honestly i didnt notice the vampire thing but maybe i should have (part 1 of 3)

Her phone beeped while she was finishing buying tomorrow’s movie tickets.

It’s gonna be a while. Mom decided to go through the drive through two miles away for a drink. And then we’re going to get gas. Need anything?

Claire pursed her lips. So much for ‘We’ll wait in the parking lot, hurry up.’ 

No, she responded. I’m good. ETA?

She switched her phone onto silent mode and avoided looking at the line of “Have you seen this person?” flyers in the movie theatre lobby when she passed them. She’d done that on the way in, and it was just depressing. 

To kill time, Claire went to the next store to look at swimsuits. She couldn’t completely relax, however. She had to be done with any clothes shopping before her mother came by because Mom would not tolerate being made to wait 5 minutes for someone to go through checkout. Even though getting clothes was one of the main goals in her visit to the country. Mom would be an absolute bitch about it-


-wow, you used to be sooo fat, at least you weren’t vain then, you spend all your time looking at yourself in the mirror, you think you’re a model, I guess you’re skinny but you’re never going to be pretty- 

-and avoiding the commentary made her decide, regretfully, that she wasn’t going to find anything today. She liked the way a green one-piece with cutouts looked, but she already knew she could not handle the relentless jealous bitching if she got in the car with a bag from a clothes store.

Her phone had a message waiting when she dug it out of her pocket.

We’re almost back, her sister wrote. Her audio book is driving me insane. I liked it better when she was playing the Shrek soundtrack on repeat.

Claire snorted. Those were, apparently, the two options, if the aux cord was plugged into Mom’s phone. Mom had refused to let either of them plug in their phones. Admittedly that soundtrack was full of bangers, but the shine wore off after a few hours on repeat.

A yellow car pulled up. She got in the backseat. It smelled like sunscreen. Her sister gave her a grimace from the passenger seat, but they couldn’t talk over the cacophony. The car was playing a book about a former politician’s wife, narrated by the most boring man alive. When their mother was distracted with her phone and driving, Claire quietly leaned forward and tugged on the cord. Hopefully Mom would think she’d unplugged it herself on accident. She did that a lot.

The sound system switched back to the radio. Her mother made an irritated grunt when the cord unplugged from her phone, but she was too busy repeating “closest gas station. Closest gas station!” to the GPS through gritted teeth.

Claire leaned back. She registered, distantly, that the radio personality was talking about the recent uptick in missing persons and a possible off-season flu. 

“Stupid- take me to the closest gas station!” 

There was the soft beep, and then the phone’s calm voice saying, “Got it. Here’s what I found.”

Her mother was blessedly silent.

She breathed a sigh of relief.

“No, that’s not it.”

She felt her shoulders tense instantly.

“Jesus Christ,” her sister finally interjected. “Just let me do it. You’re driving.”

“No! I do this all the time!” Her mother’s voice was hard to classify. Was it a shout or was it a whine? 

“Mom! Light!” Her sister shouted.

The car jerked and then continued anyway.

“It just turned red,” her mother said.

Claire grit her jaw so hard that she was a little concerned for her teeth, and hoped the bitch didn’t get them killed. She considered moving to the center seat so that she was less likely to get crushed if the car was hit in the side when they ran the next light or her Mom merged lanes when another car was there. She didn’t want to die on the shittiest vacation ever. “Not dying” was important to her.

On the other hand, the move to the middle seat would put her in her mother’s peripheral vision, and out of sight was almost entirely out-of-mind when it came to people without object permanence.

She stayed put in the seat directly behind her mother. She thought about hiding in the closet in the spare room when she was a child, so that no one knew where to find her. It had been really rare for anyone to look for her, of course, but already being securely out of sight had been a good preemptive strike against her parents’ tempers.

Three more days until her flight home. Four days, and she would be in her own apartment. It would be humid and hot because the insulation was shitty and she lived near a beach, but it was hard to complain about living near a beach. She’d had the foresight to clean the place before she left, so she could just lug her things up the four flights of stairs, hang up all the laundry from her bag, and lay down on her bed to quietly die. Yes. That sounded perfect.

