Page 150 of Ashes of Sin and Stardust

“But that stopped around the time I was fourteen, because people kept telling me I was crazy, and I figured nobody would want to rescue me if I was crazy. And then all the boys only cared about me if I was sleeping with them, so I did that a little bit, but it wasn’t very fun, so I eventually started smoking instead, and that’s when I got in trouble at school.”

“Okay, you’ve lost your breathing. Can you go back to that?”

“Right. Yeah. Okay... wow. Sorry I’m...” She caught her breath and attempted to speak while regulating her breath. “I just got really um... yeah.”

I held her and rubbed her back a little more while her breathing evened out, then I moved the laptop slightly so I could see what she’d done to my files.

Amazingly enough, her system made perfect sense. She’d reorganized the folders and relabeled everything so they were by first name instead of last name, since half of them were like that anyway, and some of the girls didn’t have last names. She’d also taken the miscellaneous documents I’d stuck at the bottom of the folder and put them in the appropriate profiles.

And she’d cleaned the hell out of the Master spreadsheet, linking and adding in more columns so that the Master had almost all the information I would need on a regular basis.

“Alice this is... really impressive and very helpful. Thank you.”

“I hoped you wouldn’t be mad. But it was just such a good idea, and I wasso bored...”

“Well, next time, before you get yourself into my files, I’d appreciate it if you ran your idea by me first, but this is really great. It’ll save me a lot of time. Let’s go ahead and make this live.”

“You need someone to organize your calendar, by the way. You missed a conference call at one o’clock.”

I winced. “Shit. What was that for?”

“Someone named Albert?”

“Damnit. I’ll have to call him and reschedule.”

“No, I already did it, you’re meeting him tomorrow at four o’clock.”

“How did you even get into my laptop without the password?”

She grinned up at me. “Because I paid attention while you were typing. Your password is ‘howtotameabrat’ with no caps. Which, by the way, is a really shitty password.”

“We all reset our passwords every thirty days. I run out of ideas pretty fast. And I got used to typing that phrase shortly after I met you so...”

She laughed and laid her head against my chest, sighing happily as I hugged her closer.

“How long did it take you to do this?”

“Um, about four hours. I had some extra coffee.”

“So you got back from the store around... noon?”

“Oh, no, I did it all this morning and then went to the store when I got hungry and... fuck. I forgot to eat again.” She looked up at me guiltily. “I wanted a chicken salad sandwich for lunch so I decided to go out and get one while I did the grocery shopping, and then I forgot to get my sandwich while I was out. I got back about thirty minutes ago.”

I smiled and stood up, holding her against my chest as I did so. She giggled and wrapped her legs around my waist. “Looks like someone’s in trouble... You also forgot to put the groceries away.”

“Oh no!” she shouted. “Have they gone bad?”

I chuckled. “Well... Let’s go find out. Also, let’s practice shutting cabinet doors and turning off lights, okay?”

Due to Alice packingthe cold and the frozen items together in a cold bag, the food was fine, so she helped me put everything in the fridge while she continued to chatter almost nonstop. “How much extra coffee did you have today, little bug?”

“Uh... I had two cups here and then I got a Frappuccino while I was at the grocery store.”

“And you probably added chocolate to it, didn’t you?”

“Obviously.”

“That’s a lot of caffeine for such a little girl.”

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