connor est le (grandemauvais) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-04-29 22:11:00 |
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Entry tags: | cassandra cain, tyrion lannister |
Who: Thea and Matilda
What: An awkward grownup v teenager talk.
Where: Matilda's apartment.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: Swears?
This time the library noticed within the first hour. After a lecture on ‘improper behavior’ (during which Thea pointed out that it was totally proper to study, in a library’) and then another on ‘appropriate use of language’ which was basically just an excuse to yell some more in the hushed, outraged tones particular to librarians and then when she was done, Thea picking at the scabbed-over nail polish on her little finger with her thumb until it was completely bare, the librarian banned her for good measure. Not, Thea knew, that mattered a ton. Flash a card that looked vaguely library in issue and look under twenty five and over fourteen and most of them didn’t care. But it was a place warm, with lights, and a vending machine a couple minutes’ walk and it was gone for the night. Which meant going back home.
Home.
It was dark, by the time she’d walked it. Missed the bus, it was far enough out that the bus made it quicker but waiting around was gonna get cold, desert sunshine bailing and leaving behind only the crisp wind that came after. Thea trudged, instead because putting one shoe in front of the other delayed the inevitable and the apartment didn’t have a light showing by the time she was done, least not the living room or the kitchen, the ones with windows that showed from the street. Thea let herself in, a rattle of keys - double locks, a third bolt on the inside - and locked back up, same way. It wasn’t her aunt being weird so much as the area, but there was enough hardware on the inside of the door to spend five minutes standing there with keys and stomach growling enough to remember she’d missed lunch. It was dark. Of course it was dark; Thea ignored the low spread of disappointment - it wasn’t like she was living with Suzy Homemaker, that hadn’t even been Mom. Still. Something other than yesterday’s cold pizza would have been awesome.
+Time for actual light. Thea dug out the laptop from her messenger bag, flipped it open and the lights on and the music - something eighties and loud and far too upbeat for the utilitarian apartment that was always, always empty. She swung open the fridge, calc homework in one hand, and rummaging for pizza with the other.
Matilda appeared in the hallway, pale and frazzled, her short dark hair sticking up in all directions, vaguely tufted away from her face like a fucked up, angry duckling. It was almost as if she expected the person blasting 80s music into her restful nap and rummaging through the fridge to be a burglar she could punish, not a teenager fresh home for the day. She stopped at the edge of the room, and stroked her fingers through her hair. "Hey," she said, watching Thea attack the contents of the fridge like she'd been starving all her life.
Matilda had been taking a well-deserved nap after roughly fourteen straight hours of work. She had a fucked up sleep schedule as things were, and this switch to a new team was definitely not helping anything. She still had a lot of work to do familiarizing herself with their different projects and missions, but she'd gotten enough done to reward herself with a good old fashioned lie-in, until the 80s music from hell had woken sleeping beauty from her slumber. Some Prince Fucking Charming it was.
She paused, and pointed to the fridge, as if Thea wasn't already rummaging through it. "There's soup," she said, turning toward the TV as if it could explain to her why she was awake. Then she walked around the corner and into the kitchen with Thea, trying very hard to not be an enormous bitch and pretend the loud music wasn't making her headache throb hard enough to make her stomach churn on top of it. She reached for the coffee maker. Coffee would help this situation.
In the short period of time that Thea had lived in the apartment, Matilda had done what she could to adapt around her. When her stay started to seem semi-permanent, she'd gone down to the Goodwill and picked up an old bed, made of wood, the real deal, not a futon, and set it up in the room that used to be her office. She'd considered picking up a mattress from Craigslist or something, but that seemed skeevy even to her, so she bought the least expensive one she could find that looked decent enough not to turn into a princess and the pea scenario. She left everything else, like buying clothes and the kind of sheets she wanted, to her niece, who she assumed was getting checks from her mother, because if she wasn't, the girl would have said something, wouldn't she?
After a couple days of doubt, a set of sheets and a blanket had also materialized in Thea's room without comment.
She didn't know how to deal with an angry teenager any better than she'd known how to deal with herself when she was Thea's age, or any more than anyone else in either of their lives seemed to have known how to deal with them. So far, she had decided to make sure she was taken care of and then give her enough distance to do her own thing, pursue her own interests, make her own friends. She wasn't her mum, after all.
