fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday [ 09/19 ]

Adah realized that she couldn't hold anything against the E Ive! ever again for her use of the word 'pestiferous.' It drew the line between a situation where Leah would be sniggering into her hand and placing the girl on the shelf next to Rachel, and Adah snidely, quietly, being able to recognize it as an actual word and therefor placing the E Ive! well above the Lehcar. But, as for the question, Adah's eyes still trained firmly on the mass of coloured hair, she shook her head, and then drew a piece of paper near.

"No brothers," she wrote, "but sisters."

She paused before adding what was becoming a staple response to such questions; her hesitation came in the form of not wanting to hear the E Ive! go on and on and on about some sense of sympathy for the matter.

"Three. One twin, one dead, one a complete idiot."

"Ahh." Evie nodded over the note, and pointed at the words 'complete idiot.' "Jonathan." She sighed a little, then searched for a pencil. She wasn't quite certain about what to say about the dead sibling, and didn't want to pry on such short acquaintance. Adah had a stone-face that made her own emotions on the matter utterly impenetrable; Evie rather envied her that. The loss could have been years old, or two months ago. Impossible to tell.

Oo! Pen! I envy you the twin, and the sisters, and am sorry for the one you lost. Although Jonathan means well, but he used to spend all his time drinking and gambling in Cairo. Boys are impenetrable. But I miss him terribly.

Tilting her head as she read the E Ive!'s response, Adah found her eyebrow quirking again. She thought to share her amusing thought that perhaps this Jonathan of hers and this Rachel of Adah's should get together; they were sure to have just a gay old time, to be sure. But, instead, her focus seemed to lie a bit more in the last statement. Did she miss her sisters? No, not really. She'd talked with River about that before. River had a brother, too. Hm...

But what really caught her was the first part. Ahhh, the niwt. Of course. Envy? Adah had to stare at the word a bit, as if it might bite her like the snake that took Ruth May out of the world. ENVY?

"It is because of my twin," Adah wrote; with the exception of the slightly disbelieving glint in her eyes, though, she maintained that stone face, "that I am the way I am."

She trusted E Ive! to contain the intelligence to deduct that Adah did not mean personality wise.

Evie read that, and was briefly puzzled, then managed to contain her "oh!" to a soundless one. Still, much more noticeable than she would have liked. Then another frown, as she tried to analyze how Adah's twin caused her handicap, or whatever physical problems she had; had it been an accident? A birth defect in the womb? Some quirk of fate, leaving one twin fine, another damaged during the process of birth...?

And oh, her entire speculative thought process must be plain as day on her face. Anne could not possibly beat her for mortifications of the month, no. How incredibly gauche of her, and how incredibly rude. "I see," she said, although she didn't, and was sure that Adah knew that, and then just gave up and put her head down on the library counter to hide her face. "Just a moment. Recovering aplomb. Searching for the correct conversational segue." One flailing arm went into the air in defeat. "Trying to be British!"

The problem Adah was facing of exactly how to assure the E Ive! that it was okay, really, that she if she hadn't gotten over it or at the very least used to it after seventeen years, then she had more problem than just having to share a womb with a selfish sister, when she had her head down like that was solved easily thanks to that last bit, which wrenched a possibly distasteful, but mostly knee-jerk croak of a laugh. British indeed, and here, the jaded American, limping all over her delicate sensibilities. The laugh filtered down slightly into a wry smirk, her head shaking slightly.

It was the kind of laugh that would have nearly gotten her smacked by her father, usually one reserved for lectures. Somehow, she didn't think she'd have to worry about that with E Ive!. Then again, she never really worried about it with Nathan, either.

Evie looked up through a puff of hair; Adah's laughter, bitten-off as it was, recalling her to the fact that she was the one making a cake of herself. And that Adah had far more poise than she did. Giving up on being British, she shook her head, chin still on the counter, but eyes up and looking at Adah, going for what one of her mother's relatives would say instead. "Right, then. Rotten luck. Sorry for my curiosity if it was too obvious. Unavoidable reflex, I'm afraid. Feel free to talk about it, or don't. I'm sure it must be a boring topic for you by now." She shook her head. "What were we on about... oh, right, yes. Jonathan. And your sisters." She paused. "Oh, there's a terrifying thought."

True, Adah wasn't exactly going to talk about it, but not for the reasons the E Ive! had mentioned. The wry smirk turned a little sympathetic toward the mop of hair on the desk; at least Evie hadn't just called her incorrigible for simply being Ada.

And then there was the pause, and Adah shifted her head slightly to the side, her eyes widened in a oh, please, do go on! fashion.

Evie could see the interest and straightened a bit, relieved at moving past the awkwardness, driving her fingers into her hair with a roll of her eyes. "He likes women. Girls. 'Dames.' 'Dollies.' 'Birds.' 'Ladies.' And he's used the most ridiculous chat lines on nearly every woman he meets. I quit introducing him to my friends when I was fourteen. 'Has anyone told you that you look like the Venus di Milo?' is *not* the kind of thing one wants to hear from one's brother directed at any woman, ever." An explosive puff of breath, and a sigh. "He got drunk here last year, and went looking for artifacts to acquire."

Adah's smirk stayed in place. If she were witty or at all prone to talk, she could just imagine her response. Why, no; I'm far more used to getting the Winged Nike; how kind of you to notice my head. And, yes, it certainly did sound like getting this Jonathan in a room with Rachel would be a delicious train wreck that Adah would revel in seeing. He sounded like Toorlexa Nebee, only British. Which, in Adah's mind, meant cleaner, but anyone could be cleaner than that man.

The smile softened a little as Adah started to think it was a shame that E Ive! couldn't read her mind like River could; so many comments going unappreciated. But such was life, and she was getting way too spoiled by River's ability to do that.

