"There's one for your aunt too," Bella says, but she hands over the prettier of the two.

In comes Bella. She inspects the house.

Fridge. "What have you been up to so far today? Boring things I bet before I came along."

"Math. So, boring to you."

"I was right," giggles Bella. "Is your aunt not home?"

"She's working. So she's only home in the strictest physical sense."

"Oh, she works from home. That's cool. Charlie works less when I'm here but I'm allowed to be home alone, sometimes."

"As opposed to what?"

"As opposed to having to have a babysitter. He wouldn't leave me alone when I was eight, but he started doing it sometimes when I was nine and I didn't burn down the house or get murdered, so now he'll go in to work and just call me sometimes. He knows I'm here," Bella adds responsibly.

"Oh," says Elizabeth. "I haven't had a babysitter in years."

"Well, you wouldn't need one if your aunt works from home," says Bella. "Regardless of if she thinks you'd get murdered or burn down the house if she left."

"Does your dad actually think you're going to get murdered or burn down the house?"

"Nope," says Bella. "Not anymore. He probably didn't really think it when I was eight either but he didn't think it would be good to test it."

"That's good. I wouldn't want to have a parent who thought that. It sounds really inconvenient."

"Well, if he was wrong, and one of those things happened, it would have been worse than inconvenient, so I don't really blame him, but I like this better," says Bella brightly.

Elizabeth gives her an evaluating look.

"What?"

"Figuring out what you mean by that."

"What do you think I meant by it?" asks Bella, puzzled.

"You could've meant that you think it makes sense for Charlie to act like there'll be a huge disaster if you're home alone because he really doesn't want your house to burn down. Or you could've meant that you really don't want your house to burn down, so you're okay with extra rules to make sure it doesn't happen, if he thinks you need them. Do you see the difference?"

"I don't think I exactly meant either of those things. Something in between. It makes sense for Charlie to act like that, and it doesn't much bother me that he does, because I agree that it'd be bad if the house burned down. If I didn't agree that it would be really bad - worse than it being inconvenient in the way it is - then I would resent it, but I do agree. If it was more inconvenient or less bad then I wouldn't."

"See," says Elizabeth, "to me, it makes a lot more sense to just not burn down the house."

"And," says Bella, "I didn't burn down the house. I just didn't mind making Charlie extra sure about it before he'd let me not-burn-down-the-house without being watched."

She shrugs. "Okay."

"I mean, I do use the stove and stuff. I made the cupcakes myself. Charlie can't cook very well."

"You make good cupcakes," says Elizabeth. "That's going in your file."

Bella giggles. "In case you ever have to tap your network for a good cupcake."

"I have a network now?"

"Well, a sort of -" Bella gestures. "Starfish. I don't know how many of the people you know know how many other people you know. In case you ever have to tap your starfish for cupcakes."

Elizabeth giggles. "Now there's a mental image for you."

"You sitting in the middle of a starfish? Yeah," giggles Bella.

"Or poking one and having it burp cupcakes at me."

"Ew! I don't think the decorative frosting would be intact," snorts Bella. "I was thinking the correct arm of the starfish would just, you know, hand you one."

Elizabeth giggles.

"That's most of the point of starfish is to have arms. They could hand you stuff. None of this burping nonsense."

"Even though it's hilarious."

"Yes," says Bella firmly.

"If you say so."

"I do say so." Bella flops onto a couch. "I thought about it and I think I agree with you I'd be bad at politics, but only if I had to get elected, I think I would be a good queen."

"Really," says Elizabeth. "Go on."

"Well, monarchs are mostly good as long as they don't start doing actually evil things, as near as I can tell. That's what the problem always seems to be with kings and queens in history, is that they started being terrible to people of different religions or going on badly informed witch hunts or taking money they didn't really need or something. I wouldn't do that, I would want a nice happy well-managed country that I could be proud of."

"The problem with monarchies is that kings and queens die and then their kids take over and at some point there's just not going to be a kid who'll be any good at it," says Elizabeth. "The best thing a queen can do for the long term is write a good constitution."

"Oh, yes. I forgot the part where I was imagining I'd be immortal," says Bella apologetically. "I was imagining that. I could probably also write a good constitution, though."

