A/N: You know how I said Beck was going to be here for this chapter? Well, there's been a change of plans. He'll come a bit later.

Saturday afternoon, Jade walked up to the front step of a familiar house and knocked on the door. After a few moments, Cat opened the door. "Jade!" Cat's eyes took in the duffel bag Jade was holding in one hand and the book bag that was slung over her other shoulder, and her smile grew. "Wanna make friendship bracelets?"

Jade made a face. "Friendship bracelets?"

"Oh, come on, it'll be fun!" Leaning toward Jade and lowering her voice to a loud whisper, Cat added, "It's good for getting your mind off other things."

"I don't have anything I need to get my mind off of."

"You always need to get your mind off of something. You're too serious," Cat teased playfully. "Come on!" Then she grabbed Jade's free hand and pulled her into the house.

Jade followed Cat across the threshold, shutting the door behind her, then let Cat drag her through the hall, upstairs, and to Cat's room. Cat finally dropped Jade's hand, then pulled Jade's duffel bag from out of her other hand and tossed it toward one corner of the room, where it landed with a soft thunk on the carpet. Jade settled into a cushy, rainbow bean bag chair as Cat skipped over to her desk and started shuffling through the contents of one of the drawers.

"What colors do you want?" Cat called.

"Black."

"What else? You need more than one color to make a good bracelet."

"Grey."

"How about some pink?"

"No."

"Blue?"

"No."

"White?"

"No, Cat," Jade said, exasperated. "Just black and grey."

Cat sighed. "Fine. But you always pick such boring colors."

"Black and grey aren't boring."

"Maybe not compared to just black," Cat said as she measured out the strings. "But compared to rainbow, they're super boring."

"Rainbow isn't a color."

Cat chucked a spool of yellow across the room at Jade. It bounced harmlessly off her foot.

"Missed me," Jade teased.

Cat picked up two more spools of thread and threw them at Jade. One of them hit her stomach and landed in her lap.

Jade picked it up and looked at it. "Pink!?" she exclaimed. "No, I'm meltinggggg…" Jade dramatically fell from the bean bag onto Cat's fluffy rug.

Cat laughed, then started to sing: "Good news! She's dead!"

Jade smiled and joined in. "The Witch of the West is dead! The wickedest witch there ever was, the enemy of all of us here in Oz, is dead! Good news! Good news!"

The two of them continued on through the whole song, spontaneously dividing up the parts. They jumped around the room, occasionally breaking into dance, and when the song ended, they fell dramatically onto Cat's bed.

Cat turned her head to the side to look over at Jade. "Good job with the lover's part."

Jade turned to face Cat as well. "Nice high notes."

Cat beamed at the compliment. "I love Wicked. I hope that one day I'll get to play Glinda."

"If you do, you can bet I'll be in the audience to see it."

Cat smiled again. "Or in the production! Elphaba, maybe. Or Madame Morrible!"

Jade shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. It would be fun to be in it with you, though."

Cat nodded vigorously. Then suddenly she paused. "I almost forgot! We have to get back to the bracelets!"

Jade shook her head. "We really don't have to…"

Cat's face was all business again. "Yes we do. We're going to make friendship bracelets, and you're going to enjoy it!"

Jade groaned as Cat pulled her off of the bed. "Fine. But no pink."

Cat handed over a few strings that she had cut earlier. "Yeah, yeah, I get it, you're boring," she said, then ducked as Jade sent one of the spools of thread flying toward her.

Cat's parents didn't bat an eye when Jade walked into the kitchen with Cat and asked if there was anything she could do to help prepare dinner. Jade had appeared at their house without warning so many times over the years that they had become numb to it, and it was hard for them to object to it when Jade was so willing to help cook. That was why Jade offered; she had learned that if she wanted to escape from her own family and live at Cat's house, all she had to do was offer assistance with dinner, and Cat's parents let her stay there without question. Plus, they were usually too busy dealing with Cat's brother to care that much about what was going on in the rest of the house.

Jade was silent as she chopped up lettuce for the salad, trying to ignore the sound of Cat's dad and brother arguing. It was much easier to block out someone else's family's troubles than her own, so Jade wasn't too bothered by it. For the whole afternoon, Cat had helped distract Jade from her own thoughts, but now, when Cat was in the other room, setting the table, all the thoughts about Tori that she had tried to suppress came flooding back.

