LuLu wandered through the park, vaguely directing her steps toward home. The small group had broken up quickly without much else being said. LuLu had volunteered to text Maxie, but Logan had insisted on finding her on his own. LuLu still couldn't believe that her friend had simply vanished, abandoning her 'boyfriend' when he was down. LuLu had always done her best to ignore the sharp edges that Maxie exuded, to tolerate her moods and biting words, accepting her role in Maxie's shadow.

The day's events made her re-examine everything. Thoughts ricocheted through her mind leaving bright flaring trails of emotion and confusion in their wake. Suddenly she stopped- the activity of her thoughts and her footsteps came to an abrupt halt.

The unusual young man, Damian, sat in the grass beside the path. He was pressing a sleeve to his temple and picking at blades of grass with his free hand. LuLu could tell that he was lost in thought and hadn't noticed her approach. She raised her chin and strode over to him.

"You sure left in a hurry. Logan could have been seriously hurt you know?"

Damian looked up at her with large troubled eyes. His unlined face looked innocent, almost cherubic in the evening light. LuLu was struck by how young he looked now, not much more than a boy.

"But he wasn't. He's strong." He winced involuntarily. "That elbow of his almost took me out."

LuLu sighed and stepped closer, kneeling next to him. "Let me see," she ordered.

Damian obediently lowered his arm and there was a small tearing sound as fabric separated from dried blood and skin. LuLu grimaced as she examined the blood-stained lump and shallow cut on Damian's temple. Some of his brown hair had become matted and stuck to the surrounding skin.

"Oh... ew..." LuLu whispered. "Does it hurt?"

Damian just looked at her incredulously.

"Okay, dumb question," she conceded. She opened her purse and began looking through it's contents. "I think I have a washcloth in... ah, here it is." She extracted a white cloth, folded it and began to move it toward Damian's battered temple. She stopped and glanced around. "Um... it's dry and there's not a fountain in this part of the park. Maybe you should spit on this? Unless you want me to?"

"Be my guest," Damian said.

LuLu turned her head so the young man couldn't see and pressed the cloth to her lips, wetting it.

She turned back and slowly, and awkwardly moved the cloth into position and began dabbing the blood and matted hair with an uncertain hand. "Oh... okay... well..." she said quietly as she worked, "...this is weird."

Damian winced at her touch but then a small smile stretched his lips. Their faces drew closer as LuLu concentrated. "I bet you never thought this is the way you'd be spending your evening?" He asked.

"Wiping my spit on someone's face?" LuLu chuckled and Damian's smile widened. Suddenly they both broke out into soft but unrestrained laughter. LuLu found herself looking into his green eyes inches from her own. They held no hostility, or even tension. For the first time Damian's gaze was relaxed and open.

"I've never seen you smile," LuLu said. "Not that I've been watching you or anything..." She broke eye contact and looked down, suddenly embarrassed.

"I've never seen you smile either," Damian said quietly. His usual monotone was softer, making his voice sound younger. "Not for the right reasons."

LuLu settled down beside him on the grass. Her face looked troubled once again. "I'm sorry about that. About the way we act sometimes. I don't know why things have to be that way. I'm not a cruel person."

She remembered the look on Logan's face when he realized that Maxie had gone. "I'm not like Maxie, not really."

"But you want to be," Damian stated.

LuLu's brow creased and she struggled to find the right words to explain. "Maxie is beautiful, rich, confident and in control. All the guys want her and all the girls want to be her."

"You're every bit as beautiful," Damian pointed out. He said it in a matter-of-fact tone, but LuLu blushed slightly anyway. "And you have family that cares about you?"

"Yes," LuLu said with a smile,"my dad and my brother are the best! Even though they don't get along with each other. My mom too, but she's been away for a long time. But I visit her and we talk every few days."

"Then I think you are probably already richer than your friend," Damian said quietly.

"Corny much?" she asked with a grin.

Damian pulled up a blade of grass and ran it through his fingers. "Too Disney?"

"It's okay," LuLu said between small peals of laughter, " I like some of that stuff."

"Like Cinderella?"