"What would you put in it?"

"It would probably depend on the country, I guess. Maybe I would keep around an evil vizier specifically so whenever he told me to do something I could come up with exactly what about his idea was bad, and put not to do it in the constitution," she suggests, mostly facetiously.

She snorts.

"I think I would also be well up on most real queens and kings just by not having Inquisitions or a torture chamber or crushing taxes, though."

"That stuff's easy. It's the tricky parts that get you. Politics is the kind of thing you can't get right just by sitting and thinking about it; you have to find out how things actually work first."

"Right. I'd have to talk to a lot of people and figure out what they wanted. Or at least have someone who was good at that."

"I'm good at that."

"You could be my not-evil vizier, then. Assuming you aren't evil."

"Of course not."

"Hmm, I wonder what the best way to figure that out for sure is."

"There isn't one."

"I think you would be more likely to say that if you were evil," says Bella, stroking her chin thoughtfully.

"Interesting. Why?"

"Well, it's either true or not true, and you either know it or you don't, and I don't think you being evil affects those odds either way - I don't think evil people know more or fewer things, or that you being evil would make it likelier or less likely that there's a way to find out about it for sure or vice versa. Well, maybe vice versa, if there were a way to find out and you knew it and decided not to be evil since somebody could find out if you were, but that's not a very big slice of maybe. But whether it's true or not and whether you know or not, you would want me to think I couldn't know for sure, if you were actually evil. ...No, that's not quite right, is it, because maybe you could make up a test and then pass it, so I take it back."

"The thing that I am that makes me say that is 'cynical'," she says, helpfully.

"People call me cynical sometimes. I'm not sure if I agree with them."

"Why do they say it, and why aren't you sure if you agree?"

"They usually say it when I talk about people wanting things and getting them by trading off other things. I don't really know why, though, so I can't follow their reasoning and see if it's right."

"Well, tell me more and I'll see if I can figure it out."

"I'd have to look in old notebooks for really accurate reconstructions of cases... Renée said it once when she explained why we have secret ballots. I said that they only worked for their stated purpose if the people who might be bullied into voting certain ways really believed they weren't being watched and it just being against the law to watch them might not work completely. Or something like that. I'd have to look it up."

"That is a cynical thing to say. But it's not wrong."

"Why is there a mean-sounding word for saying things that include things that aren't wrong? Do people not like to be right or something?" asks Bella with the tone of someone who has asked similar questions many times and never gotten a satisfactory answer.

"Cynical and idealistic aren't inherently related to right and wrong," says Elizabeth. "But kids aren't supposed to be cynical because we're not supposed to know any horrible things about the world yet."

"Then why did she even tell me about why we have secret ballots? The horrible things about that are pretty obvious. And if she'd just patted me on the head and said 'never you mind' then I might have been mad but I couldn't have done a whole lot about it if no grownups were willing to tell me."

"Just because people think things should be a certain way, doesn't necessarily mean they're good at making them turn out like that. Especially because a lot of this stuff is things people assume without really thinking about how it happens."

"People," says Bella expressively.

"Yep," says Elizabeth. "Also, you're being cynical again. But then, so am I."

Bella giggles.

Elizabeth grins.

"Maybe people will be less surprised by it when I am older."

"They probably will," she says. "But it might take a while."

"And there are probably no rules at all for how cynical immortal people are supposed to be."

"Depends. If you were ten years old forever, I bet you'd just keep getting trouble over it."

"I could look ten years old forever, but I couldn't be ten years old forever," says Bella. "I suppose my brain could quit growing, which would be bad, but as long as I could still learn things it wouldn't be all that bad. And I would have forever to figure out how to not look ten, if that was a drawback of however I was immortal that needed to be fixed."

"I mean 'be' as in physically, not chronologically. Looking ten years old would be the thing that'd confuse people, but only because they'd be assuming that you'd only lived for ten years and your brain and body worked like a ten-year-old's. Probably if your brain and body worked like a ten-year-old's forever, people would want you to keep being all cute and innocent and stuff even when they found out how old you really were; I don't know how they'd feel about it if you were an adult who just looked ten."

