Hello friends! Happy 10th anniversary of Mean Girls! If you're not wearing pink today, please feel free to vacate the planet. ;) Thank you for all of your kind words on the last chapter! They made me so happy. It's like a dream of mine that Toby and Wren face off. Like for serious. Anyway, thanks for the reviews, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this chapter too! We've been having internet issues in my apartment so I'm going to go before it cuts out again haha.

The chapter title comes from "Be Calm" by Fun. Great song and a great message, if you're looking for a pick-me-up. Okay you're all fabulous and wonderful, bye.

take it from me, i've been there a thousand times

Sometime in late August, the television remote goes missing. One day it's there, resting in its place on the coffee table, and the next day it's not. The August heat and lazy summer days keep the Cavanaugh family from watching a lot of television anyway; they're far too busy spending days at the lake and nights under the glistening evening stars. This is, of course, how the missing remote goes unnoticed for so long. But one day, the humidity causes a massive thunderstorm that keeps the family indoors on a Saturday they would have spent elsewhere. Thus, when Toby suggests they order in and watch a movie, everyone's all for it. Chinese is on its way and the family settles down, most likely to argue over what to watch. However, when Toby reaches for the remote, there is no remote.

"Hey, where's the TV remote?" Toby calls out to Spencer, who had just shut the front door on the onslaught of rain, her arms full of steaming food.

She shrugs. "I couldn't tell you. I can't even remember the last time I watched TV."

"Grace," Toby then asks. "Have you seen the remote?"

Grace shakes her head in silence. Toby eyes her. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," She says, her voice small. "I didn't watch TV today."

"Did you watch it yesterday?"

She shakes her head. Toby frowns. "This makes no sense."

"Well, it's probably around here somewhere," Spencer counters. "Check the end tables or the drawers in the entertainment center. It didn't just disappear."

They do exactly that; Chinese food all but forgotten, the three search under the couch and arm chairs, behind pillows and under blankets. They paw through the drawers of the entertainment center and check behind the television, just in case. There's nothing but dust inside the end tables and Spencer vows to attack it later. They never find the remote; it may just as well have disappeared and thus, they must enjoy their movie the old fashioned way- by pressing the buttons on the box like true pioneers. It's fine and it's totally not a big deal, but they are left with the lingering question of where in the world the remote could possibly be. It isn't like it grew legs and walked out of the house; there are only so many places it could be located.

The next day, while Grace is enjoying a play date at McKenzie's, Spencer is making use of the somewhat empty house to do some cleaning. She does dust the bowels of the end tables, as well as clean all the bathrooms, the kitchen and her and Toby's bedroom. She's putting a load of clean laundry away in Grace's dresser when she notes a sweatshirt of hers is awkwardly rolled into a ball in the bottom drawer. Spencer is too much of a perfectionist to let this go, so she plucks it from the drawer to refold and when she does, something hard falls from the middle of the cloth. Abandoning the sweatshirt for now, she kneels to the floor to pick up the object and finds that, lo and behold, it's the missing TV remote. The rubber buttons are covered in a sticky pink substance Spencer recognizes as silly putty.

"What do I do?" Spencer asks after she's brought this latest transgression to Toby.

"Confront her," He suggests. "You've got to let her know we know."

"Toby," She frowns. "She lied. To both of us."

"Yeah, she did," He agrees. "I had a feeling something wasn't right. She was way too quiet when we asked her if she knew anything."

"I know. I noticed that too," Spencer sighs. "I guess I just hoped that she'd prove me wrong."

When Grace returns home about an hour or so later, she bounds up to her room excitedly and Spencer frowns, heading up after her. She's not sure why she's dreading this conversation so much until the reason blatantly makes itself apparent. Grace lied; Spencer spent the entire second half of her adolescence lying to everyone she knew and here her daughter is, following in her footsteps. Like mother, like daughter, right? She knocks on Grace's door, even though it's open, and finds her daughter combing a doll's hair. She glances up and grins when her mother enters the room and Spencer only sits beside her on the bed. There's silence between them at first before Spencer takes a deep breath and asks,

"Do you know what I did today?"

Grace shakes her head, so Spencer continues, "I got a lot of cleaning done. I did a lot of housework. Some of that housework meant doing laundry; your laundry."

"Thank you," Grace says and Spencer smiles a bit.

"Don't thank me yet," She warns. "Guess what I found in your drawer while I was putting laundry away?"

Grace's smile fades. "What?"

