"You know, you look exactly the same," she had told Alex, and yet that wasn't entirely accurate. It couldn't be true for neither of them; it was impossible to pretend that a significant number of years hadn't gone by. That was what one should do; one had to consider the years, because there had also been a part of truth to her words. At first glance, yes, of course the dark-haired woman had altered, but not enough so as to be anything other than the old Alex in Piper's eyes.

She recalled the line that Alex had quoted from 'Casablanca'. It suited the surrealism of their encounter quite well, somewhere between shock and trepidation. It wasn't even slightly funny that the small, inconspicuous bookstore which had caught her eye a million times belonged precisely to Alex. Piper understood the brunette's palpable impassiveness and even her posterior rejection, because she had to feel like there was nowhere she could run. Here it was again, that stubborn twist of fate -even if she didn't believe in destiny-, tying knots all over their timeline. She could agree with Alex's attitude on that point; it was irritating.

Alex's knee-jerk, hostile reaction when she'd made the mistake of inquiring about her relationship with Cherry had surprised Piper. Finding the dark-haired woman still so sour about the past had been unexpected - not that she didn't understand where the anger was coming from, but it had been simple curiosity on her part, making conversation and nothing more. At least she hoped it was, for drawing straight, concrete lines was difficult, particularly while dealing with the shock of being in Alex's presence after so long.

The blonde had left the little bookshop shortly after, claiming that she had to go to work, which was arguably true, since she had to meet Polly, her business partner as well as her friend. It hadn't escaped her that Alex hadn't asked a single thing about her life, what she was doing now, or how she was. Taking into account the brunette's personality and how she used to mock small talk, it wasn't strange. "Elevator chitchat," she used to call it, "The conversational equivalent of elevator music." However, it shouldn't have appeared so superficial to her, if she would've considered the circumstances in which they'd last seen each other.

It had become blatantly obvious very soon that there was no way she could avoid that confrontation, not when that bastard Healy had ignored her cry for help and had slithered back into the building like the snake he was, leaving her alone with that other viper. And Pennsatucky was the kind of brainwashed, determined creep who was too far gone to be reasoned with. That woman was either pure evil, or completely insane, and Piper was in no position to make petty differentiations between those two states. There was no difference. To make that woman interiorize a certain concept or idea, one would have to smack her head against a wall, break it open like an egg and shove it in.

By drawing her very special Secret Santa present from inside her jumper, Piper acknowledged that she would have to fight that religious nut. However, that wasn't enough, and Pennsatucky disarmed her easily, with a swift movement, slashing the palm of her hand open with a sharpened, wooden cross. Trembling, Piper stared at the stinging, bloody gash. This was real; this was actually happening to her, bizarre as it was to picture herself in a prison rumble. But the time of imagining was over.

"God loves me. He don't love you, 'cause you ain't worthy of God's love," said the Angel of God, in fact resembling a psychopathic clown.

Piper had been backtracking, going this way and that, jumping forward, crisscrossing like a very confused driver trying to find the correct path. There was no correct path, she had already concluded, and now she was all alone. After losing Alex, after losing Larry, she had no one and nothing - not this life, not the other. There was only time, and prison, and no future. She had fucked up somewhere, but she could no longer see where. Her head was hazy, like dipped in mist, and there was a big space of nothingness sitting on her chest. All she'd wanted was to breathe some fresh air, because the pressure was beginning to choke her, but apparently, Pennsatucky wasn't even willing to allow her that small break. She had focused her self-righteous crusade on Piper because she personified everything she wished to destroy in the world.

"You ain't worthy of nobody's love. So I think it's time that you die."

She shouldn't have said that, because it was the last drop for Piper. She had nothing, nothing, and suddenly, something clicked inside her head. Her mind didn't deflect -it couldn't-, but shut down altogether, pressing the "power" button on the remote. She couldn't hold it in anymore and emptied herself, let everything drop and crash down at her feet, the different threads of her life which she was having so much trouble reconciling, focalizing it all on the freak before her.

It felt like someone else was doing it; she was seeing red, so far removed that she was experiencing everything in slow motion. Some instinct of hers nevertheless connected with Poussey, Black Cindy, Taystee, and Watson's advice, and was enough to make Pennsatucky lose her footing and stare at her from the ground with a pained and stunned expression. But Piper didn't stop there; she fell on her knees and started beating on the woman with her right fist, pinning her down with her left hand at first, until it wasn't necessary, until she started punching her with that fist as well. She was pounding on Pennsatucky, but mainly on herself, on every last aspect of her life, shattering it to pieces together with that woman's face.

Blood bloomed from her knuckles, mixed with that between her fingers -from the cut-, and with Pennsatucky's, but she couldn't stop. They had to stop her; they had to grab her and drag her off the freak, forcing her on the ground, face down, but she hadn't stopped, not really. She was still lost in that haze of liberating fury when she heard a banging noise and they hauled her to her feet. There, behind the door's dirty glass, was Alex, looking straight at her with huge, worried eyes, but Piper could do nothing about it, not with that stranger inside her body.

The truth was that their context was anything but common, so maybe it was stupid of her to expect normal questions, normal reactions, but she didn't believe that made her pretentious. Piper simply couldn't swallow the fact that she had been around Alex, talking to her, just like she'd never been able to be indifferent to her in the past. That morning, she had only confirmed that time was irrelevant in that respect.

The blonde entered the coffee shop and walked directly to one of the tables facing a wide window, which was their usual spot. Polly was already there, having tea and leafing through a couple of magazines at the same time.

"Was I early?" asked her friend.

"You're never early." Piper zipped open her jacket, took it off, and sat down.

"Then you're late. Is everything okay?" Polly closed the magazines and waved at the waitress. "Coffee?"