Matilda wrenched the coffee pot from the maker and opened the cabinet, grasping up to the second shelf blindly for the bag of coffee. "Want any?" she tried. There was still dark eyeliner smeared around her eyes from two nights ago, and she was aware she looked a little like a grumpy psychopath bear awoken from hibernation.
Thea jumped with the kind of yelp that was small but nonetheless present and she nearly dropped the pizza, right then and there. Her aunt had a habit of materializing ghost-like- of being somewhere within the recesses of the apartment, where it was dark and quiet one second, and then right there the next. It was weird, and kind of spooky but at the same time it sorta made sense. Whatever habits Matilda had, she was walking right on over them. She reached over with pizza-sticky fingers and she shut off the music, laptop shunting down into quiet, the kind of silence that stretched out and yawned, got comfortable whilst everyone else got uncomfortable quick. Yeah, her mom would have probably tried to buy her way in to Matilda’s place (Thea had no illusions; there would have been a check, neatly signed in the loopy signature Madeline signed everything with) and there was probably a serious price tag on the inconvenience of ‘high school senior: one’ but that didn’t really pan out to more than ‘hey, so my mother and you are siblings but we barely know each other before moving into a space way better suited to one person’.
Awkward.
“Uh, it’s eight. PM. Not AM. Although I guess I could go for coffee,” Thea’s voice jittered, like static on a radio, blurring out to nothing. The kitchen was small enough that two bodies got weirdly intimate in it; she could see the pillow creases on her aunt’s face, the sweep of smushed eyeliner. Thea danced with her pizza slice, out of the way, and she let the door to the fridge swing shut, cool and bright, blinking off. It felt weird, like rifling through someone’s drawers, like spending time in the way, obvious and awkward and clearly not remotely fucking wanted (like that was new) and she leaned her back against the countertop, tucking herself out of the way.
Which was her modus operandi. Stay below the radar, do homework, sleep - the couch first, although the first couple nights had been weird, waking up to something more than the brand-new smell hotels always held, rolling over and being pressed up against the sofa’s back rather than sprawled across a bed. The room with the futon - Thea thought of it as ‘the office’, not a room belonging to her - was so clearly not designed to be anything but an office. It was like Madeline had taken a knife, and carved out a sliver of space somewhere and wedged Thea into it, crammed her without regard for the size of the space, or perhaps how the thing carved into really felt. It was awkward, awkward best avoided by staying out long and late and by keeping quiet when she did come back.
Matilda gave Thea a look that clearly laid out what she thought of anyone objecting to caffeine at any time of the day. There were really still teenagers who didn't drink muddy coffee at all hours? For shame. Matilda gave a nod and scooped out enough grounds for two. She'd been thinking of getting one of those french presses, like the one her mother had in their kitchen when she was a girl, mostly because the coffee machine was slowly dying the death of old appliances. It had been in the apartment when she first moved in, along with the other items that made the place count as 'furnished'. Almost all of them were gone now, but Mr. Coffee, for his usefulness, had not been culled.
She watched Thea bob and weave from her path with a thin thread of puzzlement that would sharpen once she'd woken up a little more. "Do anything today?" she asked, because teenagers did things. That was her understanding. She had done things, when she was a teenager. She poured water into the machine and pressed the button, turning around again and hitching her hip to the counter edge.
"School?" she posited, an enigmatic question both to assure she'd gone and to ask how it had been. She assumed they would have called her if Thea was skipping out, though, since they had her number as a contact. It had to be rough for the girl, getting in there knowing no one. Maybe not, though. Maybe she was the friend-making type.
She wasn’t. Matilda wasn’t to know - Matilda was the type who probably didn’t; Thea with one of the little, flickering looks when she’d wandered from the futon to the kitchen for a glass of water and caught sight of her aunt, face lit by the glow of her computer screen and really looked. Matilda was thin, the kind of gaunt that Thea recognized but the kind that looked interesting, instead of just ‘too thin’ and gawky. Madeline made it look elegant, the painful thinness that made expensive clothes hang right. Matilda didn’t. She was smudged eyeliner and a solid stare, the kind of person people walked away from. Thea thought Matilda wasn’t the kind of person people made friends with but she wasn’t the type of person who had someone shove their hand in her underwear without permission either, and maybe that was kind of cool.
