"No, I don't," Myra said, her voice as ever not rising above a murmur.

Her mother sighed dramatically. "Would you rather stay here, and do the readings for the Misses Arbuthnot?"

Myra ducked her head, a fall of dark hair covering her eye and cheekbone. "Yeah, I'll do that."

"You most certainly will not. You'll go to the sundries store and get the supplies we'll need."

Myra sucked at a strand of hair that had got in her mouth. "Mo-om," she whispered, in what was almost a whine, "why'd you ask me if I wanted to go, if you were going to make me go anyway?"

Her mother laughed softly. "Because I'm always hoping, I suppose." She handed Myra the list.

Myra scanned over the list in a second or two, memorizing it. She stuffed it into her pocket though just in case. Quickly she rang up the codes that turned over the cash register to her mother, scooped her currency sorter out and deftly replaced her mother's in the drawer. "There you go... yeah, I'm going."

Myra's mother watched her fifteen year old daughter leave the occult bookstore in Carriage Town with an indulgent smile she'd never let the girl see on purpose. Teenagers were such wonderful strange creatures, she thought. Being Kinain, she even had a general idea how strange Myra really was. Then she returned to preparing her cards for the customers due to arrive any minute.

Myra walked quietly, head tilted slightly forward so that her hair hid most of her face. She had a pair of large round glasses that she didn't need; the frames held non-refractory plastic lenses tinted grey-blue. Too light to be sunglasses, too dark to be normal, they gave her eyes a distant look. She only wore them when she went out and didn't want to be noticed. She thought of them as making her partly invisible.

Myra pushed the glasses onto her face and watched everyone on the street without them noticing she was watching. Her eyes hidden by her hair and the grey-blue tint of the glasses, she knew no one could tell where they were focused - and her face was always straight ahead, she did not even twitch a muscle as she watched. She walked with a hurried stride toward the sundries store, which is what her mother always called it - another person might have called it a stationery store, or an office supplies store. Myra liked to call it "foolscap central," mainly because hardly anyone knew what she meant when she said that. She whispered to herself, "here I go to foolscap central," and skipped one skip as she was careful not to touch the crack in the sidewalk. She was annoyed at her mother, and she didn't believe in the specific superstition of the crack/back type anyway, but she felt obligated. Then she stepped on the next three on purpose to make up for it.

Myra pushed the hair out of her eyes for a moment as she opened the jingling door of the stationery shop and stepped inside. Once the door had closed, she carefully replaced the hair over her glasses. She ducked her head a bit more and walked toward the aisles where book repair and maintenance supplies were kept. Bindings, thread, glue, decorated papers to fit between cover and first page, anti-acidic sprays and lozenges; most of the items that were on her mother's list were here.

In fact, as Myra rubbed her good luck charm, they were all there. She smiled to herself and scooped them all into a pile, then carried it teetering over to the shopkeeper's desk. She dropped them and pulled her mother's credit card out of her breast pocket. She had to reach under the Tshirt to do this, and the shopkeeper looked away awkwardly.

Myra was dressed in a long sleeved pyjama set, navy blue, the kind advertised as "matte satin" because the smooth side is on the inside. The shirt had a large patch pocket over the left breast. Over this she wore a purple Tshirt with the slogan "Of course I'm normal. I'm perpendicular to everything else." Hardly anyone ever got it. She had another one just like it, except that it was green and had the word "right" substituted for "normal." She had, in fact, almost a hundred Tshirts with slogans on them ranging from dry wit to incomprehensible meanderings. They were all far too big for her, and all dark colors, and none were black. She was especially proud of that fact, as she didn't like wearing black.

Myra scrawled her mother's name across the slip of paper and handed the top copy to the man, and he nodded as she scooped up her purchases and left. She felt a sense of relief - she hadn't had to talk to anyone. Of course, as soon as she thought that, it turned out to be wrong.

She stopped as a blond teenage girl walked into the store, giving her an odd look. Oh no... she recognized her... it was Kelsey from her history class. "Hi, Myra," said Kelsey briskly. She must have noticed how awkwardly Myra was carrying her stack of supplies. "Hey, can I help you with that? You might drop..." She reached for the stack, and it was a close call because if it hadn't been for Myra's good luck charm, she'd have spilled things all over the girl. She rather regretted not having done so, but the pleasure of Kelsey's chagrin would not have been worth having to put up with her help picking everything up.

Instead, she let Kelsey take part of her stack and told her in a whisper, "Ok follow me," and she walked with an unusually determined, fast stride toward her mother's bookstore.