"Just water for me, thanks. I already had coffee."

"Yeah? So listen, I've got an idea."

She let Polly rattle on about advertisement and ways they could expand their business, although it was all going in one ear and out the other anyway. After years of balance, seeing Alex had shaken her up inside, yet on the outside, her hands were steady - she hadn't trembled once since she had kicked the shit out of Pennsatucky the night of the Christmas pageant. When downing two bottles of water didn't make Piper's mouth less dry, she couldn't take it any longer and had to interrupt.

"I ran into someone today," she said, not even waiting for her friend to ask her who. "Alex."

"Alex?" Polly leaned on the table to get closer, eyebrows raised, eyes wide open, her tirade all but forgotten. "Alex, Alex?"

"Yes. Alex, Alex," she replied, smiling despite herself.

"You ran into her? Just like that?"

"Just like that, on my way here."

"And?" Polly gestured with her hand for her to go on. "Was it bad?"

"No. Well, a little. I don´t know... it was just weird."

"Oh my God! You didn't…? You didn't, right? Because I'll kill you, I swear, I'll kill you and then I'll kill you again just to make sure you're dead. I'll kill her too. You're not getting into that shitstorm again."

"Jesus, Pol!" Piper reached up to her forehead and pulled off her wool hat. "Nothing happened. We had coffee, we talked, she was pissed off."

"She was pissed off? Listen to me, don't you dare feel sorry for her. That bitch, she's trying to manipulate you all over again. I know you, you can't stand people being mad at you, and you'll end up going after her with your puppy eyes."

Begrudgingly, Piper had to admit that Polly was right. She hated feeling that pulsating guilt in the mouth of her stomach; when she did, she would try to backpedal, and if that didn't work, she'd feel the desperate need to make it better. Her friend knew it, and surely Alex knew it too. Whether she had done it on purpose or not was irrelevant, really, and Piper was trying not to think about it, because that led to unraveling the brunette's intentions, and that was too dangerous.

No, Alex could've been merely voicing out the thorns in her side. She was probably making the brunette out to be more twisted than she really was - she hoped.

The biggest problem was deciding what to do now, if anything, because any course of action had to come from her. After tranquilizing Polly's snarky instincts, she left the coffee shop and went to her scheduled meeting with the kid who had designed their website, since it was ready for an update. Navigating the outside world had been deceivingly easy; how could've she ever believed that she'd had nothing to fall back on? She'd had more than most of the other inmates, but she'd needed some time to differentiate between losing everything and losing track of who she was. She'd been walking down two paths at the same time, but those paths had disappeared, leaving her stranded in the wilderness, not knowing which paths to create and where to start. Her readaptation had thus been misleading; she'd been able to move around as a free woman without great effort, but only because she hadn't lost everything - what she'd lost was her old context. She was still constructing a new one.

Piper wrapped up her meeting, texted Polly to let her know that everything had gone fine, and retraced her morning's steps in the crunchy snow. With no foreseeable path, no married life, and no real intra-history she could tell herself or anybody else, she would sometimes tell herself stories -stories of what had been close to happen, of what could have never been, of different circumstances-, but that was nothing more than mentally plucking petals off an imaginary flower. In contrast, there was something very real going on now, and the difference between knowing that Alex was out there somewhere and knowing exactly where and how she was, was more than a challenge for her mental balance. She couldn't help going back there.

The bookshop storefront was an oldened white, with its name in bottle-green lettering: "Backpages," it said, like the back pages of a book, like the sixties' song 'My Back Pages'. It had mint-green blinds, which were partly drawn now to protect the interior from excessive sunlight, she guessed, and a little bell over the door which marked her arrival into a magical place - a land where all she had to do to see the dark-haired woman was open that door. She recalled a different door to another world: that of the utility closet in prison, and Alex's quip about being the faun from "fucking Narnia", and how they'd managed to escape their reality for a short spell by clinging to each other.

Remembering those things made her shuffle her feet uneasily. They didn't usually cross her mind, since it had been a long time ago and there had been a very definite break between that first segment of her sentence and the rest, making the distance even greater. However, one thing was recalling a certain situation and a very different thing was imagining oneself in that situation again -that she couldn't do-, so it was almost as if the memory belonged to somebody else.

She passed the blackboard sign planted on the sidewalk, recognizing Alex's handwriting on it, and pushed the door open. There were five or six customers there, two of them having coffee at the little tables. Alex's friend waved at her from behind the bar and pointed to her left, where Piper made out the brunette between the stacks. Walking towards the woman slowly, Piper took the chance to look at her without her knowledge, for the first time in years. With her glasses on top of her head and the sleeves of her black t-shirt rolled up, Alex was pulling out a storybook from the top shelf and handing it to a boy who couldn't be older than six years old. The book had obviously been too high for him to reach.

"There you go," Alex said to the boy. When she spotted her, she returned her glasses to their place. "Hey, you're back."

"Hey," Piper made way for the little boy, who was carrying the book over his head and making airplane or maybe motorcycle noises. "Seeing you around children, that's a first."

"Yeah, I don't understand them. Not even when I was a kid. It's like trying to be nice to cats when you're a dog person." The brunette shrugged and faced the shelf.

"Still mad at me?"

"I'm not mad at you, Piper," Alex answered, without turning around. "I just saw the chance of saying some true stuff and said it. That's it."

"Right. You could never help doing that."

"It is what it is. And you had to half-ass ask me if Cherry was my girlfriend."

"At least I asked you something, showed some interest about your life." Piper was about to add more, but stopped herself when the brunette sighed, shook her head, and faced her. She was wearing the same expression Piper had seen behind the dirty glass - those big eyes. It only lasted a couple of seconds, though, and then her cool demeanor returned.