"She was very understanding about my weird food preferences! I expect her to act pretty reasonably in general even in things where I'm not what she expected."

"She's probably just relieved you eat green things and know how to use cutlery," Barb says cheerfully. "- So, if there's nothing else, I should let you get on with your day." She reaches in and starts digging in her enormous handbag again. "I'll give you my phone number, but - do you have an email address? I can be hard to get ahold of on the phone, what with all the meetings and driving." 

"Not yet but I'm planning to grab mirandawellenstein at gmail if it's free. Do you get texts, I can text you when I have an email in case that's taken."

"I do get texts! Or Evelyn can pass it on to me with her log notes." It seems like Miranda is a civilized person who agrees that phone calls are overrated when email exists and works just fine. "I'm not expecting you to report in on a regular schedule or anything, but you're always welcome to ask me questions." 

She doesn't ask why Miranda doesn't already have that email address. There could be half a dozen reasons, from 'she had a non-gmail account' to 'she had an account with a stupid name like xxx_bestestgirl_xxx and regrets it' to 'she only had access to public library computers that didn't let you sign into an email account' to 'she shared with her family', though probably not because she would have said so, so if it's that then Miranda is deliberately withholding her parents' contact information for some reason.

(Which she might be. There are kids who have good reason not to want to go home - and sometimes, though not very often, they're even the same kids who lie to protect their parents' image. Barb is not going to be pushy about it right now.) 

"Sounds good." Ask her no questions she'll tell you no lies. Or careful glomarizations either.

Should she say something about how she doesn't want to try to be famous, doesn't want to try to end up in the history books, just wants the sort of ordinary pleasant life that happens to have the college part be from age 12 to 16? No, she can't think of a good way to say it--and there's a part of her that wants to see how far she'll go if she's pushed. What was that Neal Stephenson quote? Every man wonders if maybe he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world, if he dropped everything and dedicated ten years to being bad. And here she is already having dropped everything.

Barb smiles at her, looking a bit distracted. "Good girl. Why don't you run upstairs and get your foster mom?"

Barb does not look like the sort of person who chooses to take stairs without a good reason for it. She's already getting ready to go, downing the rest of her juice and donning her shoes again with a sigh. After apparently failing to find what she was looking for in her handbag, she leaves her phone number for Miranda in glittery blue gel-pen on what looks like the back of a slightly crumpled 7/11 receipt (for 6 boxes of Oreos in various flavors and nothing else.) 

Evelyn has in fact been listening to a podcast through earbuds to avoid eavesdropping on Barb's half of the conversation, but she hears Miranda's knock and gets up, pulling the earbuds out as she opens the door. "You're all done down there?" 

"Byeeee!" Barb booms from downstairs, footsteps already headed toward the door. 

"Well, I guess I don't have to walk her out!" Evelyn shuts her the bedroom door quietly behind her, tucking the headphones and what looks like a very old non-touchscreen iPod into her pants pocket. "So, that's Barb. She's a bit of a character, isn't she? I'm curious what you thought." 

"I liked her. She seems like a straight shooter." And she didn't ask any questions Miranda had to respond to with total fabrications! "I told her I was planning to get an email address because it's easier than playing phone tag, so I should do that at some point, but it can wait until after errands are done for the day. Was there anything else to do before we leave?"

"I don't think so! Give me three minutes to get everything together. - Oh, and make sure you've used the bathroom before we leave, Walmart technically has one but trust me, it's a last resort." It's staff-only, and the staff will let her use it if, for example, she's trying to shephard a screaming child who has just soiled himself on purpose and is now trying to smear feces all over the home decor aisle - but they will be very rude about it, and also the bathroom leaves a lot to be desired. 

Evelyn checks that her wallet is in her handbag and her phone is charged and she has a sufficient backup supply of bandaids and other supplies, and will be at the front door donning shoes within three minutes. 

She uses the bathroom (excellent point, public restrooms are grody) and off they go.

They're making an early enough start that there's almost no traffic. Evelyn asks Miranda to keep quiet so she can focus on the road, and then puts on the radio to a station that plays bland but catchy pop music, alternating with advertisements. The parking lot is three-quarters empty, and Evelyn is able to nab a spot almost right next to the main doors. 