As much as Jade felt angry and betrayed, underneath the hurt, there was still a lingering feeling that Jade couldn't put her finger on… some small part of her still wanted to be near Tori, still wanted to talk to her and trust her. And confide in her. And Jade hated that part of her. She wished she could just convert all her feelings for Tori into hate; then she could cut Tori out of her life and be rid of the confusing, painful feelings that surrounded thoughts of her. But just like she couldn't hate Sarah, Jade found that she couldn't hate Tori.

"Jade, I think that's chopped finely enough." Jade looked up. Cat's mother was looking at her with a partially confused, partially amused expression. Jade glanced down to see that she had chopped the lettuce into shreds so small, it was practically confetti. Oops.

"Sorry," Jade apologized, brushing the lettuce off of the cutting board and into the salad bowl. Cooking could be a good way of letting off steam, but it was easy to get carried away. It was just good that she hadn't chopped off her fingers.

A few moments later, the Valentine family was sitting down to dinner. They had squeezed in an extra chair alone one side of the table, and Cat and Jade sat sandwiched against each other. The meal went pretty smoothly and quietly, as Cat's brother scarfed down his food and Cat and Jade followed suit, eager to get away from the table as soon as possible. When Cat's mother saw that the two of them were done eating, she said they could be excused if they put their plates into the dishwasher on the way out. Cat and Jade gratefully left the table.

When they returned to Cat's room, Cat breathed a sigh of relief. Being with her family always stressed her out; she was constantly on edge, anticipating some sort of meltdown from her brother. Luckily, that dinner had been uneventful.

Cat pulled out the friendship bracelet she was working on, and Jade begrudgingly followed suit. She didn't particularly dislike making friendship bracelets, but she didn't love it either. But whatever. It was pretty mindless, but Cat was right; it was actually a decent distraction from your problems, if you wanted it to be.

After a few minutes, Cat slowed her pace of work on her bracelet and shifted her gaze to make eye contact with Jade. It was an invitation: If you want to talk about something, you can. Jade considered her friend, then decided she might as well say something about what was on her mind. It wouldn't hurt.

"Vega dug up the rumor about Sarah and asked me about it."

Cat's jaw dropped, and she gaped at Jade for a moment. "I can't believe she actually did that… That's so not okay." After a brief reflection, Cat realized something. "Actually, one day during lunch she asked us…" She trailed off.

"Asked you what?" Jade asked, unsure if she even wanted to hear the answer.

Cat looked uncomfortable. "She asked us if you'd ever done anything… really bad."

Jade stared at Cat, unable to believe what she was hearing. Not only did she go looking for dirt on me, but she asked my friends behind my back? What kind of person does that?

Cat frantically added, "We didn't tell her anything, of course. Robbie started to say something, but I stopped him. And Andre told Tori not to try to figure it out!"

Jade considered what Cat had told her, trying to fit it into what she already knew. So after they refused to tell her anything, that's when she went to Trina? But if Andre had already explicitly told her not to go looking for it, then that makes what she did even worse, doesn't it? Jade really didn't know what to think.

There was a long silence, then Cat asked, "You said she asked you about it?"

"Yeah."

"Oh."

"And then I… I kind of… well…" Jade looked at Cat's face and saw nothing but kindness and encouragement. "I pretty much exploded at her."

Cat nodded understandingly. Cat, of all people, knew Jade well enough to know what Jade meant by "exploded". I guess I have a tendency to keep things bottled up, then I just burst at some point. And it's no fun for either person.

"I don't know how to feel or what to do," Jade said softly.

Cat took Jade's hand and looked deep into her eyes. "You don't have to know what you're supposed to feel. You just listen to whatever you already feel. And if you don't know what you feel, that's okay too."

"I don't know anything."

"Okay. But I hope you still know how to make that bracelet."

Jade gave a half smile. "That I do."

A/N: Thank you for reading! Sorry about the false teaser last week - I really thought Beck was going to be in this chapter, but then I decided to write this weekend scene, and it became its own thing. But Beck will return in the very near future!

See you next week!