The week had passed like this: On Wednesday, Lyra left Avery’s place painfully early to cut back across town and get her uniform, then another bus almost half way back to Avery’s again to get to work. She Taco-Belled till late, really feeling the broken sleep she’d had, but despite exhaustion she couldn’t stop a secret smile on the bus on the way home because someone believed her (and also she’d got laid, which always made her feel good in that I-got-up-to-mischief/somebody-wants-me kind of way, even if the sex itself didn’t actually get her there.) She got home a few minutes before her mother, and slipped into the shower while Jocelyn was giving Jem an earful about expecting her to babysit without asking because she had a life too.
Thursday and Friday her dance card was full of skyscrapers that needed washing, and Friday night Jocelyn took Lyra along to her book club because Mette, the host, her washing machine had crapped out. Lyra tied her hair back under a bandanna and got to work, while Jocelyn and her friends got increasingly tipsy and passionate about their books. By midnight, the washing machine was working as new, Lyra had two more dates with other women to look at their various broken appliances, and Jocelyn fell asleep on Lyra’s shoulder on the train home.
Saturday she woke up to her mom begging please, please could she watch Jemma today, just for a few hours! She’s be back by lunchtime, definitely! And if something happened and Lyra had to leave for work before she did get home then maybe she could see if Amparo could watch her instead? So Lyra took Jemma down to the park for the morning, chased her round till she was exhausted and then – because her mom had not returned, spent her thank-you-for-fixing-the-washing-machine money (ten bucks, Mette had insisted) on a big fat apricot danish to thank Amparo in advance for the emergency babysitting, and then it was back to work.
Sunday was Mia’s microwave and Yulia’s ancient DVD player, both of which she coaxed back to life, and then Yulia insisted on showing her the DVD of her daughter’s wedding, in St Petersburg, which she hadn’t been able to afford to go to (it was fifteen years ago now, but Yulia’s player had been broken for a while, and she hadn’t seen her daughter for five years, and she missed her.) Then work again, till late.
Monday was back to work dangling over the city through the daylight hours, serving tacos through the night. Tuesday, though, was just windows, and for the first time in a week, Lyra got home at dinnertime, ate with her family, watched Coco with Jemma on her lap till Jemma fell asleep, and then… then she found herself alone in her room, knowing that if she didn’t start her own research now… life was going to keep moving on, dragging her behind it, and she was never going to find any answers about any of the things that were happening around her if she didn’t take the time to look.
So, like Rosario, Lyra had been up for most of the night, sitting on her bed with the window open and her phone grasped loosely in her hand, all too aware that she needed to start googling something.
‘Fucked up faeries’, maybe or something more solid like ‘mystery hole disappearance’ or ‘faeries real world’ or…
She’d start typing something in, stare at it, feel her stomach contract in anxiety and then backspace backspace backspace. It was the first night she’d been home before midnight since her night with Avery, the first time she’d had a few quiet hours to herself, and she should be using it to arm herself with information the way Rosario would, but every time her thumb hovered over search, all it did was hover...