“Yeah, that’s bad.” Her sister was patiently agreeing to something. Claire vaguely wondered how long she had been daydreaming about emptying her suitcase. 

“The police officer never told me,” Claire’s shoulder hit the door painfully when the car swerved. It was impossible to know if that was a sign of bad driving or an attempt to avoid a pothole. “You’d think that they would follow up so I could know if I was being targeted-”

She didn’t know the topic. Claire bit her lip against any snort or commentary about who might target her mother. 

She thought about the time her mother claimed that her father had shot out the back window of her car. Her mother hadn’t seen who had fired the shot- she’d been driving home after her shift ended at 2am- but Claire thought that she was probably right. Claire’s dad had a lot of temper tantrums in the years before and after the divorce, and anyway, if anyone wanted to see Mom dead, it was someone who had lived with her.

It was hard to hold it against her dad, is all that she was saying. And she didn’t even like the guy.

Their mother let Claire and Vicky off at the hotel’s back door to carry all the shopping bags up. She was off to do one errand, which meant they probably only had two hours of freedom while Mom got stuck in traffic, and lost, and made eleventy billion stops through drive-throughs for fresh pepsi or on the side of the road to text or to wander in a furniture store she suddenly saw.

“Mom wants me to make sure no one kidnaps you in the airport,” Vicky said dryly. She put her purse on the dresser and the other bags on the counter. Claire finished toeing off her shoes and pretended that she hadn’t been planning to drop her armload on the floor right inside the door. She put it to the left of the couch instead, on top of her mother’s suitcase. She was only carrying clothes and books that her mother had bought. She wandered over as Vicky began emptying grocery bags into the fridge. God, a hotel room that had a kitchen of its own. So weird and fancy. It was like a nice apartment, really. “She’s not worried about me, I guess.”

Claire managed not to snort. It was hard to imagine anyone kidnapping Vicky. She had resting “Just fucking try it, bitch” face.

Belatedly, Claire realized she ought to answer her sister. “Why does she think I’m going to get kidnapped?” She leaned against the counter and helped gather up the grocery bags. It was better to keep the hotel room neat.

The business hotel was a really nice place and she was grateful for it, even though it had totally been a poisoned chalice. Their mother was a social vampire: if you invited her in by accepting her offer to pay for something, she would take over control of absolutely everything. Which was why they hadn’t been able to shake her yet, on day 5 of a 9-day vacation that hadn’t been meant to include her at all. 

Vicky looked up from stacking Greek yogurt cups and gave her an exasperated look. “Didn’t you pay attention to anything?”

Claire let her blank expression speak for itself. No. Of course not. If she listened to her mother, she would risk interacting with her more than necessary. Claire had the lucky distinction of being the worst navigator in the world, (it wasn’t even an affectation to avoid interactions, she was genuinely that bad at giving directions) so she was lucky enough to be in the backseat.

Her sister snorted and put the juice in the fridge. “Because there’s been a lot of kidnappings lately,” she said. Oh, right. Vicky’s tone made it almost a question- the question being, ‘why don’t you know this?’ “And someone was following her car last week at night. So she’s more freaked out than usual.”

That was news. “Do you think that happened?” Claire’s voice came out dry and a little ugly with skepticism. Their mother lied for attention all the time. 

…It wasn’t nice to assume someone was lying.

Claire wished she was home. She was a nicer person when she was away from her parents. 

“Yeah, actually.” Vicky nearly rubbed at her face, and then turned to wash her hands in the kitchen sink.  “It’s a believable story. You weren’t listening at all, were you?” She didn’t sound irritated about it. “She got pulled over, the police officer asked her if she knew the people who were following her. She said “I was being followed?” and the police officer said he’d stop the other car to give her a chance to get away.” Vicky took a glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water, because she was on a never-ending hydration mission as part of Operation Look Young Forever; subset: have perfect skin. “I believe it, because of course Mom would fail to notice another car behind her at night following closely enough to make a police officer both notice and feel concerned.”

