Britannia, NY

Elaine is half asleep at her lunch table. She hasn't slept properly in more than a week, and it shows; at least school's practically over for seniors, so she can sleepwalk through the few remaining classes. Most of her friends have been avoiding her, more or less, which would upset her except that it gives her more time to read. She's reread The Ill-Made Knight three times this week. It hasn't made any more sense any of the three times. It's open on the table in front of her, though her eyes aren't focusing on it with much consistency.

She can't have dreamed this when she didn't know it. It's impossible. And White got some details wrong. She's certain of this, and she's scared to death of how certain she is.

And she misses him. On top of going crazy, she misses someone who she objectively knows doesn't even exist.

“‘And happy is the man who does not find me a stumbling-block,’” Nissa reads out loud – barely out loud, just loud enough it can’t be said to be under her breath. “‘Happy is the man who does not find me a stumbling-block.’”

She’s sitting at a small table with a chessboard set into it in a park, her Bible lying in front of her, open to Luke chapter seven. The table is under an apple tree, and she must not have moved, nor turned the page, for a long while – there are petals on the page, petals in her hair. Her hands are in her lap, clenched against the fabric of her skirt. She is not quite shaking.

It’s getting late. She knows she should get up, go back to the manse, eat something, but she’s still seeing white hospital walls, a heart monitor, a bustle of confused doctors, a puzzle print of a Thomas Kinkade painting, painstakingly assembled, preserved under glass.

"...and King Arthur almost makes it with a goose."

Opinion is divided, among the student body, on Mr. Madison, but he is rarely accused of being boring.

"That's the first part, which is all we're going to have time for, this sucker is long. But if you wind up reading the rest over the summer, I won't breathe a word." He leans on the desk, sharp-eyed as ever, if a little worn of late. "Questions. Hit me."

[Group scene, threadjacking encouraged, talk amongst yourselves!]

Ever more increasingly, what is going on with Gary is anybody's guess, some quiet, unobtrusive, intense agenda that comes with no explanation. He spends the day going methodically though their apartment, sorting his drawings into neat little stacks, sometimes rearranging things--on Monday, for no apparent reason, he cleans half the rooms, polishing the mirror in the bathroom, vacuuming the bedroom and carefully washing its wallpaper clean, all while Mike is at work. Sometimes he takes over the computer for hours at a time and once in a while a package comes for him.

The studio is generally locked when Mike is home, and Gary stays in there, too, inexplicably--no noise comes from inside the room, but sometimes he's there for seven or eight hours at a stretch.

And, every now and then, he goes out, going about some kind of business. It's a little warmer now, the first of the false summers, but he still has a jacket on, close around his neck. He still carries the revolver everywhere--for emergencies, if there's an emergency and he has to--he doesn't usually think as far as what he'll have to do--and about twenty dollars and a few other odds and ends that have a purpose only to him. The funny thing is that the stranger he gets with his own inexplicable habits, the more ordinary he looks, a pale young man with dark hair and a quiet face. Nothing special: increasingly, increasingly. No one at all.

Adia is working at the store as usual, but, unusually, she has been in a really good mood for the last few weeks. Ordinarily she's fairly sullen with her customers, resentful in a way she can't quite stifle, but lately she's been prone to smiling, cheerful, even good-willed for the most part.

Right now she's humming as she puts things in order behind the counter, her long dark hair loose down her back in ringlets, her slim cool fingers busy with receipt paper. The song isn't one she learned in his lifetime, although she doesn't know that; it's an old one that Dinadan used to play on May Day, when the court celebrated and she went out before dawn with her ladies to gather flowers, fighting to keep her skirts pulled out of her way, her hair the colour of gold in wild braids and violets tucked in. Dinadan wrote the song for her; at least, Arthur asked for it, and it was played every year, and it's in the back of Adia's mind even though she can never remember where she heard it.

Enfys doesn’t go to Church. She’s only been twice, as far as she can remember; once, as a young child, when the pair of them – her mother tall and elegant in swirling silks and mile upon mile of plastic pearls and love-beads, she small and elfin and swamped by her duffel coat – took shelter in one when the Combi ran out of petrol and she stood, mesmerised by the pageantry of crimson and gold, the flickering of the candles, and once not long after they settled in Britannia – Midnight Mass - when she was testing exactly how far she was willing to push in her rebellion (not quite that far, as it turned out). She wasn’t ever baptised or Christened or anything. She doesn’t celebrate Easter, either – her eggs came a month earlier, on Spring Equinox. Her mum’s odd like that, but it’s cool, whatever.

Sometimes, though, she can’t help but wonder – what hot cross buns taste like, for one thing. What it would be like to belong to that sort of tight little group, to orient herself around a common moral compass rather than sit off-kilter.

Except it’s not really wondering, or doesn’t feel like it. It’s more like struggling to remember. Which is weird, so she tries not to think too much about it.

She’s sat on the lawn outside her house, laptop balanced on her crossed legs, cup of strange decaffeinated tea brewing nicely on its USB-powered heater mat, sticky-sweet caffeine syrup (smuggled in past her mother) conveniently to hand. The sunshine is warm on her skin, the scent of someone nearby mowing their lawn leafy and fresh. Spring has most definitely sprung in Britannia.

It's a quiet Thursday afternoon, and Cecilia is stuck at the reference desk. Which means she is really pretty well stuck at the desk -- waiting for a patron with a question, monitoring the timed computer usage for the library's few open terminals. Nothing much happens here until the kids start coming in for schoolwork, though she has already helped that little old lady who likes to look up her china patterns in the price guides about six times.

She has a stack of paperwork in front of her that she's putting off in favor of reading professional messageboards. She looks busy enough at first glance, but she's accessible, and here to answer questions.

Elaine skipped school today. It's near certain that someone will see her around town, but she's a senior with very few sick days to her name, and it's her last St. Patrick's of high school. Elaine's always had a soft spot for the holiday, given her descent, and she's in a white babydoll t-shirt with green Mardi Gras beads adorning her neck, long blond hair pulled back from her face.

Currently, she's stretched out in the park, bobbing her head slightly to the beat of whatever's on her iPod and watching the clouds go by. No school, no work. For this afternoon, she can almost forget she's still in this little boring town with nowhere more interesting than the park to run off to.

She could probably stand some company, even so.