A/N: OMG, I am so sorry. I haven't updated since October... Let me just say that life has gotten in the way. I won't waste your time with my lame excuses. I hope to be able to update this, and my other stories, way more frequently, like, at least once a month. I'd say once a week, but that might be pushing it. Here's a longer chapter, so hopefully that will sort of make up for the lack of updates.

What happened last: Chloe arrived in DC, and made a comment about airplane security which upset Emily because her father was at the Pentagon on 9/11. Chloe doesn't really understand her mistake, but she explains that to Emily, and is forgiven.

I woke up early the next morning and no one else was up. It was about seven. I opened one of the windows and let the warm breeze blow in. The air conditioning was almost cold. It was strange not to hear the sounds of a farm in the morning. Instead, I could hear the distant sounds of a city waking up. There were cars and trucks flying by on a highway, there were honking horns in traffic jams. This was different from everything I had ever experienced.

I headed to the bathroom and organized my toiletries in the drawer and on the counter. Then I took a shower and got dressed in jeans and a light purple shirt.

By the time Emily and Dr. Lightman got up, I have been awake for several hours. Lightman made breakfast while I sat in the kitchen with one of my books and Emily was on the phone with her mother. By the sound of it, they didn't get along well, and Emily's mother wanted her to do something that she didn't want to do. Dr. Lightman announced that his blueberry pancakes were ready, and Emily came back into the room and tossed the phone onto the counter where it landed with a thud.

"Mom wants me to go to a dinner party with her this afternoon and evening. She said she'll be here to pick me up at four." Dr. Lightman didn't look happy.

"I told her we have company," he said.

"It's Mom. She doesn't listen."

"Dr. Foster has a video for me to watch. Maybe I could call her and we could do that tonight," I said. Emily looked relieved.

"Okay! We can take you to her place on the way to the dinner," Emily said. "I'll text Mom and let her know."

"I'll call Foster for you Chloe. She wants to talk at me about payroll again anyway."

"Okay," I said. "Thanks."

"Come on! Let's get ready to go drive around," Emily said as soon as we were done eating. She put the dishes in the sink and rushed upstairs, with me following. Several minutes later I had put most of the usual things in my purse and had chosen a pair of flats. Emily met me in the hall, and we headed downstairs, calling out a goodbye to Dr. Lightman as we headed out the door.

Emily and I tossed our purses in the back seat and got into the car.

"Where to?" she asked.

"You're the expert," I replied, and we both laughed.

We drove around for a while, and stopped at a café that Emily likes for lunch. She was right, the food was really good. Then we decided we should head back so Emily could get ready for her dinner party thing with her mom. When we got back to the house, Emily called out to her dad that we were home, and he hollered back okay. We went upstairs, and Emily headed straight for her closet to pick out what she was going to wear. I was left standing awkwardly in the doorway, listening to her constant stream of talking. She tossed a pair of black heels, a black skirt and a red shirt onto her bed, and stepped back into my view.

"So, what are you going to wear to Gill's?" she asked.

"Uh… I don't know?" I said, although it came out like a question.

"I can help, if you'd like," she offered. "I have almost an hour to take a shower and do my hair and stuff."

"Okay," I said. There goes her begging for my approval streak again. It may not seem so, but I really was glad to have her help me. There was something about this new environment that made everything different. At home, everyone expected me to always be dressed up. In the city, I guess there is such a thing as being overdressed. I didn't want to make another rookie mistake. Besides, I was going to see Dr. Foster.

Emily followed me into my room, and opened the door to my closet.

"Do you own anything casual?" she asked.

"Sort of." She looked at me like I was crazy. "This is most of it, but there's more at home. I'm here for an internship, first and foremost," I explained. "I didn't really realize that I'd need lots of casual clothes."

"Oh. Well, we'll definitely have to go shopping. I can't let you go to any of the summer parties in a suit!" I laughed.

"Summer parties? How many are you talking about?"

"Well, there's a pool party next week, and a bunch of us are going to the movies, and Kelsey Martin always has a bonfire at her beach house..." Emily continued leafing through my closet, trying to find something that was suitable for me to wear. "That's not even including the stuff at the club. There's a formal at the end of June, a fourth of July dance… It goes on and on."

"Wow. That's a lot of parties."

"What kinds of parties are you used to going to?" Emily asked.

"Oh, well… our parties are usually at someone's house, like, a bunch of people get together and eat too much food, and that's it." I could tell this wasn't a satisfactory answer. "We have a whole week of parties like that at the beginning of summer. Someone's always hosting something." Still not satisfactory. "I went to a cave party in the mountains last summer… My friend Jamie drove a bunch of us up there when we were supposed to be sleeping over at her place."

"A cave party? What's that?" Damn, I was hoping this minor exaggeration would convince Emily that my social life wasn't as dull as it really was. Not that it had seemed dull to me, but compared with the list of parties that Emily had been invited to this summer, our little small town parties sounded exactly as they were. Lame.

"A bunch of seniors snuck up into the mountains and set up this huge party in a cave. They had music, and everyone brought food. It was lots of fun. Some juniors thought it would be cool to spike the drinks, so it was pretty funny to watch everyone dancing as they got drunker."

"Wow, that sounds really cool! Didn't you guys get caught doing it though?"

Uh oh. "We didn't. We weren't drinking, and we left pretty early. Things went… unfortunately wrong… after we left."

"What happened?"

"I'd rather not talk about it," I said. If I told her the whole story, she'd see what kind of place I came from. Cave parties don't happen in DC, and if they did, the school's star football player wouldn't get killed running from the cops when they busted the party. If I told her the whole story, she'd see it all, because the truth was, that party sucked.

