Brian wanted to come, but he had some other unspecified thing to do.  Liz, on the other hand, seemed perfectly cool with the idea of taking her only day of the week off to wander around with Dori on her random business.

This didn’t make her feel any less weird.  But then, it was probably going to be a weird day–she was on her way out to try and intimidate a newspaper, after all.

Dori picked Liz up at her apartment.  She offered to drive, but Liz’ car was tiny.  Dori didn’t feel like riding in anything smaller than her big old car just yet.  They compromised, and Liz drove Dori’s car. Read more…

Being accused of kidnapping Taylor was too big a piece of news to be kept from Aunt Andrea, so Dori told her over brunch.  Okay, so it wasn’t really brunch, just the usual super-late breakfast, but still.  For some reason, telling on herself felt a lot like going to the teacher to announce that a kid had fallen off of the swings and everyone was saying she had pushed him, but she hadn’t.  While she was making her report Dori wondered in the back of her head why she was so prone to random grade school and junior high flashbacks.

Aunt Andrea was predictably horrified.  “I was afraid that girl would be trouble,” she said.  “Sometimes I just get a feeling.  You should probably talk to our lawyer.”

“You have a lawyer?” Dori asked, surprised.

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Liz and Nikki were getting together with some other friends for dinner, and Dori had to work, so they said their goodbyes and promised to meet again.  Dori got to work feeling positively buoyant; Nikki was back, and her friend seemed cool, too.  Nikki’s parting words had been to suggest that she and Dori go apartment-shopping the next day, if she was interested.

“Get a three-bedroom and I’ll move in in six months,” Liz said half-jokingly.

“Okay,” Nikki said.

Dori laughed.  “I should start making decisions like that,” she said.  “Just, bam, so be it.  I am woman, hear me roar, and shit.”

“You don’t need anyone’s permission to run your own life,” Nikki had said, and then she and Liz left.  Dori rolled the thought around in her head all the way to work.  It was kind of empowering at first, but then she thought about it too much and by the time she got there, she wasn’t even sure what Nikki had meant by it any more.

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All in all, Nikki was one big happy surprise.  She was still her moody, gothy self and that was okay with Dori, but she’d lost most of the hesitant, insecure girlishness that she’d been full of two years ago.  In fact back then Nikki reminded Dori of the way Taylor was now, a little.  Now Nikki moved and walked like she owned the world, in a good way.  She was confident, meeting people’s eyes when she spoke to them and making quick, self-assured decisions.  Nikki’s response to the story of Dori’s troubles with the football fans was immediate.  “What newspaper?” she asked.  “If you got hurt and people are harassing you because they printed an error, they owe you a lot of fucking money.”

“I don’t really want to sue anybody, though.  There’s just something about suing people that bothers me.  The whole idea of it.  It’s just kind of lame.”  Dori tried to cut a piece of her apple pie’s crust off, and wound up flipping it into her hair like a tiddlywink.

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Taylor insisted on coming with when Dori went to meet Nikki.  There was no way she was going to leave the girl at Aunt Andrea’s house all day, so it made sense to bring her with, but then it turned out that the restaurant Nikki wanted to meet at was on the way to Taylor’s school, where she had to go anyhow, and it made no sense to drive all the way out there and then come back into town, she might as well go see Nikki and then maybe the three of them would go and drop Taylor off and then do lunch of whatever.  Taylor was surprisingly persuasive on this point, and Dori didn’t have a reason to say no, so she took her with.

It had been over two years since Dori had seen Nikki, but she recognized her at first sight anyway.  That wasn’t weird.  She was pretty good at remembering faces.  Besides, Nikki was only five feet tall and favored black clothes that made her stick out like a sore thumb, unless they were at a place where other goths congregated.  What was weird was that she recognized the woman who was with Nikki, too.  It was the bald Asian woman who’d been at Pandora’s a few days before. 

The chick recognized her, too.  Her eyes narrowed in confused recognition.

