Emily was startled awake by the sound of the front door closing. The house was dark and quiet and she was on the couch, snuggled underneath several blankets with a glass of water nearby her on the coffee table. She didn't remember falling asleep or who had tucked her in here on the couch after she, Charlie, Eden, and Tuck had made it back to the Log and talked for some time about what had happened in the scene shop. By the light of the street lamps coming in the windows, she could just make out the form of Tuck curled up like a cat on the other part of the sectional. He was still fast asleep. The door closing hadn't woken him.

A dark figure was moving in the doorway. Emily could tell it was Jo from the way she moved and how careful she was being to keep quiet. Emily expected her to make her way upstairs after she had pulled off her boots and hung her coat on the banister, but she walked into the living room instead and made her way to the corner of the sectional where she picked up Emily's sleep-heavy legs, sat down and settled them on her lap again.

"Time is it?" Emily mumbled.

"Nearly 2:30."

"You okay?"

"I guess," Jo replied. "I broke up with Liz."

"You did? I didn't think you believed me," Emily admitted quietly.

"Of course I did, you're one of my best friends," Jo assured her. "But it was still a bad situation, Em. You were drunk in the middle of the scene shop and I needed to talk to her and hear her side of things."

"I'm really sorry," Emily sighed. "I don't know what else to say."

"She told me what she had said to you," Jo went on. "I can't believe I didn't know that she thought that way. I mean, I was dating her. How could I not have seen that?"

"I guess there are some things you don't learn about people right away," Emily said. "I was pretty shocked when she started saying all that stuff about Eden."

There was silence for a while and Emily could feel Jo toying with the blanket that was covering her feet.

"I don't want to be with someone who thinks that way," Jo finally said. "But you shouldn't have thrown that paint on her. That wasn't right either."

"I know," Emily said. "I feel pretty awful about it. Do you think I should apologize to her?"

"No," Jo answered firmly. "She specifically asked that we all just leave her alone. I don't see how that's going to work with Charlie and Eden and I being in Rep Term with her, but, I'm going to try to respect her wishes."

"Did she get it, at least? That she was being racist?"

"No. We talked for such a long time, but I don't think she got it."

"I'm sorry," Emily said again.

"It's okay. We'll all do better tomorrow."

Emily fell asleep again sometime after that. The alcohol that was left in her system was steadily pulling her back into unconsciousness and the fact that Jo was there with her and safe and not too upset made her feel calm and soothed.

When Emily woke again in the morning to pull the blinds more firmly shut, Jo was no longer on the couch with her. Nor was Tuck for that matter. But she could hear the sounds of people moving and clattering things in the kitchen and that made Emily happy. She didn't want to face the morning alone.


When Paige woke up that morning, she didn't remember anything. As a rule, she never slept very deeply. She woke often in the night tossed and turned a great deal. On the rare occasion that Paige did sleep deeply when she woke up, it was as if the world had been erased completely and it always took her a few minutes to piece everything back together.

There was once, soon after she had started at Stanford that this had happened. Paige had been so worn out from the grueling swim schedule and her body so unused to her new surroundings and schedule, that she had one of those miraculous nights of sleep that felt like one long blink. She and her freshman roommate's beds had been set up parallel to one another in their dorm, on opposite walls, and when Paige had awoken she had turned toward her roommate's bed. Paige would never forget waking up that morning, staring at this person and having no idea who they were. It had taken her nearly two whole minutes of internal what-the-fucking before she remembered that she was at college and the person sleeping in her room was not some random stranger but, in fact, her roommate. It was quite a relief.

First Paige remembered Tuck. Tuck was always first. She remembered his laugh which brought back his smile and quickly after that, the rest of his face. Then Paige remembered herself. Then she recognized her surroundings and after a small search of her mind, why she was sleeping in her grandmother's bedroom. After that, she remembered Emily and then she remembered the fight.

Almost as if on cue, her phone rang. Paige did not need to look at the screen to know that it was Tuck.

"Hey," she answered simply.

"I've been waiting for you to wake up for like two hours so I could call you," Tuck grumbled.

"Sorry," Paige said unnecessarily. "I was actually getting some pretty good sleep."

"What the hell happened with you and Em last night?" Tuck asked, getting right to the point. "She'd barely tell us anything."

"We just had a fight, that's all," Paige told him. "It wasn't even really a fight. She just told me something that upset me. I just needed some time."

"You're both being annoyingly vague," Tuck huffed.

