CHAPTER 2

A/N: Much thanks to everyone who reviewed! Sorry I am unbelievably slow with this story, I'll try to be better! On with it now…

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The end of shift came too early in Sara's opinion. Everyone else couldn't wait for shift to end, they were all psyched about the Christmas holiday, enjoying themselves and having fun, but not Sara. She hated Christmas with a passion ever since she was a child. Even though that part of her life was gone now, she was a different person, and she hated thinking about it, holidays were still the worst time of year. Holidays for her when she had been younger, before she'd gone into foster care, not that it'd been much better mind you, just consisted of yelling and fighting more so than regular times of the year. The happy moods of everyone else in the world seemed to put Sara's parents into a horrible mood, thus making them angry with Sara, her brother, and each other, which brought on the fighting. Sara still expected Christmas to consist of screaming, hitting and things been thrown around at each other instead of presents, Santa and turkey dinners. She hated how everyone expected her to be as happy and joyful as they were this time of year, especially Greg. He was always complaining to her about how she was the Grinch because she wouldn't join in on singing the carols in the playful banter in which the rest of the lab would, and how she wouldn't show any compassion for the holidays at all. He didn't take the time to think that she may have a ligament reason for it, he didn't take the time to talk to her and help her enjoy the holidays, he just expected her to because he could. But of course, she reminded herself, she wouldn't have told him anything if he had asked and showed any interest anyways. She would have told him it was none of his business and to get back to work. And now? Now she had agreed subconsciously to do god knows what tomorrow with everyone, and she'd be expected to enjoy it. All she knew was that Greg was picking her up at six, and Nick wanted to know why she didn't go home to visit her family at Christmas. If he, or anyone else, was going to bring that up tomorrow, she'd leave right away. She wasn't going to spend Christmas telling her life story and receiving unwanted pity from her friends. That wasn't what the holidays were about. She'd have to find some way to enjoy it all by tomorrow, or she'd have to develop some sort of illness…

"Sara!" She heard Catherine call her from down the hall somewhere. She knew she was coming to talk to her, so she didn't bother responding. "Hey Sara." Catherine repeated as she entered the room.

"Hey." Sara mumbled, not taking her eyes off the folder she was studying.

"Excited for tomorrow?" Catherine tried to make some sort of conversation in which Sara might by chance let her help her with whatever was making her hate Christmas so much.

"I guess." Sara answered with a shrug, not wanting to talk about anything Christmas related, which sucked because that's all anyone else wanted to talk about.

"So do you know where we're going?" Catherine asked, the way Sara acted earlier, and how she was responding now wasn't like the usual alert Sara at all. She highly doubted she even heard where they were going, and wanted to know if she'd still come when she did.

"Nope." Sara admitted. She hoped it wasn't too wild, but she had heard the part of their conversation about Lindsay coming along, so she doubted it'd be that bad.

"We're going to that restaurant a few blocks over… neither Greg nor I can think of the name of it at the moment, but we've both been there before. There's usually a good band playing there, good food, great dancing, and they have a kid's area too, so Lindsay will like it as well." Catherine told her with an excited look.

"Sounds fun." Sara sighed, still trying to drive the bad memories and flashbacks out of her head which was hard with Catherine standing beside her reviewing their Christmas plans. "Well, I better go home now and rest up for tomorrow night, see you then." Sara told Catherine before shutting the folder and heading to the locker room. If Catherine wasn't convinced before that something was up with Sara, she was now. Sara had just willingly agreed to go to a place where she would most likely have to dance. How weird was that? Something was wrong, something was really, really bugging her, and Catherine was going to find out what it was.