Lucy was leaning on a stick and acting like she had a hunchback.
This was the first thing Alice saw coming back through the main building doors. Bryan was by the car, same spot, same posture, one hand in his pocket. And Lucy was next to him with a stick propped under one arm like a walking cane, one hand resting on top of it, shoulders curved dramatically forward.
Alice slowed down slightly.
Lucy saw him coming and deepened the hunch. Her voice dropped about two octaves and went very slow and creaky.
"Ah," she said. "You've finally returned."
Alice kept walking.
"So long." She shook her head with great solemnity. "We have waited so long."
"You have your phone," Alice said.
"That is not the point." She hadn't fully committed to dropping the bit yet. "I am ancient now. The parking lot does things to a person."
"How ancient?"
"Forty-eight."
"That's not ancient."
Lucy straightened up entirely. "Okay, rude. I wasn't going for old specifically, I was going for ancient and wise." She pointed the stick at him with considerably more energy than an ancient and wise person should have. "Also, you were gone forever."
"Things happened."
"What things?"
"I'll tell you in the car."
Bryan pushed off the hood as Alice reached them. He looked at the shopping bag, raised an eyebrow, and said nothing. Bryan was good at saving questions for somewhere better than a parking lot.
"Car," he said. "Then you tell us."
Lucy dropped the stick and moved toward the passenger door at a light jog. Her hand landed on the handle.
Bryan's hand landed on the back of her collar.
Up she went. Clean lift, straight to the back door. She kicked at nothing. She said his name in exactly the same tone as always. He opened the back door and deposited her inside.
"I was not sprinting," she said from the backseat. "That is my normal walking pace."
"You were jogging."
"That is my normal walking pace and you know that."
Alice got in the front. Bag on his lap. Seatbelt buckled.
"Passenger princess," Lucy announced to no one in particular, settling in with the resigned dignity of someone who had accepted their fate but wanted it acknowledged. "I sit back here and I see things. I have perspective."
"You grabbed the wheel," Bryan said, pulling out of the parking spot.
"Once. Out of curiosity."
"You were steering it."
"I was curious about the steering." She crossed her arms. "Also, are you saying I'm not normal?"
"Yes."
"Good. I'm not normal because I'm special."
"Lucy."
"It was one time, Bryan."
Alice looked out the window as the campus moved past. The afternoon had gone golden and a little hazy, the kind of light that made everything look slightly unreal. He kept the bag in his lap and thought about Aunt Mathilda's face, that careful something underneath all the warmth that had never quite gone away no matter how many years passed.
"Okay," Lucy said, voice dropping out of the bit and into the regular one. "What happened?"
Alice turned from the window. He looked at the bag for a moment, then set it down at his feet.
"Where do you want me to start," he said. "Before the principal's office or during."
Lucy sat forward between the two front seats. Bryan's eyes moved to the mirror, then to Alice, and the car got a little quieter in the way it did when Bryan was actually listening.
"Before," Lucy said. "Start before."
Alice let out a breath. "Okay. So there was a crying sound coming from a side path. And I recognized the voice."
A beat.
"Oh no," Lucy said.
"And then I saw a stick nearby."
Bryan closed his eyes for exactly one second, then opened them and kept driving.
"Alice," Lucy said, in a voice that was trying very hard to be responsible and not completely delighted at the same time. "Tell me everything."
Alice told them everything.
Well. Most of it.