"Is she okay?" Paige couldn't help but ask. Even when she was upset with Emily she hated not actually being there. Long distance made everything so much more difficult. Paige hated it.

"Oh sure," Tuck quipped. "I mean, she showed up at the scene shop last night totally blasted and threw a can of black paint all over Jo's girlfriend. But otherwise, she seems peachy."

"I'm serious, Tuck," Paige said, not in the mood to joke around.

"So am I," Tuck responded, his tone free from sarcasm.

"Wait," Paige spat, sitting up in bed. "She did what? Why would she do that?"

"Liz was saying some pretty racist stuff," Tuck informed her.

"So she threw a bucket of paint on her?" Paige asked again, just to clarify. It still seemed crazy that Emily would do something so reckless and impulsive. That was more of Paige's thing.

"Well, like I said, she was drunk," Tuck answered. "I'm sure it seemed like the right way to handle the situation at the time."

"Still," Paige and Tuck said in tandem.

"-wasn't the best idea," Tuck finished their thought. "I mean, if the director or anyone had still been around, I don't think it would have gone well. She probably would've been sent to the Dean or something. Maybe gotten suspended from classes for a few days. I think you should talk to her."

Paige was momentarily stunned. She'd just assumed that everyone at Vallance had been in on the fact that Emily was not currently a student. But apparently, she had managed to keep that a secret from everyone, even her closest friends. For some reason, this made the fact that Emily had kept this from her, Paige, sting a bit less. If Emily had felt embarrassed or upset enough to keep this from everyone, maybe she was right and there was something to this that Paige just didn't understand.

"Paige? You still there?"

"Yeah, yeah," Paige replied, snapping back into the moment with her brother. "I'll definitely call her today."

"So what did you do last night?" Tuck asked.

"I made pretzels," Paige said.

"Wow, you're getting really boring," Tuck laughed.

"Shut up," Paige responded. "I wanted to perfect my pretzel twist. You have to spin the dough in midair and then make sure it lands on the tray the right way...it's harder than it sounds."

"I bet," Tuck mused. It was clear he was still teasing her.

"I made three dipping sauces to go with them, too!" Paige thew out. It was all she could think of to defend herself.

"Oh well," Tuck responded, "why didn't you say that in the first place? Your Saturday night sounds much less lame now. "

"I hate you and I'm hanging up now," Paige said.

"Love you, too, my little pretzel queen," Tuck responded. Then, laughing loudly, he hung up quickly before Paige had a chance to retort.


When Emily walked into the kitchen, she found her three housemates in mid-conversation.

"I just don't get what I'm doing wrong," Jo said. "I'm 21 and Liz was my first real relationship. I waited such a long time and I still got it completely wrong."

"Maybe you just didn't know her well enough before you started going out," Eden suggested.

Jo was sat on the floor, her back leaning against the fridge and Eden had her head in Jo's lap. After a moment, Emily realized that Jo was holding a pair of tweezers and, sure enough, after a few moments, she leaned over and carefully plucked a few hairs from Eden's left eyebrow.

Charlie was standing at the stove, minding a couple of pancakes which were cooking in a skillet in front of her. She flipped them and held the spatula up to her eyes to inspect it.

"When did we get this spatula? Eden, isn't this our...spatula?" Charlie asked, holding the object out to her girlfriend.

"Oh shit, how did that get down here?" Eden asked, holding out her hand. Charlie gave the spatula over to her and she looked at it closely. "Yeah, you shouldn't use this on the pancakes."

Charlie pulled another spatula from the can of kitchen utensils that they kept on the counter between the sink and the stove and lifted the now complete pancakes from the pan, putting them in with a large stack that was sitting on a plate inside the oven to keep them warm.

"I just feel like I'm missing something," Jo went on as if the spatula conversation had not even happened. "Now that I think about it, I'm not really sure I even liked her as much I liked finally having someone. Is there something wrong with me?" She looked around at her friends sadly.

"There is nothing wrong with you," Eden told her. "You're the most normal and well adjusted of all of us."

"You're just so GOOD and NICE," Charlie added, finishing up another two pancakes. "I think it's just hard to find someone who's a real match for you. And who cares how long it takes you to find someone you really like? Whoever it ends up being is going to be the most lucky person in the universe."

"I think you find people when you stop looking, you know?" Emily said, finally entering the conversation from where she was leaning in the doorway. "When you try to force things they're just not authentic. You should just relax. The right person will come along."

