A/N: A brief interlude, but the next chapter will be up sooner than this one was! Thanks as always for the reviews!!

Disclaimer: I still own nothing.

The disturbance caused by Dan Burright notwithstanding, Amy was back to her normal, collected self the next week in Biology class, and when Mrs. Adams assigned a lab on cellular structure with the report counting for fifteen percent of their grades that quarter, offered up her house quite politely as a place for them to work on it.

And so it was that that Zach found himself driving to the pristine, front-page-of-Architectural-Digest house where Amy lived for the second time after getting out of Debate team practice. Walking up the shallow stone porch steps, he rang the bell.

Amy answered the door, and ushered him in with innate politeness into a fleckless foyer with polished hardwood floors and an artsy single lucky bamboo in a slim blown-glass vase on a glass table. The walls were a spotless white and the floor looked clean enough to eat off of. Zach raised an eyebrow and curiously looked around.

"Well, I promised you a tour earlier, right?" Amy said quietly. "There's not really much to see, but it's clean. We've a housekeeper come in twice a week, and to be honest, the place is empty most of the time, since my mom works so much and I've swim practice and Chess club and volunteer part-time at the library."

Zach could have figured that one out without her saying. The interior of the house was as sleekly modern as the exterior, everything precisely arranged and polished to a gleam. There were no shoes carelessly kicked off by the door, no dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, no ties or jackets draped over the backs of chairs. Were it not for the single photograph of Amy and a woman whose dark hair and solemnly intelligent blue eyes clearly marked her as Amy's mother on the wall of the parlour, Zach would have expected the house to be an unoccupied model home decorated and upkept by real estate agents.

"Well, anyway, do you want something to eat?" Amy asked him after giving him the brief tour of the lower level of the house. "Or do you want to just get to work?"

Zach was mortally afraid that he'd irrevocably dirty something up in the spotless kitchen. "We can just get to work. Um, where are we working on the report, by the way?"

"My room," Amy answered. "Come on up."

They ascended a spiralling wood-and-glass staircase to the upper level, and Amy opened the first door on the left. In a stark contrast to the minimalist, barely-lived-in appearance of the rooms downstairs, her bedroom looked almost old-fashioned, with pillows in all shades of blue on a snowy-white bed and dainty, feminine white furniture. There was a neat desk holding a sleek laptop adjacent to a bookshelf holding a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica along with an eclectic collection of literature ranging from Virgil to Shakespeare to Ayn Rand to the Harry Potter books. There were even one or two paperbacks that looked like they could be trashy romance novels, but before he could tease her about that, his gaze landed on the wall behind the desk.

It was white, like the rest of the house, but almost entirely covered with carefully framed pictures. Several larger ones were recognizable as paintings, all done in the same style with subject matters ranging from seascapes to still lifes to a portrait of a girl who looked like a younger version of Amy herself, standing on a bridge over a creek teeming with lilies and cattails. The smaller ones looked to be postcards from places all over the world, and Zach recognized one of them to be the postcard of the Little Mermaid sculpture in Denmark that he'd found after it had fallen out of her book earlier that year.

"My dad sends me a picture every birthday," Amy said softly, coming up behind him to look at the little gallery herself. "As well as Christmas. Once in a while, though rarely, one comes without a special occasion. Nowadays it's mostly postcards rather than actual artwork, but..." She sighed, and he turned, and though her expression was calm and carefully blank, he wanted to step forward and wrap his arms around her, enfold her like one might do to protect something delicate and fragile and injured from the harshness of the outside world. It would be a bit presumptuous, though, and her history with her father had nothing to do with him.

"How many birthdays has that been?" he asked. "Er, well, you don't have to tell me. I don't want to overstep the bounds here or anything."

"Eleven," she answered, and perhaps she read his expression a bit too clearly, because she reached out and touched his arm in what was probably meant to be reassurance. "You don't have to worry about me. I'm fine."

"I'm not worried about you," he said quickly, before modifying the statement. "Or, that is to say, no more than any of my other female friends. We ARE friends, right? I mean, you're not putting up with me just as a way to pass AP Bio and stuff. We both pretty much know that you could kick the exam's ass with one hand tied behind your back and running on fifteen minutes of sleep. But, yeah, I'm not trying to butt in or anything. As long as you're okay. And if you're not okay, I swear that I can listen without being an asshole about it or asking stupid questions. Unless you start crying or something. In which case I might panic like a five-year-old at a horror movie, because girl tears are scary and evil and make me feel like raw sewage. Raw sewage mixed with radioactive waste and the Ebola virus and like, Satan's vomit."

He paused after this not-quite-masterful attack of verbal diarrhea and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans, trying for nonchalance. Amy kept silent for a moment, then smiled, and in an uncharacteristic move that surprised him, reached up and traced soft, delicate fingertips across his cheek.

"You're sweet," she said softly. "And a good friend. Let's get to work."