Thea wasn’t that kind either. “School, yep. That happened,” Thea said, with the vague pleasantness that was teenager-distant. The pizza sagged in her hand, cold and suddenly unappetizing. Thea carefully picked the cheese off the pizza in a long, clammy thread and she tossed it directly into the trash can, squishing the bread in half and biting a little of it off - the coffee, on the other hand began to smell good, the bubble of the percolator audible. As was the risible attempt at engaging. There had been little enough of that in Russia - Madeline thought duty was complete if she bought a handful of glossy magazines that weren’t in Cyrillic and if she asked how she was, it was usually in front of company. It was, Thea thought, thumbs firmly tucked inside the overlong sleeves of her sweater, strange.
“Went to the library?” she offered up, helpfully. It sounded limp. It fell into the space between them, it had been a dumb idea, coming here. It had been dumb, looking at the worn look on her aunt’s face, like Thea’s existence was pressing in on her. Maybe she’d find somewhere else to go. Maybe Lin wanted a roommate.
Matilda watched Thea, listening, and seemed utterly unfazed by her distancing, sarcastic disdain. She knew that tactic, and with a nod of respect for her disinterest in talking, she turned and fetched down a pair of coffee mugs as the percolator sputtered to a wet stop.
"Did you read?" Matilda asked, pouring out the coffee. She turned round and handed the mug off to Thea, and, after a moment's thought, groped behind her on the counter for the sugar dispenser and slid that forward. The apartment was clean, but not by her own doing. She could only really be bothered to clean when the place got disgusting, and a visit a while back had ended in her having a maid hired for her by Narcissa, the lead on the team she'd worked before. Narcissa had implied that someone employed by the agency, even on the tech side, might have reason to host a contact or a fellow team member at her place every once in a while, and that this was effectively a military operation, and discipline ought to be observed, and etc. etc. Matilda had bristled at the idea of someone violating her space without her permission, and when the maid, Lucia, had arrived the first day, she'd fully intended to send her packing. But the woman was a force of nature, twice Matilda's age, skinnier even than she was, and with a tendency to cluck at the messes she kept around. They came to an agreement that, so long Lucia didn't touch Matilda's filing system or her desk, she could stay on and clean once a week. The place was minimally furnished, anyway - it wasn't as if there was that much to clean. She would often clean around Matilda at her desk, who would only minimally acknowledge her presence, headphones on and usually working at the computer. She would migrate around the room as necessary, perching on the bed with her laptop until Lucia was done vacuuming and needed to change the sheets, at which point, like a cat spooked from lounging, she would untangle her limbs and move to the desk. Lucia didn't talk much, and when she did, she snipped that Matilda was too skinny. Sometimes she left covered dishes of home-made Spanish food. She was nothing at all like Matilda's mother despite the fact that they were close in age, and Matilda didn't mind her presence, which was saying something.
When Matilda had been Thea's age, she'd read a lot. Lots of randomness, anything she could get her hands on, really. Psychology textbooks, young adult novels, kama sutra handbooks, whatever seemed interesting. But she'd also sometimes gone to the library because the stacks were a nice, quiet place outside the house to make out, or smoke out back, so there were other reasons to go than reading, she knew. Whatever Thea thought of her, whatever opinion she'd formed of her rail skinny landlord/aunt, Matilda was interested in her neice. Perhaps it was too belated - she hadn't spent much time with anyone in her family in a long time, Thea included. But there was something about her niece that, much like with Lucia, Matilda understood, and it created a thin thread of commiseration. “Or do something else?”
Thea wondered - the way she’d heard classmates do, the way kids who stayed with their parents no-matter-what and the way she used to wonder, back at the clinic when there had been no doubt at all - if Matilda ever went into the room where the futon was. (Not her bedroom - no tyvm. Hers implied staying, hers was a possessive word, it implied ownership, roots. Stability. She’d had stability for all of thirty seconds before, and it wasn’t something she was jonesing for. Stability meant you got fucked over when you expected things to stay the same and they didn’t.) There was nowhere to keep shit that wasn’t out otherwise - the living room was all couch and TV and Matilda’s door closed, like she was locked up in there doing crack or something (Thea doubted this as a theory, but it made for good hyperbole). The futon was stacked with books - with softbacks and hardbacks, new shiny covers and covers gone furry from use. They were fiction and non-fiction, a clashing array of physics and feminist theory and they sprawled in the room, the way she didn’t, with the quiet ownership books made on a place. Obviously her aunt hadn’t, if she asked about books the way other people asked about MTV, like it was an option instead of something to hold onto because it made breathing easier. It was privacy. Weird.