"I just feel like it should have happened by now," Jo pouted. "You've all found your….soulmates or whatever."

"Oh my god," Charlie said, "please do not judge your love life against the mess that Eden and I made of everything since freshman year."

"I know it was sort of will-they-won't-they with you guys for a couple years, but it wasn't that bad was it?" Emily asked.

"If you two knew the amount of nonsense we put each other through," Eden said, sitting up as Jo had finished her eyebrows. "We had to keep most of it from you because, well, you just would have killed us if you knew how stupid we were being."

"And I'm a terrible girlfriend so don't worry about me either," Emily commiserated as Jo waved her over and Emily took Eden's place. Jo began to pluck her eyebrows as soon as Emily had closed her eyes.

"What happened with you two anyway?" Jo asked.

"I just...fucked up," Emily said quietly. "I wasn't honest with her about something and I should have been."

"That's about all we got out of her last night, too," Eden told Jo.

"Well, it's like what you just said about you and Charlie," Emily replied, covering up her vague answer. "If you knew how stupid I was being, you'd kill me. It's not a big deal. We'll work it out. Everything will be fine."

The answer came off much more confident than Emily felt, but the other three seemed to buy it and for that she was grateful. Paige's reaction to finding out she had been forced to take a term off made her reticent to share the information with her friends. She just couldn't take any more confrontation right now. She was too tired and hungover.

Their talk turned to mindless chatter for the next few minutes as Charlie finished up the pancakes and Jo finished plucking Emily's eyebrows. Soon after that, Tuck, who had gone to shower and change for the day, rejoined them and they all enjoyed a leisurely breakfast.

"I can't believe you guys only get one day off a week," Emily said nearly two hours later as they were finally clearing off the table. "I feel like I never get to see any of you at all."

"I know what you mean," Jo replied. "I think I saw you once in passing this last week. It sucks. But we open in just under six weeks and I am nowhere near ready."

"You're going to be fine," Tuck assured Jo. "I promise. I'm not going to let you make a fool of yourself on stage. We have the rest of the day to work on your scene and we can grab time in between class and rehearsal every day during the week."

"You just have to stop dreading it so much, Jo," Eden advised her. "Just go all in. If you give everything you have to this character, you're going to be great. I know it."

"You do seem like you have some kind of hang up with this part," Charlie agreed. "Do you hate doctors? I would understand if you hated doctors."

"I just feel really weird playing a man, to be honest," Jo admitted, grabbing the binder which contained her script from her backpack in the hallway. "I don't know how."

"That's what acting is, though," Eden said. "I'm not in my 60s. I'm not Mormon. It's not about any of that. It's about telling the story. You have to figure out what part Henry plays in the story we're telling and do your best to present that to the audience."

"People know that you're acting," Tuck added. "It's like an unwritten agreement with the audience. We pretend to be other people and they suspend their disbelief. We all engage in the story together. That's what I love about theatre."

"I think that you were cast in this part for a reason," Charlie said. "You obviously have something important to give to this part. A perspective or that no one else has or I don't know...an awesome jawline."

Jo laughed at that.

"Put the gender thing aside," Eden said firmly. "It's just one little part of this."

"It doesn't feel that way to me," Jo admitted. "It's been all I can think about lately."

"It's just a part," Tuck told her firmly. He rounded the table to where Jo was sitting and put his hands on her shoulders. "You can do this. I'm going to help you. I am a guy, after all. I can help you get into character."

"You'll tell me if I'm awful?" Jo asked, holding Tuck's gaze firmly with her own.

"I promise," Tuck said, smiling. "But it's not like there's a wrong way to be a guy. Everyone is different. Henry can just be your kind of guy."

Jo looked a bit thunderstruck. "I never thought of it like that," she admitted. "Okay. Let's get to it."

"Yes! Alright, let's go." Tuck stood up and clapped his hands together. "Living room?"

Jo stood up and followed him out of the dining room. "Don't you need your script?" she asked as they walked out down the hall together.

"I've got your whole scene memorized already, actually," Tuck replied.

"Wow. That's not annoying at all, Tuck," Jo deadpanned.

Emily heard him let out a roar of laughter as the two disappeared into the living room.

"Man," Charlie sighed, kicking her shoes up on the table. "Jo's really going through it, huh?"

Eden had gone into the kitchen when Jo and Tuck had headed to the living room, so it was just Emily and Charlie now.

"She does seem crazy stressed about this part," Emily agreed.