Evie shook her head, dolefully thinking of Jonathan, and sighed, hoping he was well. Well, of course he was. At least for the next ten days; she'd been home for a month, in 1917, and gotten a letter from him near the end of it. The vagaries of time travel still confused her, that he could be living out his time in Jerusalem 1917 at a right angle to hers in 2007. But in another week or so, he would be back in the No Man's Land of warfare, no way of knowing if he was well, albeit not in France. If he could just make it until Christmas...

"Will your family visit in October, do you think?" Evie wondered. She gave her locks a look of alarm. "Oh. Dear. I may have to re-dye my hair, if my mother comes. Ohhh dear."

With another quirked eyebrow for the E Ive!'s attention to her hair again, although, really, Adah would find it a little distracting, too, she answered simply this time. After pulling out a dead sister and a twin-caused deformity on the poor girl, Adah did have at least a little sympathy and consideration in holding back the reason why her simple answer was so simple.

"My mother might," was all she wrote, leaving much unsaid.

Evie couldn't discern if that was a good thing or a bad thing; Adah's insistence on writing notes in the Library, while exemplary, meant that such subtleties as tone of voice were completely missing, and her expression remained uncompromisingly stoic. Body posture didn't help either, since she was compensating for unknown injuries and whatever pain might accompany them. Frustrating. Evie supposed she should just be grateful the other girl chose to answer questions directly, or it would be like trying to communicate with the Sphinx. A latent sense of-- fun? If not exactly a typical sense of humor, did seem evident most of the time. "The place becomes rather a zoo when all of the families arrive, but amusingly so, I must admit. Between those who don't want their parents to know what they've been up to--" Which would include her this year, eep. "--and those who don't want their families to speak to their friends about what they were like before this place, it becomes a very complicated dancing-around of visitors and residents."

"And then there are some," Adah responded back, "who would just rather not deal with the crowds. Shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm not exactly good at dancing."

"I'm not either," Evie wrote back cheerfully. "Although Sokka likes my dancing. So I don't mind so much. It's more important to enjoy ourselves than be good at it, we think. We can be good at other things." She looked up from her note to whisper, "Crowds can be overwhelming, though most of the time it reminds me of home. This place really is too small."

Adah took a second to boggle at the completely missed point before writing back.

"Good size for me. Smaller than Bethlehem, larger than Kilanga. Could use fewer stairs."

Evie assessed that, and frowned again. Weren't there supposed to be elevators, and escalators, and dumb-waiters, for access to the upper levels? Wasn't that a law? Part of her brain was working this when she absently asked, "Where is Kilanga? And have you been to Israel?" And then her thoughts caught up with herself, and she said, "That must be quite annoying. You would expect, with as much magic as there is around here, that they might cut down on those sorts of obstacles."

Adah shrugged a shoulder absently. "I'm getting used to them. Kilanga is in the Congo, at the very heart of Africa. The Bethlehem I speak of is not as impressive. Bethlehem, Georgia, where I was born and mostly raised, named for the affluent birthplace of Jesus Christ, although far less likely to be churning out any manger-hidden saviors."

"Africa! Oh, lovely!" Evie looked gleeful, and caught herself, restraining herself to a setting somewhere around 'fidget', lowering her voice again. "Someday, perhaps, I'll be able to visit there-- although I have such a long list, it shall take a lifetime, so who knows when. Georgia is south of here, isn't it? I'm afraid my American geography is sadly lacking. I've only been to Washington D.C. and New York City, aside from here." She tilted her head. "You didn't like Bethlehem?"

Adah nodded slightly. "South of here, yes, and a little to the left. And Bethlehem had nothing for me but judgmental fools, so, no, I was not too terribly fond of the place. Africa was much better; difficult, but better."

"Exotic and romantic and dangerous and much more interesting than a small town in your home country, I should think." Evie took up the pen again, finding it easier to write than to say: "London was as big and as interesting as Cairo, but much more difficult for me. All these things that needed to be explained to the natives, that I'd taken for granted in Egypt." She added aloud, "And I like Fandom very much, but I'm not at all tempted to stay." She frowned. "Judgemental fools? Because of...?" She waved to Adah's shoulder and arm, not knowing how to refer to Adah's disabilities politely. Or what Adah would call politely.

Adah grinned a little at the E Ive!'s gestures and very significantly pointed to her head, tapping her forehead with her fingers before resuming the pen to write. "And that. Mostly that. If it weren't for a chance, rogue grocery receipt, I'd have been doomed to special education."

"Special education, wait, that's... They thought you were mentally handicapped?" Evie gave Adah a bewildered look and said, "That's ridiculous. And where does a grocery receipt come into it? What year *are* you from?" She tended to assume everyone was from 2007 unless they seemed utterly alien, or very definitely from a different time period; now she had to revise that assumption. Silly of her.

"1962," Adah wrote back, simply enough, and then explained the case of the receipt. "And my parents began to have second thoughts about my mental capabilities the day I had the entire week's grocery bill totaled before the cashier had even finished ringing them up..."

Evie had been rather good at math-- not exemplary, but better than many of her classmates-- but nowhere near Adah's level, it sounded like. And forty-five years; yes, a great many things had changed in the interim. But still. "Just because of your physical difficulties? Didn't the doctors set them straight? Or did they never see a specialist, after you were born?"

Adah's smirk was wry and cynical.

"Couldn't be bothered with something like that. My father is a preacher; he didn't exactly have enough money to support three daughters under two and a wife, much less spend money to send one of them through all of that. When I was born, they said I'd never be able to walk, but I did, anyway, so they must have figured I was okay. It's hemiphelgia. Only half of my brain works. And I don't talk. So everyone just assumed I was slow, until I showed them otherwise."

Library, Wednesday [ 09/19 ]

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