LuLu shook her head. "That's old school and too girly. But seriously, this stuff has been going around in my head today. I don't think what you've done was right, exactly, but at least you stood up to her. Why do I always end up following her around? Why am I scared not to fit in? I try to do everything the way I'm supposed to, but I always end up in the background and no one notices me." The smile and the laughter were gone. "Or I'm a big joke, like with Diego and the intercom."

LuLu wondered why she was exposing herself to this newcomer. She could never have imagined that talking to him would be like this.

Damian let the blade of grass flutter to the ground.

"Imagine for a second that I could reach out and put another sun into the sky." He raised a hand and gestured toward the sun which hung low and orange-red in the sky.

"Um, okay,"LuLu responded with an uncertain grin.

"Now if I placed it perfectly behind the one that's already there- who would know? Maybe you are too busy trying to be something that you're not. The world already has one Maxie, trust me, two is overkill." He thought about Dillon and the way he always reacted to LuLu. "People notice you, but they aren't interested in what another clone of Maxie is going to do. Everyone knows that formula already. They want to know who you are." He turned his head and gazed at her intently, his eyes half shrouded by his unruly hair. "I want to know... who is LuLu Spencer?"

Their eyes met and they sat quietly for a few moments, the impending sunset engulfing them in a world of dark orange, red and long black shadows. Finally LuLu spoke. "If I figure it out, I'll let you know. Everyone has different sides to them, you know? I'm really mad at Maxie right now, but she isn't all bad. Sometimes she's a really good friend. And you... at work you're all distant and quiet. No offense, but you act like an emotionless robot! I wonder how many people get to see you like I am now?" She smiled tentatively and turned his earlier question back on him. "Who is Damian Spinelli?"

Damian's expression became a little more guarded and the orange glow reflected in his eyes.

"The person you described from work? That is me." He stood and walked a few steps over to some exposed dirt. "Have a look at this." LuLu got to her feet and followed after brushing herself off. She followed Damian's gaze and saw a small ascending cone of uniform dirt pebbles surrounded by lines of tiny, busy insectile figures. An anthill.

"This, right here, is a whole community- a whole world unto itself," Damian stated.

"A world within our world, right under our feet," LuLu mused.

Damian cocked his head and looked at her with an arched brow.

"What?" She asked with a laugh. "I can't have a philosophical thought? I'm only obsessed with shallow crap between the hours of eight to five, and I'm off the clock."

She could have sworn that Damian smirked. "Right," he continued. "There are worlds within worlds. Everywhere. But these guys, they don't know that. There are thousands of them only aware of their reality and their place in it. They're busy fulfilling their missions, and will be their whole lives. They've got their queen, she's made it to the top and no one is going to take her place. Most of these guys are workers- drones. They serve the queen, take her orders without question. They build, bring food, do everything at her whim, and they never take one step outside of their established, programmed lives. Their job is to maintain the status quo." He shook his head and stretched his arms out. "They never once look up and become aware of the vastness that surrounds them. They never see the horizon, they have no idea how tiny, how vulnerable they really are."

He lowered his arms and looked back at LuLu. "They have soldiers too, that fight and die without hesitation to protect the hive. But their efforts are really only going to matter against another, rival colony that might decide it wants this territory. They can't really do anything about the bigger threats." Damian inched his shoe closer to the small hill as he spoke, and the tiny figures increased their pace, swarming around the sole of his shoe and the pyramidal dirt cone frantically. LuLu watched and listened, not sure how to take this sudden nature lesson.

"And sometimes... a soldier ant from a rival colony will find a way to penetrate a hive. They do everything by smell and touch, so if he can find a way to disguise himself with their smell, he might be accepted into their world. Of course at any second his cover could get blown and the rival soldiers will tear him to pieces, but he doesn't care. See, he has a mission, and like I already said, with these little guys that's all that matters."

"What's his mission then? What's that important.?" LuLu was curious now in spite of herself.

Damian looked at her, his face was blank once again, his eyes unreadable. "Gain access, get close... and kill the queen."

LuLu shook her head slowly. The answer didn't seem right somehow. "But why? It just seems mean and cruel."