Charlie narrowed her eyes at Emily, considering her for a moment.

"What?" Emily asked.

"No, I mean…" Charlie began, looking at Emily like what she was referring to should be obvious and gestured open-palmed toward the living room.

"What?" Emily repeated, less patiently this time.

"You pulling my leg?" Charlie asked.

"No…"

"Okay," Charlie nodded. "So Jo is just stressed about her part in the show and you just had a little fight with Paige. Nothing else is going on."

Emily quirked her eyebrow as she and Charlie stared at one another across the table. "I would say that is a fairly concise summary of the morning," Emily finally said after carefully considering how to respond.

"God," Charlie huffed, shaking her head. "I'm the only one who pays attention to anything in this house."

Emily was about to question Charlie further and try to suss out what she might have guessed about her situation, but she was interrupted by Eden.

"Charlotte," Eden said simply, appearing in the doorway with the purple plastic spatula in her hand.

Charlie's eyes lit up and she tried to get up so quickly from the table that she nearly tipped her chair over. Eden waited for her to start towards the hall before she followed behind her.

"See you later, Em!" Charlie said happily, turning to wave at her as they disappeared down the hall.

Emily rolled her eyes as she watched Eden swat her on the ass and Charlie give a little jump as she hurried along.

"I'm going, I'm going!" Charlie laughed as the two disappeared up the stairs.


With everyone in the house otherwise occupied, it was fairly easy for Emily to slip out unnoticed and head to work for her shift at the Calico Cat. Shonda had explained to her the day before that due to the higher customer traffic on Saturday and Sunday, she closed the shop on Monday and Tuesday instead. Emily couldn't figure out how the little shop which sold such a hodgepodge of knick-knacks and what seemed like useless luxury items to her managed to make enough to stay afloat, but according to Shonda the store did pretty well. Apparently, the citizens of Solomon had a great love of overpriced candles, lotion, wind chimes, aprons, watering cans, greeting cards, paving stones with inspirational quotes carved into them, bookends, journals, coasters...Emily could see no rhyme or reason to the inventory that Shonda stocked in the store unless it was that each item had to have a certain level of kitsch.

Still, Emily was grateful to even have a job, let alone one that was able to pay her a couple dollars more than minimum wage, so she did her best to convince the men and women who walked into the store that their lives would be insurmountably enriched by a silver brooch of a romping kitten, or a long necklace with a gold peacock feather adorned with green and blue crystals, or a ring shaped like a ginkgo leaf that wrapped around the finger and reached nearly to the first knuckle. What did Emily know? Maybe their lives would be better with these things. She had no idea how the upper class lived.

About halfway through her shift, Paige had sent Emily a text, asking if she had time to talk and they had set up a phone date for later that evening at 8:30 pm. With this conversation looming in the distance, the second half of Emily's shift seemed to stretch on forever. It wasn't that she didn't want to talk to Paige, she was just worried that Paige would still be angry with her and the underlying discomfort that Emily felt in her life whenever she and Paige were at odds would creep into the next day. She didn't want that to happen. Emily wanted to make things right. She just wanted everything to go back to normal.

As often it did, Emily's mind wandered to words as she polished a few pieces of jewelry that a woman had opted not to purchase a few minutes prior before she replaced them in the display case. Today, as Emily stared out at the snow-laden streets and the sky, as far away and as the ground seemed from her, shut up in this little shoe box of a store, she remembered a bit of Shakespeare from her senior English class in high school. It was a speech from Richard III that began, "Now is the winter of our discontent." If Emily was remembering correctly, the speech went on to speak of sun and transformation, from dark to light, from broken to healed. Emily wondered vaguely as the minutes crawled by whether she would one day look back on this winter and find a transformation there, or if the season held nothing but discontent in its bruised arms.

Finally, 8 o'clock rolled around and Emily bid Shonda and the other shop clerk a good night and headed for home. Her stomach rumbled as she walked and Emily hoped that there was some pancakes and sausage still left over from that morning. She'd done the calculations in her head and, with another small loan taken out in her name, if she saved as much as she could from this job, minus her rent and various utilities, she would just make enough to pay her tuition for spring term. She hadn't factored in much of a budget for food at all. There just wasn't enough. There was never enough. She would figure it out somehow, though. She had to get back in school and stay on track to graduate. It was the most important thing. She couldn't be left behind. The thought of watching all her friends graduate before her was a nightmare that Emily was unwilling to let become a reality.