Tommy Heasley had a bit too much to drink, and when someone sounded the alarm that the cops were coming, he jumped into his dad's truck, and drove it straight off a cliff. He was dead before he hit the ground. We found out later that the brakes on the truck were shot before he ever got behind the wheel, and if he'd been sober, he would have noticed before it was too late. I couldn't tell Emily this, because it would show exactly what I was escaping from.

"Oh, okay," she said. "How about this shirt and your red heels? I love those, they're really cute!" Emily handed me a red shirt, one of my favorites actually, and pointed to the red shoes.

"Thanks," I said.

"I'd better go shower and change," Emily said, and she left my room. I closed my door behind her, and changed into the red shirt. Then I pulled up Facebook on my computer, and IMed Jamie.

Me: didn't know DC kids went to so many parties…

Jay: ?

Me: Emily was just telling me about all the parties she's been invited to this summer. & she asked what we do for parties…

Jay: uh oh. I sense a crisis?

Me: Yesh. Truth wasn't interesting enough, of course. I think she thought I was joking, actually.

Jay: are we that pathetic?

Me: I guess.

Me: To save face here, I told her about the cave party…

Me: not about Tommy Heasley obvs..

Jay: don't remind me. That could've been us.

Me: You were sober. & it wasn't.

Jay: we shouldn't have gone.

Me: We were young and stupid.

Jay: yeah. well, gtg, there's a barbeque at Stud's

Me: … have fun!

"Ready?" Emily called from down the hall some time later. "My mom's almost here."

"Almost," I called back, and I minimized my conversation, put my shoes on and grabbed my purse. I headed downstairs to find Emily waiting. A car pulled into the driveway. It certainly looked nice, and expensive.

"That's my mom," Emily said. We got all the way outside, and Emily introduced me to Zoe, before she realized she had left her cell phone in her room. She rushed back inside to get it, leaving me with Zoe. Thankfully, Emily returned moments later, holding her phone. She looked slightly guilty.

"Tsk, tsk. I don't want to be late for this dinner," Zoe said. "Emily knows better."

"Sorry Mom," Emily said when she got into the back seat. Zoe rolled her eyes.

"She means it," I said, for some reason feeling that I needed to defend Emily.

"You're better at hiding it than Cal," Zoe said. "I almost thought you were normal."

"Mom," Emily said. Zoe stopped her thread of conversation, and didn't nag Emily anymore about taking too long. Zoe stopped the car in front of a condo.

"I'll walk you to the door," Emily said. We both got out of the car.

"You don't have to. I don't want to make your mom late."

"No, I want to say hi to Gill," Emily said after we had closed the car doors. We walked up to the door, and Emily knocked.

"Thanks for defending me like that."

"No problem. It's just what I saw. You looked guilty when you said you were sorry."

"Oh, yeah. I forgot you see everything." It was probably good that I couldn't see her face right then, otherwise I would have gotten caught reading her.
Dr. Foster opened the door.

"Hi Emily, Chloe."

"Hi Gill! You guys have fun. Chloe, give me a call when you're done, and I'll see if we can pick you up on the way home," Emily said.

"Don't worry about it, I can take her back to your place," Dr. Foster said.

"Okay! See you later Chloe!" Emily said, and she turned to get back in the car before her mother got even more irritated.

"Come on in, Chloe," Dr. Foster said, and I followed her into the house. She had the documentary all set up on the TV. I wasn't really sure if I should say something, so I didn't, and then she started the documentary.

By the time it was over, I got it. Maybe not as much as someone who lived through 9/11 and remembered, and certainly not as much as anyone who was affected, but I got it. After it was over and Foster shut the TV off, I found myself staring at the blank screen. My brain felt all fuzzy. It was just too much to really take in and understand. There were definitely things here that I wasn't going to understand right away, because no one ever talks about it. I finally tore my eyes away from the black TV screen to look over at Dr. Foster. She was wiping tears from the corners of her eyes. I was too numb to cry.

After several more minutes, she turned to face me.

"I think I get it now," I said. My voice sounded pretty flat and unemotional.

"I don't know about you, but I need some chocolate," Dr. Foster said.

"Sure," I said, and I forced a smile across my face.

I followed her into the kitchen, where she pulled out a cookbook.

"Cookies, pudding, brownies, cheesecake…any preference?" she asked.

"Not really," I said.

"Chocolate cheesecake for dinner then?"

"Sounds good," I said. It was just a little bit awkward, to be standing here in my boss's kitchen, about to make chocolate cheesecake for dinner, after watching a horrifyingly real video about something that really honestly happened.

"Chloe? Earth to Chloe?"

"What? Oh, sorry Dr. Foster. I guess I spaced out for a minute."

"No problem. I was just asking what you wanted to drink with dinner. And you can call me Gillian," she said.

"Uhm, okay, Gillian. Do you have milk?"

"Sure do."

Why did I get the feeling that she wanted me to talk about the documentary?

"Nobody'd ever shown us a video before… back home. They told us about it, in school, but words weren't really enough to describe the emotions."

"I haven't see video of it either, not since I was watching it in between clients at the Pentagon that morning."

"How do you live with it? When it was this close to home?"

"People are really pretty amazing, what we can learn to live with anyway. At the time it seemed like we were all going to die. Nobody really knew anything. Since then, I guess we just have to hope for the best. Our whole world changed afterwards, but I'd personally rather deal with the changes than the alternative. You just have to wake up in the morning and live your life. You just have to move on."

"You don't do it because it's easy, you do it because you have to," I said. I got it. Living with this was just like living with my father. Or living with Tommy Heasley. You wake up in the morning and move on, because you have to. You can't change the world by hiding from it.

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