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“There’s absolutely no reason for a man over the age of eighteen to ever be fired from a job,” Khalid Kazemi said.  He was standing over Smile, who was a picture of smoldering agitation at one end of the couch, but he wasn’t looking at his younger brother.  “Especially not a job for high school students,” Khalid added.  “I can understand why you haven’t told our mother and father about this job, but why did you have it in the first place?  Is delivering food really all that you’re capable of?”

Smile said nothing.  His fists were balled at his temples, eyes on the floor, and he was clenching his teeth, hard, so hard he thought they might crack if Khalid didn’t shut up soon.  Sheerin was in the kitchen, ostensibly scrubbing the space between the stove and the counter, but no doubt listening to every word they said.  At least Khalid was speaking English.

“I had to reassure our mother when you failed out of med school.  I told her you’d be okay, that you were still finding your way.  She asked me to talk to you, while I was here, you know.”

“About what?”  He tried to keep the anger out of his voice, and failed.

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Taylor showed up at Pandora’s (well, out back, actually, where Daniel wouldn’t see her) with a big red handprint on her face.  She’d been kicked out again, or maybe she’d stormed out.  She certainly hadn’t slapped herself.  “Can I sleep on your couch again?” she asked Dori.

She knew that letting Taylor come home with her again wasn’t the brightest of ideas, foolish even, but couldn’t think of a remotely nice way to tell her this. 

And really, it wasn’t that it was a bad idea, it wasn’t like they were fucking, it was just that the way Taylor idolized Dori made her uncomfortable.  In the end, she was feeling too good after her conversation with Charles, and if Dori was addicted to anything it was making people feel good.  Letting the kid come home with her again would obviously make Taylor’s day, and that was enough to convince Dori to do it.

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Dori was surprised and a bit scared when she couldn’t get herself out of bed the next evening.  After getting a ride home from the hospital from a frantic Aunt Andrea and sleeping like a baby all night (and some of the day) she’d felt fine.  When Smile called that afternoon and left a message that he had sent a mechanic over to fix her Oldsmobile so she would have transportation, she had felt fine, had even told Smile thank you and asked again how he was.  He was distant, and seemed to be annoyed with her.  

When the mechanic got the car running (it took him about ten minutes of poking about), that was fine too.  But when she woke up from her afternoon nap, she couldn’t move.  Dori’s eyes opened, and she stared at the ceiling and couldn’t move.  It was as though one arm was held down by her wrecked Neon, and the other by the fact that she had to move out, and one of her legs was trapped under the shit with stupid Chris Sinclair and his fans who seemed determined to make her life miserable through pranks and occasional threats.  Her other leg was stuck under the whole Smile situation, even though that was technically resolved.  And she couldn’t get up.

She could hear the television in the other room; Aunt Andrea was watching the news.  And she knew she had to work at seven, so it was time to get up.  But the order was issued to her legs, and they just ignored her.  A message came back from her feet.  Who gives a shit? it said.  Everything sucks.  And her feet didn’t move.

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The negotiation had been brief.  The EMT had appeared, with his box, at the side door of the van that Dori had been taken to, and asked her a few general how-are-you-doing questions.  Once he had made sure she was lucid, he asked if she wanted to go to the hospital, to be checked.  Dori had told him, “Not really,” since she mostly felt like going home and lying down and figuring out what to do now that she had two cars that didn’t work.  “I don’t really like hospitals,” she told the guy.  “All they ever do is look for bigger and bigger things to impale me with.”

“You were in a serious accident,” the EMT said with a tone that suggested he had had this conversation many times before.

“I’ll be okay.  I always am.”

“You know,” he replied casually, running a hand through his sparse hair, “sometimes, you can be in an accident like this and break your neck or your back, and not even know about it for several hours.  Then, without warning, you turn your head or bend over to get something and bam,” he snapped his fingers loudly, “your spinal column is severed.”

Dori blinked at him, eyes huge.  “Um, okay, I’ll go.”

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