Paige called just as Emily was walking in the door.

"Hey, babe," Emily answered. "Hold on just a sec, I'm taking my coat off."

Emily waved distractedly at Tuck and Jo while she pulled off her outer layer of clothing. The two seemed to be watching an episode of some old TV show and laughing together while they shared some chips and salsa. Jo seemed to be much more relaxed than that morning and Emily was glad of that.

"Sorry," Emily said pressing her phone to her ear as she trotted through the house and down into her room. "I'm ready to talk now."

"No worries," Paige answered. Her tone was tender and careful, a complete 180 from the night before. "How was work?"

"Oh, it was fine," Emily said, hurriedly. "I don't want to talk about that."

"Oh," Paige replied. "Sorry."

"No, I just mean...Paige, I'm so sorry," Emily gushed. "I should have told you. I don't like keeping things from you. It made me feel even worse about the whole thing, but I just felt so..."

"It's okay," Paige interrupted. "I'm sorry, too. I should have been more understanding."

"You had every right to be mad," Emily countered.

"Em," Paige said gently. "You haven't told the girls, have you?"

"Well...no," Emily admitted. "I don't want them to worry. And they'd try to fix it for me, you know. And I need to handle this by myself."

It was this fact more than anything else that made Paige worry for Emily. She knew the girls would want to know. She knew how much they shared with one another and supported one another. The fact that Emily was keeping such a serious situation from them confused Paige as well. She knew that they were her main support system and that she would probably be much less stressed and self-destructive if she told them what was going on. Paige had never seen pride effect Emily so much and she didn't know quite what to do to help her.

"I just don't want people to know about this, Paige," Emily told her honestly. "It's really embarrassing to not be able to pay my tuition."

"Okay," Paige replied, though unwillingly. She had a gut feeling that this wasn't going to go well for Emily, but she didn't want to push her either and end up making her girlfriend angry. This was a tricky situation, to say the least.

"Tuck said something about pretzels this morning when we were all having breakfast?" Emily prompted, obviously changing the subject. "Have you finally gotten the twist down?"

Paige smiled softly. "I have. I cracked it at about 12:30 last night. On my third batch of pretzels."

"I'm so proud of you," Emily grinned back.

They talked for nearly an hour, wandering from one subject to another, but Paige couldn't shake the cloud of worry that had settled around her heart. She could only hope that Emily would come to her senses and let her friends help to carry some of the enormous weight she was shouldering.


After hanging up with Paige, Emily headed back upstairs. Everyone was in the living room now and she joined them, plopping down on the sectional, snuggling into the corner. Eden and Charlie were on one side and Tuck and Jo were on the other.

"Can I have some of those chips?" Emily asked, pointing at the discarded bag of tortilla chips that Jo and Tuck had been munching on earlier.

"Yeah, but the salsa's gone," Jo told her.

"That's okay," Emily responded.

Jo passed her the bag and she started shoveling the crumbled remnants of the chips in the bottom of the bag into her mouth.

"Are there any leftover pancakes?" Emily asked the room at large.

"No, I finished them, sorry," Eden informed her. The plate sitting in front of her had the very edge of what Emily could now see was the last few pancakes sitting atop it.

"Could I finish that?" Emily asked shamelessly, eyeing the ghost of a pancake that remained on Eden's plate.

"Sure," Eden replied, handing the plate over, eyeing her friend suspiciously. "Is everything okay, Em?"

"Oh! Yeah!" Emily replied, a bit too enthusiastically around the mouthful of pancake she had immediately started to consume. She swallowed hastily as she looked around at four pairs of worried eyes watching her. "I just didn't have time to go the store today and I'm out of, um, food. I'm out of food. I need to buy groceries."

"I was just about to order a pizza," Charlie chimed in suddenly. "You want some? I'll pay."

"That sounds incredible," Emily gushed. "Whatever kind you want. I'll eat whatever toppings."

"Cool," Charlie replied.

Emily breathed a sigh of relief as everyone's attention returned to the TV. She thought she'd played that off well. She settled back more comfortably in the corner of the couch and tried to ignore her rumbling stomach.

What Emily didn't notice was the quizzical look that Eden was giving Charlie as she pulled up the number to their favorite pizza place and after the call was answered, ordered a large bacon and olive pizza which, as Charlie well knew, was Emily's favorite flavor and as Eden well knew, Charlie thought was a disgusting combination of toppings that she had no intention of eating.