"Why don't you tell me?"

She looks away, avoiding her mother's gaze. "The TV remote."

"Bingo," Spencer confirms. "Now do you want to tell me why it was in your drawer when you said you hadn't seen it?"

Grace still doesn't look at her mother and her voice is quiet when she explicates, "I was playing with the silly putty even though you said I couldn't. When you put it on paper, all the words come off on the silly putty so I wanted to see if I put it on the numbers on the remote, if the numbers would come off too. But when I put it on the remote, I couldn't get it off. It was stuck there and… I didn't want you and daddy to be mad at me so I just hid it."

Spencer's honestly not surprised. Grace's rationale for doing things is always because she doesn't want to make her parents mad. She asks calmly, "Grace, do you see what you did wrong, here?"

She nods fiercely and questions, "Are you mad at me?"

"I'm not mad at you because of the remote. We can buy a new one," Spencer tells her. "I'm mad because you lied to me. We asked you if you had seen it and you said you hadn't. Do you know that lying is bad?"

Grace nods again and Spencer then implores, "Do you know why lying is bad?"

When her daughter hesitates, Spencer elaborates. "There is a very important thing in every relationship called trust. That means that you can believe that someone is telling the truth and that you can count on that person to be there for you when you need him or her to be. But when you lie, it makes it very hard to trust someone after that, because you never know if that person is being honest with you again. They could be telling you the truth, but you might not believe them, because they lied to you once and that's all you remember. Do you understand?"

Grace nods a third time, her eyes growing wet. Spencer continues, "Lying hurts people's feelings. It makes them upset. It's not a good thing to do, Gracie, and it could really get you into trouble. And I don't want to see that."

"Okay," Her voice is even smaller than before.

"I really want you to think about it, Grace," Spencer tells her, standing to leave the room. "Think about what you did wrong and think about what you could've done instead."

"I'm sorry," Grace pleads. "I'm sorry I lied, mommy."

"I know you are," Spencer kisses the very top of her head. "I don't want to see you do it again, okay?"

The five-year-old agrees and Spencer leaves the room to find Toby eavesdropping from the hallway. She shuts Grace's bedroom door behind her and her composure nearly crumbles. "Oh my god. Oh my god. I'm a terrible person. That is the worst thing I've ever done. Oh my god."

"Spencer," Toby says soothingly, his hands bracing her shoulders. "What are you talking about? You taught her a lesson she needed to learn!"

"No, I'm such a hypocrite," She shakes her head. "Here I am, the biggest liar in the world, telling my daughter lying is a terrible thing to do. I mean, who does that? If she only knew my history, she'd be laughing in my face. Just wait until she's a teenager; I won't be able to live it down."

"You're not a hypocrite," Toby disagrees and when she shoots him a skeptical look, he backs up his previous statement. "You're not! Look, you're teaching our daughter that lying is bad, which it is. Just because you've lied in the past doesn't mean you're a terrible person. You're not a terrible person, Spence. You lied because you had to."

"I only lied because I had to after I lied in the first place," Spencer corrects. "If I hadn't… The first big lie I ever told was about Jenna and if I had told the truth… Maybe it would've saved us both a lot of trouble."

"I can almost guarantee that isn't true," Toby's eyes darken slightly at the mention of Jenna and the horrors he'd endured because of her. "You think all of that stuff with A wouldn't have happened? You think Alison wouldn't have gone into hiding and Mona wouldn't have terrorized you and you wouldn't have gone through hell if you hadn't told one lie? I'm sorry, but there's no way that's true."

Spencer sighs. "Well, we'll never know for sure, will we?"

"No," He agrees. "Look, I understand why you're feeling the way you are and it is slightly justified."

"See?"

"But," Toby goes on. "People are going to lie. That's a given and that's never going to change. Grace is going to lie again; that's just the way kids are. She may have said she won't, but she will."

"How is this supposed to make me feel better?"

"Because," He insists. "She knows it's bad. That's the main point. Along the way, you and Alison and the other girls lied so much it became second nature. You forgot how damaging it was. And you were reminded- quickly and usually in the worst ways possible. But as long as Grace knows lying is not a good thing, she'll be okay. She'll have a conscience and she'll have to let it guide her. We can't control her thoughts or her actions, but we can control her morals. She's going to grow up knowing lying is bad, regardless of whether she does it or not. My kid will not- will not- be another Alison DiLaurentis."

Spencer smiles a bit. "The world would probably implode if there were two of them, anyway."