"Because there's always a war going on, or one about to start, and war is as cruel as it gets," Damian replied, and his voice almost sounded sad. "With the queen dead, the colony has no one to issue orders. It falls into chaos and an army from outside sweeps in and takes them out quickly. Then they can take the hive, all of the work that these guys did, and use it for themselves."

"You've got a strange mind," LuLu observed. "This is cool I guess in a Discovery Channel kind of way, but why are you telling me this?"

Damian shrugged, but his green eyes watched LuLu closely.

"It's funny I guess," LuLu said slowly as she watched the tiny creatures at work, "if you think of the Shop 'n' Save as an anthill, it would be easy to see Maxie as a queen... and that makes me, and most of my friends, little worker ants." She frowned as she thought about this.

Damian smiled thinly. "A whole bunch of ants scurrying around, worried about a lot of things, a lot of problems that seem huge, but are really very small. Misusing their senses, never looking up, never sensing the bigger picture." He peered at LuLu intently, and his tone gained a sense of urgency. "Today your friends got just a small glimpse of something they could never imagine before- the horizon. The world that they control, that they have assumed is everything, isn't as big as they thought it was. And there could be something infinitely bigger and more dangerous that could stumble along and crush it all without a second thought..." Now Damian slowly lifted his foot and held it over the anthill, as if about to bring it down and grind the tiny creatures into the earth.

"No!" LuLu exclaimed. Damian withdrew his foot and looked at her. She glared at him in consternation. "You can't tell me all of that stuff about their world and then casually destroy it. That wouldn't be right! Just because we're bigger, it doesn't give us the right to step on them. Like you said- it's a whole community that's working hard to survive. I mean, I don't really like ants, especially at a picnic, but leave them alone, okay?"

Damian laughed, and for a few more seconds the blank mask of his face was broken by a warm smile that reached his eyes. "Sure. Settle down! You said you aren't a cruel person... I believe you. You see, you're already different than some of your friends."

LuLu sighed and then returned the smile. She noticed it was really getting dark. "I have to get home."

Damian nodded. They stood for a few seconds in a silence that suddenly felt a bit awkward. "Can I walk with you?" Damian finally asked..

"I don't know, can you?"

Damian didn't react to the joke. "I guess the robot is back," LuLu thought. She shrugged. "Sure, if you want."

.

.

Twenty minutes later the duo approached a two-story house on an isolated lot of a quiet street.

"This is it," LuLu said. "Told you it wasn't too far."

Damian examined the structure. "Nice place."

"It's kind of big for just my dad and me. My mom is away, but I keep hoping she'll be able to come back soon."

Something about the way she said 'away' triggered an echo of recognition for Damian. He knew that LuLu's mother probably wasn't on vacation or traveling for work. It was some other far more serious form of exile.

LuLu took a couple of steps toward the house ahead of Damian then turned to look back at him. "Thanks for walking with me. I hope your head is okay."

"It'll be fine, thanks."

"Still, you should put something on it..."

Damian shrugged.

"I'm going to go in. My dad is probably wondering where I've been." LuLu hesitated for a second or two and then continued. "Damian, be careful. I don't know if Maxie is going to let this go. She has a lot of friends. I'll talk to her, but she hasn't been listening to me. Please, just don't do anything else to provoke her, okay?"

Damian looked at her for a few moments, and just when she thought he wasn't going to respond, he spoke quietly. "I'll do what I can."

The answer was less than LuLu had hoped for, but she realized that it was the best she was likely to get for now. "It was nice talking to you. If you ever need someone to talk to..."

"I know where you live," Damian stated.

"Right," LuLu said with a small laugh. "Have a good night."

"Good night," Damian said in return and then turned to leave.

"Hey Damian!" LuLu called out to him after he had taken only a few steps. Damian looked back and in the darkness could just make out LuLu's silhouette like a halo of muted gold surrounded by increasing darkness. Somehow he could sense that she was smiling.

"Yes?"

"We were talking about everyone being like ants. You never said what kind of ant you would be."

"What kind do you think I am?" Damian asked. He squinted and could just make out LuLu's thin, blurred shape. Her long blond tresses reflected what little light there was emanating from the distant porch. She must have been stepping back slowly toward the house- when she spoke her voice was further away.

"I think you're a soldier," she said, and then she was gone.