Claire winced. “I wouldn’t notice either,” she admitted, thinking of the time she had been stalked, in, like, that exact fashion except that it had been night-after-night and not one incident. By a guy with a big old truck. The only reason she’d ever known was that one day she’d given in to her nervous feelings and begged Vicky to come with her while she did her late-night driving for work that night.

…Yeah, if someone wanted to kidnap her, she would not notice.

By the long, patient look that Vicky was giving her, her older sister was probably remembering the same thing. 

‘Maybe my bad attitude will turn out to be useful. I’ll either die or I’ll be fine. Maybe the person who decides to kidnap me will wait until I’ve had another year of jiu jitsu practice and I’ll throw them to the ground and sit on them.’

Then she realized that she was acting as though it was inevitable that she would get kidnapped, which was kind of a weird perspective to take. Claire had never actually checked the statistics, but she was confident that most people did not get kidnapped. 

So Claire shrugged, showered, and got ready for the dance class they’d signed up for. Claire and Vicky were taking advantage of their brief window in the country to do things that were harder to do in their rural placements back home. There was just absolutely no chance of Claire finding a pole-dancing, silks, twerking, or flexibility class within 3 hours of her apartment.

They changed into the matching outfits they’d brought- tiny shorts and tank tops, with green and pink for Claire while Vicky wore blue and purple- and called to arrange for the hotel shuttle take them to the dance studio in an hour. 

Their mother came back while they were waiting. She was in a rare good mood. Vicky was watching nature TV to detox from the stress of being their mother’s sole focus and should probably be allowed to do that in peace. 

So Claire stepped up to entertain her mother. She made enough agreeable sounds for the one-sided conversation about the phone conversation her mother had just finished about people who Claire had never met and how some distant relative was angry about some incident that Claire had never heard about. 

While listening, she gathered up the trash and put it all in one bag to leave outside the hotel door. She wiped down the counter. She washed potatoes and nodded through a well-meant and thoroughly redundant lecture about the skin being the most nutritious part of the potato. Then she ran to the restroom.

As soon as she walked back in the room, her mother started talking again.

“Claire, can you do this?” Her mother sounded irritated. 

“What’s up?” She tried to said chipper, because she wasn’t in the mood for a fight about her tone.

Mom made an annoyed sound and held up her hand. It was bloody. “I cut myself and got it all over the damn potato and board.”

Claire cringed. She came close enough to see that there was no visible blood on the cutting board or knife anymore. “Yeah, I’ll do it. Did you wash everything well or should I do it?” 

“Of course I washed them.” Mom said. Her tone implied that she was leaving off the word ‘idiot’. “I’m going to see if there’s any first aid things in the bathroom.”

Right. Fine. Claire forced her shoulders to relax, took a few deep breaths and finished cutting the potatoes. She cut the carrots while she was at it, glad that her mother had already cut the onions. 

After a few minutes, her mother hobbled back into the room with toilet paper wound around her finger and began opening broth to serve as the base for a roast. 

At that point, Claire beat a strategic retreat to the bedroom. It was early morning back home, so she had a text message waiting from the guy she’d been flirting with. She indulged in that and social media until her ‘time to go meet the bus’ alarm went off. 

She and Vicky got onto the shuttle and discovered that “twerkography” didn’t go into a detailed explanation of how to twerk. The academic premise was more like ‘learn this choreography that involves twerking, to a bizarre and filthy song you’ve never heard before.’ 

The teacher allowed them to put their phone up front and record the last two rounds at the end of the class. Claire watched it while Vicky put a new layer of sunscreen on. She noted, delighted, that her ass looked a lot better than she had suspected it did, and that she had managed to do maybe 30% of the choreography right. That was pretty good! Almost halfway to a passing grade!

It was a lot better than she thought she’d do, honestly. She had literally never been good or even okay at any athletic endeavor before jiu jitsu, so Claire had walked in with subzero expectations.