"Do you want to push the shopping cart?" she asks Miranda, more out of habit than because she thinks Miranda will find this a particularly exciting privilege. 

At her current height and mass pushing the shopping cart is going to be, not exactly difficult, but nontrivial enough that she'll actually have to notice she's doing it, which of course makes her more interested in doing it. "Sure, thanks."

Onward to the clothing for tiny people section! She probably wants to look for pants in the boys' section, for the pockets, and definitely wants to look for shirts in the girls' section, because she wears a size they make shirts with unicorns on them in. Will people take her less seriously if she has a full wardrobe of colorful unicorns, rainbows, wolves, dolphins, etc, yeah of course. But if you give up your aesthetic for a bit of extra being taken seriously then you will gain the whole world and lose your own soul.

In her size in the boys' section, she can find jeans and corduroys and slacks with pockets, and cargo pants with lots of pockets. The jeans in the girls' section have fewer and less useful pockets, but most still have the usual front and back pockets at all, and the texture is better. One set has vaguely reasonable pockets and glittery rainbows printed on it. 

Once Evelyn realizes the kind of shirt she's looking for, it turns out that she knows the Walmart children's section inside and out, and also seems to have in her model that some children have texture preferences for their clothes. The T-shirts with unicorns and rainbows on them tend to have them printed on in a way that makes the front stiff, and many of the options have sequins sewn on such that they a) have itchy stitches on the inner side and b) will start falling off in the wash almost immediately, but there are some soft polyester-blend short and long sleeved shirts with glittery images that Miranda might like. How does Miranda feel about sparkly rainbow kittens? A blue whale on a colorful space-nebula background? A glittery pegasus against a rainbow?

Cargo pants! Soft shirts with awesome pictures on them! A bunch of identical black socks and underwear! (Not having to figure out bra sizing!) All of this is excellent. Changing into a bunch of different outfits to figure out her pants size and confirm the non-itchiness of the shirts is so not excellent but it doesn't take that long.

Evelyn is incredibly relieved to be looking after a child who's so pleasant to shop with! Miranda doesn't seem at all inclined to run off or have a tantrum or start throwing clothes on the floor, and she isn't insisting on buying half the store or putting incredibly impractical outfits in their cart, and she seems to be enjoying it rather than miserable but she also clearly wants to be efficient and get this done, rather than dithering for ages. 

Does Miranda want a backpack too? And while they're here, if Miranda wants she can pick out some toys or craft supplies to be hers. (Evelyn has a huge array of toys and art supplies at home, of course, but she knows how important it is to kids, especially kids from deprived backgrounds, to have things that are theirs.) 

Backpack and art supplies is a YES. The backpack should be sturdy and capacious and ideally of the kind with a zipper around the top like a lid rather than arcing over the top but those are hard to find and arcing over the top is fine too. She hasn't actually had time to go through Evelyn's stash yet so doesn't know what art supplies are already available; please stop her if she attempts to get duplicates. . . . Also, what is her budget here, she should know that going in. (Her memories of making art and buying art supplies are gone but her knowledge of what art forms are awesome and what she would recommend someone buy when getting started are intact and her desires are both expansive and expensive.)

Walmart indeed does not have the lid kind of backpack in a size that's at all reasonable for Miranda to be hauling around, but she can find a reasonably sturdy and spacious backpack with several compartments and side pockets.

Evelyn, after a moment of thought, tells her she can have a $50 budget for craft supplies. At Walmart prices, this is enough to kit her out with (the cheapest versions of) a minimum viable complete set of supplies for one kind of art or craft, or else she can work around what Evelyn has and get fancier supplies. Evelyn, to her best recollection - it's been a while since she fully inventoried the Art Boxes in the garage - thinks she still has a decent selection of watercolor paints, but any given color may be out. She doesn't think she has as much for acrylic paints (she disprefers it because it's not water-soluble and doesn't wash off if a kid paints it on her furniture), and what she does have is one of the boxed kits that comes with a lot of paint colors but in teeny pots, so she suspects half of it is probably out. She has brushes but cannot speak to how many of the brush sizes will be ruined or missing. Possibly they should do a proper craft store shop for Miranda after she's had a chance to sort through everything that Evelyn has already. 

