought garlic knots.

Perhaps she will!! She is excited to try them, at any rate.

They can take home all their groceries and he can put a frozen macaroni and cheese in the oven and try to help her make cupcakes.

Between his broad familiarity with human cultural background and her attentiveness to instructions, they will probably manage a decent batch of cupcakes out of this box of cake mix!

And, once the frozen mac and cheese (solidly pleasant) and the cupcakes (!!!) have been sampled, Bird is going to propose CELEBRATORY POST-CUPCAKE SEX because WOW they did a GOOD.

Keith is super up for this! So to speak!

Yes, that does appear to be the case!

And after celebratory post-cupcake sex, and post-celebratory-post-cupcake-sex cuddles, she requests writing materials with which to draft CUPCAKE PLANS. There were multiple cake mixes in the store! There were multiple frosting options, and other decorative tools and materials into which she did not delve! She is going to be systematic about this! She is going to learn all there is to learn about cupcakes!

Keith can find a beat-up yellow legal pad and a pen with his dentist's office's contact information on it.

This suffices. Bird inscribes PLANS.

...the English alphabet is deeply inadequate and after wasting one page trying to draw up charts and to-do lists in it, she turns the page over and starts inscribing intertwined nests of sharply angular lines with the occasional English word sort of tucked in there like strange ugly fruit sprouting from a very geometric tree.

"Whoa, that's kinda pretty," says Keith.

"Thank you! It's the language I spoke before I was human. I can't pronounce it anymore but I can still write it."

"You spoke... a language before you were human?"