The next class in the studio started right away, but they weren’t signed up for that specific pole-dance session so Claire and Vicky had to clear out and find something else to do for an hour before their flexibility class. They walked out into the summer heat to buy drinks and refill their water bottles. Vicky saw an enormous rat run across the parking lot. Claire sulked because she hadn’t seen the rat. 

“It’s just a rat.” Vicky popped the lid up and down on the grossly sugary and suspiciously fluorescent blue sports drink that they were sharing. Pop, pop. “It’s not that interesting.” She drank about half of the water in her bottle. They’d need to refill that again before class. Vicky was going to have perfect skin, forever. Claire guiltily remembered to drink more water so that she could refill at the same time.

“I wanted to see a rat,” Claire complained under her breath, at that perfect volume where her sister definitely heard it. 

Vicky sighed. 

Claire conscientiously drank more water.

The real highlight of their free hour on the glorious streets of Chicago was the filthy stray cat that wound its way down the block. It was sticking to a path in the shadows from buildings. While Vicky cooed at it, Claire ran into the gas station again and bought a greasy sausage sandwich. The cat allowed Vicky to feed it about half of the meat. In reward, it butted its head against her leg and waited for her to stroke its ear. 

Vicky was basically Snow White. Stray cats and dogs always liked her.

When Claire cooed at it and held out some meat, the cat slowly came close, squinted up at her, and swiped a paw out to leave 4 jagged scratch marks on her ankle. It flicked its tail twice to be super-sure she understood it was displeased with her. And then the cat ran away. 

“Goodbye, I love you,” Claire called. “You forgot your treat.”

Vicky snorted. “You need to have some boundaries, I think. Love that cat a little less.” She massaged the back of her neck.

Claire shrugged. Her leg was barely bleeding anyway. She just was happy to have a cat pay any attention to her. She tossed the meat onto the sidewalk, in case the cat or the rat came back and wanted it.

They went back into the studio to attend flexibility class. Claire tried not to look at herself in the mirror too much, because she had just discovered through comparison to the professional dancers that her thighs were enormous, and it had turned out that the appropriate dress code for these classes was either sexy underwear or an enormous off-the-shoulder loose top with leggings. 

Claire unrolled one of the studio’s yoga mats near the teacher and realized with horror that the woman closest to her was intimidatingly cute. Like, this woman had rolled up to class in teeny tiny skintight shorts, a strappy black top, and a belly chain, with her hair up in that adorable hairstyle that made two puffs above her head. She was actually following along with the teacher, graceful and confident.

She tried not to make eye contact in the mirror too much. She followed along with a torturous regimen- flexibility class was not as fun as she had thought it would be- and wrestled down the useless urges to A. give up. B. cry about how much her inner thighs hurt in this position. C. look at the really cute girl in the mirror. 

‘Don’t stare. Don’t be weird. For an hour, please just don’t be weird and make her feel uncomfortable.‘

By virtue of proximity, the other woman ended up her partner for the core workout. She had a really nice smile. Claire tried to focus and be businesslike about doing the reverse sit-ups while her partner held her legs down. Her partner had cool hands. Claire did the exercise really enthusiastically in an attempt to be normal. 

It probably looked weird.

The pre-arranged hotel shuttle was waiting for them when they left. Claire and Vicky sat in sweaty near-silence for the thirteen-minute drive and then took turns showering as soon as they got back.

Claire felt weird. She thought it might be a physical thing, under the exhaustion, but eventually diagnosed it as social discomfort. She picked at the roast. Usually she liked vegetables best, but she found herself taking an uncomfortable amount of beef… and covering it in salt, pepper, garlic, and ketchup. Vicky made do with pepper and ketchup so that less time separated her and the experience of eating meat. Mom had yet to discover seasonings, as a general rule, and at 57 it was probably too late for her. 