Thea reached for the coffee cup, a brush of long fingers and bitten nail-polish in the pass and she eschewed the sugar with a scrunch of the nose, hitching her own skinny hip up against the counter-top competently. She was thin, the kind of thin that to most people looked like ‘doesn’t eat’, but was all collarbones and wrists, and too-long nose, and looking at Matilda was a little like looking into a weird, carnival mirror, like understanding a little of where it came from. Madeline looked like she’d dieted that way, Matilda looked like you could eat nothing but pizza and sugar all day and it wouldn’t make a fucking difference, you’d still have to stuff your bra. Thea glanced down, the loose, thrifted sweater in electric blue that swallowed her whole. Yeah, stuffing your bra was a bitch.
“I read,” Thea said and it came out guarded, she dipped her chin down to look at the coffee cup, at the black, oily swirl of it in thick china and her hair fell across like a pale blond curtain. It was very Madeline, that hair color but it was too long, it wasn’t cut, and Thea kept it like that because she’d tried black, black-as-dye-boxes and it mostly looked like she was trying too hard. The length irritated her mother. “Cloud Atlas right now.” Because Matilda was - it felt like - trying, strained-awkward trying, and it was something to offer up.
Matilda's own nails boasted small, moth-eaten islands of black and chipped pale growth. She didn't take very good care of them, but they distracted her for a moment, and she picked at one residual, clinging thread on her thumbnail, which had been there so long it looked as if the nail had begun to grow a layer over it and bond it into her body. She needed to break out the acetone, later.
She didn't stuff her bra, interestingly enough. She remembered fleetingly considering it in secondary school when boys mocked her for being flat and pale, like a piece of polished stone, but she'd found getting in fights to be a lot more rewarding, even if they did tend to end with her sitting in the nurse's with kleenex up both nostrils. "Haven't read it," she volunteered, picking up the sugar and dumping an inch-thick layer into the bottom of the cup. She blew across the surface of the black liquid, creating a momentary layer of tiny ripples, and then stirred with her finger, because finding a spoon seemed like a lot of work. "Din't they make that into a shitty movie?" she asked, trying to remember, and she sucked the cooling coffee off her finger before trying a sip. Bitter as fuck, but it'd do.
Thea didn’t notice the nail-polish until she did; it looked like Matilda peeled it off with her teeth, or picked at it the way she did, and that was too similar to be anything other than weird. She noticed it the way she noticed the jut of Matilda’s collarbone and the quiet unreadable quality to her face. Matilda looked like taking on a teenager wasn’t something she intended to do - not next week, but ever and she wanted, a little bit to say sorry and also it’s not my fault and briefly - hard and vicious and hot behind her rib-cage, Thea hoped Madeline was writing a big check each month. She might be a nuisance but someone was going to pay for it.
She curled her fingers around her own coffee cup and Thea examined the gloom of it, all drawer jutted into her hip and the prospect of drinking coffee at eight thirty at night was kind of a stupid one and the pale ambiguity of a look that wasn’t readable herself, sent over to her aunt. “I don’t know,” she said, bleak and flat and somehow pleasantly modulated - like a child that has been taught to say please and thank you by rote, and does so. “I was in Russia. There’s not much point in going to see movies if you don’t speak Russian that well.” And she didn’t. Romance languages, yes. Romance languages were easy. Russian scrabbled across the tongue and spat from the back of the throat.
It occurred to Thea that if her mother spoke every language there was, maybe it was a childhood thing. She’d never asked. “Do you... speak Russian?” It was timid. It came from behind the curtain of hair.
Oh yeah, Russia. She'd heard about that, that Madeline had shipped her daughter off there for a while before she sent her here, and she felt a flicker of distaste. She didn't mind Matilda's company. As far as she was concerned, she was a pretty decent sort of person, for a teenager. What she did mind was Madeline carelessly shipping her daughter to any foreign destination that seemed like it might work to improve her daughter’s disposition. It reminded her a little of the authors she'd learned about in her obligatory uni English classes, who got sent to warm dry places for their sickness and usually died anyway. Like the setting was going to make a difference. She tipped her head in assent to the truth of Thea's statement. Yeah, send the girl to a place where she barely spoke the language and had a different alphabet. Throw the fish in the shark pond for a change of atmosphere. Fucking Madeline, stupid bint.