She knows that she has a huge supply of non-paint drawing supplies, which are relatively unmessy and take longer to use up than the tiny Walmart paint portions in the kits - she has crayons, colored pencils, charcoal pencils, watercolor pencils, pastels, felt pens in every color you could ever want including metallic and glittery colors - so anything Miranda picks out there is more likely to be redundant. She has some amount of the heavier-duty fancy paper for sketching and painting, in various sizes, but mostly she has the kids use printer paper since it's cheaper, and anyway Miranda might want her own sketchbook; she also doesn't have canvases anymore, they're pricier and she buys them one-off when kids want to do paintings. She has modeling clay for sculpting, both Plasticine and the kind you bake in the oven to make sculptures harden. She has beading and jewelry-making supplies, though mostly cheaper plastic beads, and yarn for knitting, and some fabrics and thread for sewing. She has boxed kits for a range of child-friendly crafts like fusebeads. As previously mentioned, she already has embroidery floss, which Miranda is welcome to. 

Possibly she should hold off on most things until she's gone through Evelyn's stash and can go to a proper craft store, because the main things she wants are embroidery supplies (not just thread but fabric, hoops, erasable pen for pattern transfer, etc) and weaving supplies, and both of those will be easier to figure out when she's had a look at what's already present and a bit of time to plan. But she's very appreciative of the offer and definitely intends to take Evelyn up on it! Art is great and having art supplies will be great. And it sounds like Evelyn doesn't have a ton of paint so she'll get a set of basic colors of gouache and one fine-detail brush and that will be unlikely to be redundant.

The paint looks nice! Plausibly they should just go to the dedicated arts & crafts store a bit further away once Miranda has a wishlist. It's more expensive, but mostly in the sense that it doesn't specialize in boxed kits with 10 cheap brushes and 50 colors of watercolor in teeny pots for $35, a price Evelyn is still fine paying even if it gets used three times before all the brushes are ruined. But the art store might actually come out a better deal if you know exactly what you want and are going to end up using up all of it. 

Evelyn will take the cart with Miranda's clothes and backpack and little stash of paint to the checkout. They've taken long enough that it's starting to get slightly busier, but there are still only three people in line ahead of her. (The self-checkouts are free, but Evelyn finds them confusing and also likes getting to briefly chat to the cashiers, she knows almost all of them, in many cases since they were kids at one of the local schools. Two of her former foster children work some hours here, it's a good part-time college job.) 

...Actually, Evelyn seems to just know a lot of people here period. The lady ahead of them in line used to be on the PTA board with her at Jeremy's primary school. They start chatting. 

It's good when people know each other. She'll casually listen in if it's in the sweet spot between "immensely boring" and "why are you talking about that where someone could overhear you" and otherwise zone out until it's time to start piling stuff on the conveyor belt.

The lady, Pippa, is apparently into gardening in her retirement. She's here for a top-up on potting mix and fertilizer, and she's thinking about getting a plot at the community gardens so she can grow more than she can fit in her tiny backyard. They also exchange some gossip about the school board that is veering toward "why would you talk about that in public." 

The line moves quickly, and Evelyn checks out and loads the bags into the cart. "Right. It's getting close to lunchtime, so we could go home, or if you want we could go to the proper grocery store and look at vegan foods for you." Walmart technically has groceries but Evelyn abhors buying her food there unless she's really in a hurry and only has time for the one stop, their produce is always old and the ratio of junk food to fresh healthy food is way too high for her to want to shop here with most foster children. 

"Sure, I'd be down for a grocery shop." she says, and then realized she has no idea what sort of things to get. Does she cook? She can follow a recipe even if she'll need a stepstool to use the stove safely. Prepackaged food is great when you're busy but she's objectively not that busy, she's just going to be studying things at the library and making the occasional art for the next several months, and cooking is both cheaper and more nebulously virtuous.

Evelyn takes her to Whole Foods, a ten-minute drive away. She starts to head for the produce and refrigerated-foods section at the outer edge, which is where she usually starts first, and then stops. 

"Actually, hmm, to be honest I haven't done much shopping here for specifically vegan foods. We already have lots of ingredients - I should maybe have gotten recipes first - but, hmm, maybe we can just walk around and you can pick out things you like? I especially want to make sure you have enough protein in your diet."