Karma's with Liam and Amy's ignoring Shane (another chorus of 'this is the perfect chance to tell her how you feel' is the last thing she needs) so there's no one for her to call or talk to and binge watching anything without Karma just feels… wrong…. and she's got plenty enough wrong in her life lately. So, really, there's not much for Amy to do but start working on the project.

Or… she could wax her eyebrows (if that was something she did, ever). Or she could shave her legs (except she's wearing jeans the rest of the week and who's going to see them, so what's the point?). Or she could wash her car (if she had one), go to the mall (broke and, again, no Karma), find a new documentary to watch on Netflix (because that wouldn't remind her of how alone she is).

So… starting the project it is.

But then she hears a door slam downstairs and it's too early for her mother or Bruce to be home. That means it's Lauren and while talking to her step-sister-to-be is normally near the bottom of her list of things to do (and who is she kidding, it isn't near the bottom, it is the bottom, but Farrah has been pestering them both to… bond) she's running out of other options.

Amy glances over at Jenny. Sitting on the bed. Staring at her with those beady, dead, soulless eyes.

She's out the door and down the stairs and into the living room before she can stop herself.

Lauren's in the kitchen, hunting through the fridge, no doubt looking for something semi-healthy (good luck) or looking to once again hide Bruce's various hunks of meat and sorta meat before he, as Lauren keeps warning, "eats himself into a red meat coma." Her baby doll, dark haired and slightly larger than the other dolls, is laying half on and half off the kitchen table.

"Hey," Amy says, hoping to not have a repeat of the time she startled Lauren in the hallway and nearly got a curling iron in the eye.

Lauren's head pop up over the side of the fridge door and that's when Amy notices her wide, almost panicked eyes and the bottle of water in her one hand.

And the bottle of pills in the other.

Amy remembers the rumors, the whispers, the gossip about Lauren and some mystery pills. She didn't give it much thought at the time partly as she was being busy as a (not so) fake lesbian and trying to figure out how to tell if Karma felt the same which meant a lot of time with Shane and that meant not getting in his way even when he did things she found… morally iffy.

The other part of it might (not might) have been a somewhat healthy fear of Lauren, the same fear that makes Amy think now would be a good time to turn and run and hide and forget she ever saw anything but then that might inspire Lauren to chase her and she might be little but she does have that curling iron.

So Amy does what Amy usually does which is a whole lot of nothing, just a lot of waiting for the other person to do something, so she stays rooted to that spot, eyes flicking back and forth between Lauren's face and the pills (and it's such a big bottle and Lauren's clutching it so desperately), and not saying a word.

"I thought no one was… I didn't know you were… I…. I…" Lauren stammers for a moment before regaining something close to her usual composure and pulling the bottle of pills down and out of sight. Amy can literally see the mask falling back into place as those wide terrified eyes are replaced by Lauren's usual cold glare and perpetual frown. "Did you want something?"

Amy thinks 'yeah, you to tell me what's in the bottle cause maybe then I'll feel slightly better about me' but says "No. Nothing. I just heard you come in and I was upstairs trying not to work on that stupid baby project and so I thought maybe I'd come down and -"

"You could've stopped with 'no'," Lauren snaps. She slams the fridge shut and stalks past Amy, headed for the stairs. "I'll be in my room," she says. "Whenever Karma gets here, I'd appreciate it if you two could keep the fauxbianing to a dull roar."

It takes Amy just long enough to parse out 'fauxbianing' (faux lesbianing and really, lesbian as a verb?) for Lauren to make her escape and leave her alone in the kitchen. Amy glances at the clock on the microwave. Five minutes from door slam to… wait for it…

Lauren's door slams upstairs.

Five minutes. That's a record, even for them.

Amy makes her way back upstairs, stopping for just a moment outside Lauren's door. It's still unusual, still new enough that the site of that door being shut still gives her pause. All the years she's lived in this house and that door's never been closed and it's just one more thing, one more pebble of different that's been dropped on her life these last few months.

Different like her room being empty because Karma's not here (which is unusual) or she's not at Karma's (which is more unusual) and those differences Amy thinks she might be able to live with (though not happily). It's the other difference, the other new, the reason Karma isn't here or she's not there that Amy finds herself struggling with. It's not so much that her best friend isn't with her, it's that Karma's with him and that's where she wants to be and it's not the dull ache of friends growing apart that kills Amy (she's always known that would come, eventually).

It's the sharp pain of jealousy that wrecks her. The pangs she feels starting in her gut but not stopping there. It radiates, spiraling out until it hits everywhere. The fingers she wants laced with Karma's. The lips that miss her (admittedly fake but that's so not the point) kisses. The cheeks she longs for her best friend to caress, the arms she needs to feel Karma in, the legs that go weak every time her phone buzzes and she thinks it's Karma, the same ones that almost give out every time it's Shane instead.