She roused herself enough to find some manners. “Thank you for making dinner.” Claire refilled her mother’s glass with Pepsi and set it down. “It’s really good.” Her stomach churned. Honestly, what the hell? Nothing she had eaten should be remotely hard for her stomach to handle. It was heavier than she usually ate at night, though. That might be it.

“Yeah, it’s just about perfect for after a workout,” Vicky added. She had eaten half the meat personally, because that was one of her powers. “I’m going to have a banana though. Thanks again, for buying a ton of fruit.”

Claire agreed vigorously with that. Fruit was crazy-expensive back home. She had eaten two bags of green grapes along with three containers of cottage cheese so far. When she’d fantasized about all the food she would eat in the USA, she had mostly been thinking of things like Mexican, Italian, French, and Middle Eastern restaurants. Oh, and fast food Chinese. And she’d been prepared to beg for a ride to a sub store if there hadn’t been one close enough for her to walk to. And, oh my god, she had dreamt about an everything bagel with green onion and garlic cream cheese, paired with a Mt. Dew. 

It felt really weird that Mom had stocked the fridge and planned to cook once almost every day, but she was grateful for it. 

They sat and poked at a puzzle, because that was what their mother literally always wanted to do. Vicky stuck it out a lot longer than Claire managed. Claire put two pieces in and felt sufficiently accomplished. And tired. She rubbed at her face. “I’m going to go to bed,” she said. “You know, because I’ve gotta go to the gym in the morning.”

She glanced at Vicky, but her sister didn’t betray any annoyance that Claire got to go to practice jiu jitsu and Vicky couldn’t go. They belonged to different schools, and Vicky’s school didn’t have a gym in the city. 

Claire felt a little guilty. But not guilty enough to skip a chance to take as many lessons as possible. Wrestling people was always fun, but it was, like, even better when you understood the language that the lessons were taught in. 

“Don’t stay too long,” Mom warned. She actually wagged her finger at Claire, like she was talking to a dog. “There’s things that I want to do.”

‘…It’s not your vacation, but cool, yeah.’

She felt her jaw go way too tight. It was hard not to give her mother a shitty look, or sass back out loud. It wouldn’t make any difference, and she’d just regret snapping back. It had been way too optimistic to think she had enough emotional distance to have some kind of relationship with her mother, even though the woman wouldn’t even admit to remembering crucial childhood events like the time she’d listened to Claire scream and beg to be let out of a hot tent with the zipper pulled to the top. She’d been in there for hours after her crayons had melted. She’d given up on being let out and started begging for water instead. That hadn’t worked, either.

The only reason she knew her mother had been there was that she could hear her sitting a few feet away, flipping the pages of a book and occasionally setting down a wine cooler on the picnic table.

Honestly, Mom probably didn’t remember. Nearly succeeding in killing a child from heat exhaustion with juuuust enough plausible deniability might not be memorable for her. She’d made plenty of attempts at paring down her brood with neglect. That one was just unique because Claire had been left in a tent instead of a car or locked out in the snow. 

Maybe she’d remember it if Claire reframed it as “the time you were mad at Dad for leaving a camping trip to take Vicky to see Artsplash because she was supposed to go for class.” 

The incident had probably been just as much about punishing Dad for disobeying her as it had been that she liked causing pain, after all, and Mom remembered every slight with as much reliability as she forgot everything she did that might be morally off or embarrassing.

‘Jesus, why am I so hung up on this? I’m 26, it’s 22 years too late to do anything about that. I didn’t die. I need to get over it.’

“Did you hear me?”

It was weird how no matter how long she stayed away, she never gained any distance. Her mother could say one thing in that condescending tone and the rage-center of her brain lit up like she was still in high school or something. She hadn’t lived with her mother in 8 years, for god’s sake. She’d never even visited home in the summers of her university years. 

‘Two years since my last visit to the country was clearly not enough time. I’m not coming back for at least another 4 years after this. So I need to eat all the Persian food in the city to tide me over.’

Her mother was still holding her finger up, waiting for an answer. Her blue eyes were enormous behind her magnifying glasses.