"No," she said, taking another sip of the coffee, and then a long swallow, now it was cool enough. Ordinarily she would likely have stopped there, but the question seemed like a step in the right direction, and she watched her niece hide behind her hair with a vague pang of familiarity. "I speak Mandarin, Japanese, French, and I can get by with Spanish and Portuguese." She shrugged. "I'm not good with the Germanic ones, or Russian. And fuck if I can remember more than four words of Gaelic my tutors shoved down my throat."
The look that flickered over Matilda’s face was interesting. Thea did not often look at herself in the mirror (she knew what she would see: long nose, skinny cheekbones, pale eyelashes, a look rather like a rabbit that had been startled, less hip and boob than a ten year old boy) but if she had, it was a look she might have recognized. It was all disdain, quiet, simmering. Nothing full-blown, nothing real but discarded scorn, tossed down but passed by. Madeline wasn’t worth much in Matilda’s estimation and it showed; Thea didn’t know the why, but she knew the look and she bit the edge of her thumbnail, worried the edge of it with her teeth and she looked at Matilda, all hesitant interest behind that pale hair.
“Shit,” Thea said succinctly, and she whistled, low and soft, all those languages rattled off like they were beads clicking together on a necklace, links in a chain. She wondered what it was exactly her aunt did. It wasn’t like ‘freakishly linguistic’ was a job title, and Matilda had never been a passer at diplomatic parties. Her father had never said anything. Her father never said much about anything, especially that which he didn’t like. “Do you like, translate stuff or something?” Mandarin was hard, hard enough that she’d not learned more than ten words in four months, but the post had been short. There had been enough languages early that when she’d gone to bed, she’d cried because she couldn’t remember which one to dream in.
She blew on her own coffee, and took a hesitant, black sip. “Gaelic, huh. Mom never talks about it.” Madeline never talked much about anything, but occasionally she had come and stood by the head of the bed, sat on the armchair near by with her perfect ankles crossed and the sort of nervous tension that made her look like she was vibrating. And she’d talked about her book, about the tour, like she was talking nothing to make sound. It had been nice; Thea had liked it, a little.
Matilda shrugged, a minute move, and took another long swallow of coffee, leaving her mug nearly empty. "I like learning languages," she said. Understanding, decoding. These were the things that gave her the most satisfaction. Learning new skills and new ways of communicating made her feel as if nothing could get by her, as if everything could be understood, given enough time. Forget whether or not she was actually much good at the whole communication tip. What mattered was that she could understand what was thrown at her if she heard it, or beat it back and crack it open if it came flowing across her screen.
Matilda made a face that looked maybe, possibly, like a smile, brow slightly raised. "No?" Matilda's feelings toward her sister were complex and ambivalent. There was enough of a long gap between her and her older siblings that they had never spent protracted lengths of time together. But they had still been ever-present in her childhood, the planned siblings against the unplanned third child, particularly glittering, perfectionist Madeline. When she would sweep home, fashionable and pretty Matilda always felt like she was losing something. There was no comparing to her. "They thought it was proper," she said, with that same strange, small smile. "Your grandparents may be the most British people you will meet, but their children were to be raised in Ireland, mostly, and they thought we ought to get a proper education in the history of the people they repeatedly subjugated." She drained her coffee mug, and set it aside. And it was 'charming', she imagined, to wheel out your small, overeducated daughter, and have her speak in gaelic to well-classed acquaintances.
Thea shrugged. It was a tight little movement that required nothing of rib-cage, just the vague upward motion of a bony shoulder. “I’ve never met my grandparents.” They hadn’t been that kind of family - hadn’t ever. Madeline had gratefully dropped tradition for incoming tradition - there had been the year they had celebrated Eid instead of Christmas, Madeline stood in a handmade silk dress, greeting guests and talking about how ‘fun’ it all was. Thea bit her bottom lip, “So kind of like studying the Native Americans.” She looked up from her coffee cup, pale blue eyes very intent and very clear and the fall of pale hair that had masked her, fell back like curtains parting. “We fucked you over but we’ll teach our kids you existed. Same difference. Right?”