If this is what new and different is like then Amy's more sure than ever that she prefers old and same and she'd gladly forget these feelings ever existed.

If she could.

But she can't and she knows she can't and right then and right there, Amy needs something (anything) that isn't Karma and isn't her feelings and isn't thinking about what Karma and Liam may be doing right at that moment (and God she hopes 'Jason' is watching and creeping them both the fuck out with his dead little eyes) so she does the only thing she can think of.

She turns around, walks across the hall and bangs on Lauren's door. A fight, she figures, is better than silence.

Lauren opens the door, which surprises Amy a bit, just enough that she forgets what she was going to say (not that she really had much of an idea in the first place) and Lauren goes to slam the door shut (again). "Wait!" Amy says as she sticks her foot in front of the door. "I mean… I…" Lauren's glaring at her and it's making her nervous and she doesn't know what to do or say or why the hell she did this in the first place.

And she's totally blaming Karma. And Liam. And whatever they're doing (hopefully not very well) and fuck does she hate feeling like this. Weak and alone and drifting and alone and hurting and did she mention alone? And Lauren's still glaring and she's still stammering and nothing's coming out, nothing that would make any sense anyway. Amy pulls her foot back and turns back around, walking into her room and silently shutting the door behind her.

A fight might have been better, but it seems she can't even have that.

Amy slumps against her door, sliding down to the floor, pulling her knees to her chest. It's quiet in her room, so fucking quiet and she finds herself missing Karma's voice (and just when she thought she couldn't get more pathetic). It's not even the words she might say (Amy learned years ago she could tune out half of what Karma says and still get the point) that she misses. It's the sound, that familiar buzz and bubble and bounce that Amy knew she was used to but didn't know she'd miss until it was gone.

She remembers asking Karma once what it was like to be in love. This was back in the Andy Restovich era when Karma doodled his name in her notebooks and practiced all the different ways she could take his name 'upon the occasion of their marriage' (Karma believed in the formality of the language, if nothing else) and scribbled some version of 'Karma loves Andy' on every piece of scrap paper or never-going-to-be-handed-in homework assignment she had.

"What's it like?" Amy asked. "Being in love?"

"It's… wonderful," Karma said. She rolled over onto her back on Amy's bed and stared up at the pale outlines of the stars on the ceiling. "It's like I'm that star," she said, pointing at one (and if there was a reason for her choice, Amy never saw it), "and he's that one and you see how dull we are? How plain and boring and blah"

Amy nodded and then Karma clapped her hands and the lights went out. The stars glowed on the ceiling and they stared at them, heads inches apart.

"But see?" Karma said. "Now we're electric, we're glowing and shining and lighting up the night." She beamed up at the stars. "Being in love is like something inside you burning so bright and so hot that it could light up the sky and it's like the sky must always be dark because everyone can see you shining, always."

Amy smiled, as she so often did when Karma rambled on about something with all her energy and passion and even if she made little (no) sense, Amy loved it. Maybe it wasn't the glow so bright she could be seen from space kind of love (or maybe it was) but it made her heart hurt in the best kind of way.

She'd waited years since that night to feel that kind of love Karma had talked about. It wasn't an active kind of thing, it wasn't like she fell asleep every night hoping the next day she'd wake up and find him (because she'd just assumed it would be a him because...well… why wouldn't she?) and she always figured it would happen when she least expected it.

Guess she was right about that.

But now Amy knew Karma was wrong because yeah, maybe love burned bright and hot. And maybe it could light the sky (if you let it) but the sky clearly wasn't always dark because everyone sure as fuck couldn't see it, not even the ones who thought they did.

Not even the ones who should.

But she'd had the burning part right. It is burning bright and hot and Amy feels like she's going supernova from the inside out. But it's invisible, the light's trapped inside her and there's not even the tiniest crack. There's not so much as a sliver of it escaping and it's killing her and she just can't take it anymore.

She stands before she can think, opens the door before she can pause, crosses the hall before she can stop herself. She's halfway through the third knock when Lauren throws open the door.

"I think I'm gay," Amy says. "Like really. Not faking it gay, like you think I am," and she realizes that she just outed herself and Karma in two totally different ways. "But, really actually gay gay."

Lauren stares at her for a minute, just long enough for Amy to think maybe she's fucked up and just made the worst mistake of her life and to wonder if maybe that's actually a good thing cause maybe anything is better than this.

Anything except maybe the silence (and Amy finally gets the whole deafening idea) that lasts right up until Lauren scoots to one side, giving her room to come in and this time, when the door shuts again, Amy's on the other side, hoping that maybe this new will be better than the others.

She doesn't think it could be much worse.