Claire managed to answer with something sufficiently polite and vague and fell in bed. She spent more time than she wanted trying not to remember pathetically pressing her face against a tent floor because the ground was just that little bit cooler. Or that when Vicky and her dad got back, it was Vicky who unzipped the tent and put a hand on Claire’s back, and that Dad never even asked her if she was okay or what had happened. She didn’t remember the rest of the day because she suspected it was spent barely conscious, but she remembered the feeling of losing hope that an adult was going to give a damn that she’d screamed until she lost her voice.

In retrospect she’d been a fucking idiot, though. If it had occurred to her to tell one of her grandparents the next time she saw them in church, they would have cared.

She turned over in bed and punched the pillow twice. Her whole body felt tense. This was so conducive to good rest and her quest to be healthy and happy. Everything was wonderful.

‘God, I’m never really going to be able to move on until they’re both dead. So maybe I’ll be happy by the time I’m 50. They’ve both got so many health problems. Come on, diabetes.’

Usually when she was stuck thinking about something like that, it kept her up for hours and sent her on anxiety spikes that ruined the next week. Every time she looked at the clock and saw depressing numbers like 4:00, it would get harder and harder to drift off.

But that didn’t happen. It was like being in someone else’s body. She was fuming with impotent rage and self-loathing, and then she realized that she was waking up and actually feeling good. She sat up, a little confused by how she felt. It was really weird to wake up feeling okay.

She padded silently around the hotel room. Vicky was sleeping on her back, hands folded on her stomach, with her black silk eyemask in place. Her dark hair was loose on the pillow. 

Ridiculous. It looked so fake. What human slept like that?

Her mother was a lump under no less than 4 blankets, because she was perpetually cold. Her shape was well-camouflaged by the three pillows she had brought from home, as well as all the pillows that had been on the couch. The only hint that a human was under there was a bit of red hair poking out. 

Those were more acceptable sleeping habits.

She tucked earphones in and tried to be quiet in the kitchen. She scrambled 6 eggs with mushrooms, bell peppers, onion, tomatoes, and avocado. She seasoned it all with cumin and coriander and a basic Mexican-ish flavor profile. She put a generous dab of Greek yogurt on top and squeezed lemon juice over everything. 

It was what she ate every morning, basically. Protein, calcium, healthy fats, and vitamin C so that she could absorb said protein and calcium. Good start to the day. The only thing she varied was the quantity of eggs, based on how active she planned to be.

Thirty minutes before the 8:00am class, she had the hotel shuttle take her to the dojo for the two morning lessons offered. The basic lesson here had a pretty fast pace. She was used to doing about half as many techniques in an hour-long lesson, so it was a fun challenge to keep up and memorize the long string of movements. 

The self-defense move for the day involved ducking under someone’s punch, grabbing their middle, and sweeping them to the ground. Sweeps were always fun. She kept getting the footwork wrong on this one, but it was still satisfying to maneuver until her partner’s knees buckled.

The actual jiu jitsu movements, when strung together, made a plausible match sequence where she put her opponent on the ground, did a choke incorrectly, got swept, deflected a submission, recovered to pass her opponent’s guard, and then correctly completed the original choke. She got the movements down to the point where she felt pretty good about how smoothly and accurately she was doing them. Claire was feeling pretty confident, although a little annoyed that she got paired by default with another woman when there were men who were closer to her size and skill level. 

And then in the time allotted for spars, all 3 of the other women left because they weren’t yet experienced enough to do sparring. A few guys left, too, but there was an assortment of 4-stripe white belts and variously striped blue belts around. She got her ass thoroughly but gently handed to her by a series of big men, most of whom had rather scruffy facial hair. Some of them doled out helpful pointers- genuinely helpful things. 

She tried not to let it rankle her pride. With three stripes, she was at the lowest rank possible for a person to participate in the spars after drills. And she hadn’t been at that level for long. So obviously, everyone who she sparred with was actually qualified and encouraged to help out people at her level.