Matilda didn’t look like she’d stand in a tailored dress and shake hands at Christmas, use it as a networking event and say Christmas trees were old-fashioned. “I hate languages,” Thea said frankly. She did, a tangled weave of words in her head like yarn someone had set to knotting so tightly they couldn’t be separated. “There are too many of them to like them.”
"Not surprised," Matilda intoned. Madeline might have a good relationship with their parents, but she hardly went out of her way to stay involved in their lives. Her visits had become less frequent as her marriage and her daughter aged, and she recalled there usually being an excuse of some kind not to bring Thea along. School, usually. Matilda had visited them once or twice, mostly by force, her parents sending her away to spend a holiday with her sister. Beyond that there had only been Madeline's happy visits home on her own or with her husband. "Kind of," she said. There were some similarities there, of course, and many differences, but this didn't seem the time to trot out history. Contrary to appearances, Matilda liked history. She'd always liked real events better than fictional ones. "Except I'm more Irish than British." She shrugged. It had made for a strange upbringing, when her parents realized that hiring local nannies and living in a foreign culture just a jump over the sea had thoroughly complicated their vision of perfect British children. They'd gotten hybrids instead, with Matilda the most Irish of the lot. She'd never liked London much anyway.
Matilda set her mug aside, with just the dregs of the coffee left. She didn't take offense to the dislike of an angry teenaged girl. Thea wouldn't have been a very interesting small person if she didn't have her own likes and dislikes. "You can," she said, with the same kind of noncommittal lack of care from before. "Learn one, the rest start falling. Like dominoes."
“I can speak them.” Thea blinked at her, how the hell else was she supposed to survive, country to country? It wasn’t like Madeline spent time guiding her through and it wasn’t like her dad was ever around long enough to smooth things over the way he did for his clients and contacts. “When I was three I stopped speaking. But I learned the languages where we were mostly.” Another tight little shrug, as noncommittal as Matilda herself. “It wasn’t like there was anything else to do.” Not until boarding school. The international schools were full of other bored kids and once you hit puberty, most of the entertainment was seeing how many of the other bored kids you could fuck.
“Do you think Madeline thinks she’s Irish?” It was interested, even if the note was small and carefully held back. Madeline, not Mom. Madeline was closed doors and glossy nails, the affectionate pat of a cheek or pulling gently at the very ends of Thea’s hair. She wasn’t stories about her parents and she was more likely to talk about classics than she was about immediate history. “Or are you different?” There was a semblance of hope in there - again, tiny and kerneled tightly within teenage indifference. ‘Different’ was better than ‘same’.
Matilda nodded. "That's good," she intoned, because it seemed so. It was good that she'd spent some time with languages, even when she hated them. But that was all the value judgement she had to pass on it, really. "I read textbooks," she said, for what she'd done when there was nothing else to do. There had been other things, of course, especially as she got older, but reading thick, analytical texts had remained a mainstay.
She stared at her niece for a moment. What a strange question. She'd never given it much thought before. She tried not to give much thought to Madeline in general. "Don't know," she said. Was she different from her sister? A twitch of a smile. "But yes."
Matilda moved away from the counter, walking around the half-counter and into the living room. Her black sweater was slumped on the weatherbeaten blue couch, and she picked it up. "I love my sister, your mum," she said. "But we didn't grow up together, so much. So we're not much like each other at all."
Yeah. That seemed right. Thea looked at her, all bony angular and the lack of deliberate grace that Madeline had (it made her think of ballet classes, of the pink leotards she’d been stuffed into, stood in a line with other girls and made to bob awkwardly like a duckling out of place). Matilda walked like she didn’t actually care what someone else thought instead of doing her very best to make them think they way she wanted. Once, Thea had wanted to emulate it, all careless dignity and gracious tilt of the head - until Russia. Until she saw how much effort Madeline put into it and then she didn’t want anything like it.
“Thanks,” Thea said and she indicated the coffee cup but she might - might - have meant the conversation. She tilted the cup awkwardly in a salute, and she scooped up her bag from beside the door, it sat atop sneakers already kicked off. She was pale hair and dipped head, and she turned at the door to the futon-room, to the office-that-wasn’t-her-room and she said, “I like textbooks too,” but so softly, it was as if she didn’t want to be heard. The door closed with a quiet snick.