....Lily has lots of ideas (for example she could practice riding her bike with Iomedae!) but she's...going to shyly look at Iomedae first, apparently?

“I do not know what we do! I do not know all the things there are.”

Then Lily will not feel at all bad about picking for her. "W'go BIKE?" 

"Sure!" Learning to bike is important for getting from place to place anyway.

Then they can all put shoes on and go out in the backyard and Lily will haul her bike out of the shed! It's pink and has a basket in front and training wheels. She manages to fall sometimes even with the training wheels, and at one point needs to be rescued by Evelyn from running headlong into a street sign, but she's very proud of herself. 

Evelyn gets knee and elbow pads out for Iomedae. She doesn't actually have a spare bike in Alfirin's size, but her neighbor two doors down has a ten-year-old son, who's big enough for his age that his bike frame might work fine for Alfirin if they raise the seat a bit? If Alfirin wants to practice too then she'll go knock on their door and ask. They're probably up, the ten-year-old son gets the same bus as Lily. 

There sure are a lot of things Alfirin needs to learn how to do to live in America. She is still sore all over from krav maga, and she doesn't want to practice riding a bike, especially since that probably involves a lot of falling over.

"Yes, I should learn riding a bike."

Evelyn asks Iomedae to keep an eye on Lily and make sure she doesn't go out into the street (though she's not very worried, it's 7 am and this neighborhood doesn't get a lot of traffic even at rush hour.) She confirms as she walks past that she can see the kitchen lights on in her neighbor Carol's house, and then rings the doorbell and smilingly asks if she could borrow Joey's bike for a bit for one of her new foster children - they won't be going far or anything, just around the neighborhood.

Carol smiles back and suggests Evelyn keep a hold of it until after school, she'll be out most of the day visiting her mother-in-law and helping her pack, she's downsizing to a smaller apartment. They make a couple of minutes worth of small talk about Carol's mother-in-law, with Evelyn glancing over every so often to make sure she still has line of sight to the girls, and then Evelyn thanks Carol warmly and wheels the bike over. 

She may not have a bike in Alfirin's size, but she has spare training wheels, and a lot of practice with quickly placing and removing them; it's pretty common for preteens and young teenagers in foster care to have never ridden a bike, and Joey's bike is still small enough to fit the standard training wheel size she has. She puts them on, and gets Alfirin kitted out with a helmet and knee and elbow pads, and then she can have a go! 

See, with two more wheels she can understand why it doesn't just fall over. She will put on the armor and try to make the bike go?

Evelyn cheerfully gives her advice and demonstrations on how the brakes and gear-changing and steering work!

The bike is easier to keep upright with training wheels but keeping it going in a straight line, let alone turning on purpose, is still pretty tricky. Evelyn keeps a close eye on her but tries not to be too visibly hovering, it makes kids anxious. 

How's Iomedae getting along? Evelyn has been quietly considering whether Thursday will end up being too early for her to try out biking to krav maga. It might actually work out really well if Marian is there and can accompany her, though that doesn't solve the issue for Alfirin. 

Iomedae has no particular advantages at learning to bike other than her willingness to subject her already-bruised body to a lot of falls. She's making progress, though. Really it's just like riding a horse except that horses make sense.

Evelyn is very proud of her foster daughters!

At 7:50 she wants to take Lily in for hair-grooming and teethbrushing and final schoolbag checks. They can stay out front and keep practicing on their own, as long as they're careful of the road, and Iomedae looks out for Alfirin and comes to get Evelyn right away if Alfirin falls and gets hurt or something. 

(They're almost certainly not going to get seriously injured, and she's really quite sure they're not going to run away. And - teenagers need to do normal teenage independence things. They need to be trusted. Young adults who are trapped in foster care despite not being kids probably need it even moreso.) 

Iomedae isn't sure what Evelyn will do if Alfirin gets hurt but she'll get help if it seems indicated. It seems genuinely very useful to master bike-riding. And if they see anything interesting Alfirin can check it for magic.

It's not a spectacularly interesting neighborhood. In the next fifteen minutes they observe one car departing for the morning commute, a teenage boy on a bicycle who whizzes past on the other side of the street and doesn't even glance at them, and a woman in her early thirties - wearing four-inch heels and a short tight skirt - walking a tiny poodle with a ridiculous haircut and talking very fast to someone on her phone. 

Evelyn comes out with Lily, now schoolbagged and shod, at 8:03 am, a couple of minutes before the bus arrives. It's a nice day and they're not on a deadline. She's brought her second coffee with her, and sits down on the front step to watch the girls practice. 

Biking is like all skills and can be mastered with determination, prayer, and a willingness to die for the cause. Or, well, fall on one's bruised limbs for it. 

Evelyn should probably not encourage them to spend all morning at it, even though watching Iomedae determinedly learning to ride a bike is honestly very inspiring. The girls are collecting an array of bruises that would be concerning and awkward to explain if, say, Diel visits sometime this week and notices. 

At 8:30 she suggests they go in. Maybe they can go to the library today? She was thinking about English practice, and what she really wants is non-fiction picture books, which she doesn't own as many of. Also the library is great and she thinks they'll like it. 

"Library?"

"It's a big building just full of books! You can go and borrow some of the books for free! As long as you take them back in two weeks so other people can read them. There's also a librarian who knows a lot about the books and can help you find ones you want." 

"Who pay for that?"

"...I think a lot of it is the city government, so it's from taxes? And the library takes donations, they encourage people who use it a lot to donate a bit of money if they can afford it. People donate their books, too, and I think they get discounts on buying books, so that part costs less to run. ...Books are like clothes, I bet, and way cheaper to make in America than you're used to. You can buy a new paperback for ten dollars or so, usually." 

"That is so little! God is glad!"

"He would be! It's really, really good."

And Evelyn has a better sense, now, of what sorts of confusion Iomedae might need explained, and what things it helps to try to say. 

"It's cheaper because we have machines to copy books. I assume writing them is still just as much work as it was in your country, but once a book is written, you can just get a factory to make lots and lots of copies, using machines, and it only costs a tiny bit per book once you're printing enough of them. I think even the poorest children who are born in America usually have some books at home, or at least magazines or newspapers - those are things that get published every day or every week, with news and stuff - and it's easier to learn to read, if you have things to read at home." 

Shrug. "And I'm not poor, but I'm not rich either, by American standards, and you've seen how many books I have. - You can get them cheaper if you don't buy new. At the thrift store - the store for used things, people donate clothes and pots and toys and books, if they don't want them anymore but it's not worth their time to try to sell them - anyway, there you can get a lot of paperback books for a dollar or two, and nice hardbound books for less than ten dollars usually. Most of my books are second-hand, or from friends who were moving and needed to get rid of some of their stuff."

"And all childs whose parents do not work on farms learn to read?"

"I think even kids whose parents do work on farms usually have to go to school, if they were born in America and, uh, have papers so the government knows about them."

And this is giving her the itchy feeling of being another very understandable misunderstanding that Iomedae would have if she grew up somewhere very poor. Hmm. 

"- It's really not very many people in America who work on farms. I'd have to Google the exact numbers but I think it's, like, definitely less than one in twenty people, maybe one in fifty people? ...I guess the migrant workers aren't counted as Americans and that might throw it off, some, but for crops like wheat and stuff, we have machines that do nearly all of the work. There are a lot of poor people in America but it's - people who work at grocery stores and gas stations and packing boxes and driving trucks places? And their children go to school and learn to read and do math and stuff."