She got a little satisfaction during the drills in the advanced lesson that came after. Apparently, her gym-mates had been being honest, not kind, when they told her that she was good at a triangle choke. She was a praise-based lifeform, so she was getting pretty good at wiggling into positions to set a sucker up to receive said choke. Next, she got to learn how to do a clock-choke, which turned out to be deliciously vicious. And she had already done a similar sweep back home, so she got the satisfaction of propelling men who outweighed her by 70lbs over her back to land on the mat. 

She was the best at that in her gym, actually.

Well. She frowned.

Addendum: She was the best at this throw out of the white and blue belts.

…It still wasn’t quite true.

Further addendum: She was the best at this throw out of the white and blue belts, except that one white belt who had a black belt in judo. He didn’t count.

There we go. That wasn’t too overly specific to be proud of, was it?

Her success might have been attributable to enthusiasm. Everyone else was so ginger and hesitant about it, which was hard to wrap her head around. The way that she approached those exercises was with an attitude that could basically be summarized as, “Throw people! Yell! Take god’s lunch money! Go, go, go! Now get him while he’s down!”

Of course, her bout of high self-esteem wasn’t meant to last. Because next they did sparring again, and she had to tap out at least 4 times in every single spar and never got close to scoring. She couldn’t out-muscle or out-maneuver any of her opponents into a position where she could force them to submit, or even get points by holding a good position for long enough. She managed to pass guard a couple times, though, so there was that.

Sigh. 

She wasn’t physically strong or technically skilled. Those were just the facts. And her repertoire of moves to use in a spar was still small. Being able to do things in class drills didn’t mean much if she couldn’t translate it to a match.

It was fine. She was still a relative beginner. It was probably even a good thing that she could recognize where her shortcomings were. All she had to do was work on them. Get stronger, get better, stop making so many sloppy mistakes like leaving her ankle far enough to get grabbed. Solid goals. She was going to do it.

‘I’m going to be scary one day,’ Claire promised herself. ‘I’m going to be as scary as that purple-belt woman in Kyoto.’

…in about 5 years, maybe. If she was lucky and persistent and kept going to practice at least 3 days a week. Still, it felt good to have a dream. She floated out of practice to buy a bagel across the street and immediately took notes on everything that she had learned. 

The magical promise of an everything bagel with green onion and garlic cream cheese didn’t come through. She took the first bite, expecting heaven. But it wasn’t the experience that she’d remembered. Claire gave it a discomfited look. Maybe the bakery had changed their recipes in the 3 years that she’d been out of the country.

Maybe happiness was too much to ask of a baked good.  

No, that couldn’t be it. 

Maybe she was sick.

That seemed more likely, actually. She was bone-deep tired, and it didn’t feel like workout tiredness. And now that she was thinking about it, her throat felt a little sore.

‘Did I not eat enough?’ Claire wondered. ‘Did I not eat the right things?’

Maybe she needed more protein. She’d really liked that beef last night. Oh, iron, she could be low on iron.

She returned to the hotel with a goal. She sneakily raided the fridge for cold leftover beef, showered, put on a really cute floral one-piece outfit, and made too-casual inquiries about whether or not her family had already eaten. They were willing to go out to eat Russian food, on their way to finish seeing exhibits they hadn’t managed to see on their first trip to the Field Museum.

While her mom went down and started the car, Claire put on a silver necklace, a hasty layer of sunscreen, and mascara.  

They were walking down the stairs when Vicky gave her a sidelong look and frowned.  “Your skin is turning red,” she commented. She reached out to indicate where on Claire’s neck, but carefully didn’t touch the necklace. “Did you let anyone borrow that? Maybe it has an allergen on it. Or it could be a heat thing. You should take it off.”

Claire winced and began unclasping the damn thing. Served her right for trying too hard. “It’s really flattering to be so sweaty that I can’t wear jewelry,”’ she said dryly. She had the weirdly petty urge to throw the necklace away. What? Why? She frowned. She liked this necklace. She dropped it into her purse instead.