"I don't think anyone really knows how much of ten year old brains working different is because they need to physically grow more and how much of it is because the people who live in them have all only been around for ten years," says Bella thoughtfully. "I mean - how would you check?"

"There are developmental differences and stuff. But yeah, I don't think there's a way to get adults with ten-year-old brains and ten-year-olds with adult brains, at least not ethically."

"Yeah. How would you do it unethically?" muses Bella.

"Science can do some pretty weird stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody at some point figured out how to change how fast people's brains develop."

"I suppose. People sometimes talk about 'mental age' but I don't think that's the same thing really."

"I don't think so either."

"I am looking forward to being grown up. My parents know I'm pretty responsible but they don't always act like it, and other people don't even know as much as they do."

"Chris is good about that, and everybody else I can pretty much work around."

"Do you have any good tips on working around people?"

"Not generally applicable ones. Why, who do you need to work around?"

"Nobody in particular right now. Teachers sometimes, unless I get good ones next year."

"I can probably help you work around teachers, but I don't think I can tell you how without knowing who. It's not the kind of thing where there are general principles you can talk about easily."

"Oh. And I go to school in Phoenix so you couldn't meet them really."

"You can meet them, and I'm sure your observations won't be completely worthless."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"You're welcome!"

Bella sticks out her tongue.

"What kind of information? Maybe I can practice before I go home, so you can check my work."

"Okay, imagine you are having a problem with someone that you want me to help you solve," she says. "Think of a specific example. What would you tell me about it?"

Bella closes her eyes. "Uuuum, last year we had to do group projects in English with assigned partners and mine wouldn't do any work and the teacher didn't believe me. I'm not sure whether the right place to solve it would be with the teacher or the other kids though."

"What can you tell me about the conversation you had with the teacher about it?"

"She said that part of the assignment was teamwork, and that if I couldn't work with my team I needed to 'cultivate those skills', and that she was sure they weren't really going to sabotage our project because their grade depended on it too, and that if I kept complaining no one would want to work with me when we did get to choose groups."

"That doesn't sound promising. What about your group?"

"One of them didn't care about his grade at all and outright didn't want to do anything but sign his name and pretend we'd all worked together, and the other one was either trying or pretending to but she always forgot or had other things she thought were more important come up."

"I could probably manage the distracted one. In person I might be able to get the other guy to admit how much he didn't care in a way the teacher couldn't ignore, but that's trickier to pull off."

"What actually wound up happening was I called their parents. They weren't happy, but I didn't really want to be their friends."

"That's one solution. Did it work?"

"It worked okay. We got a B. The teacher decided her opinion had been vindicated and the whole problem had been solved by me trying harder, but I don't have to have that teacher again."

"Acceptable."

"I'm a little worried that the teacher is going to be stupid at more kids than she would have been because of that, but I don't have any clever ideas about it. I guess maybe when I'm eighteen I can go tell her off once I am magically able to have worthwhile opinions." She waves her hands to accompany the last clause.

"I don't think you had much of an effect on her one way or another. People who'll take any outcome as a sign they're right will take any outcome as a sign they're right unless a choir of angels descends from heaven to sing them a little song about how wrong they are."

"Do you know where to get choirs of angels?" asks Bella.

"Sadly, no."

"That would be really useful. If you could call down choirs of angels to sing wrongness at wrong people," sighs Bella.

"It would probably cause more problems than it solved. But it's a nice thought."

"Heart attacks. Bewildered scientists. Copyright claims on the little songs."

She giggles.

"And the news would never shut up about it, either, it'd be all choirs of angels all the time, and I bet there would be silly cults."

"So many silly cults."

"And probably some really stubborn people wouldn't even believe they were wrong if an angelic choir told them so," sighs Bella, picking at a frayed spot on the hem of her jeans.

"Probably."

"I wonder what that is like. I wonder if it is so much like not being wrong that I couldn't even tell. Maybe I am wrong a lot about a lot of things and I can't notice no matter how hard I look."

"It's possible," she agrees. "But mostly, if you're trying, you can eventually tell. People who are like that are trying really hard not to tell, because it's more important to them to feel like they're right, or have everybody agree that they're right, than to actually be right. Or because they're just so sure about something that they can't face being proved wrong."

"The thing I look at most is me. I wouldn't want to be wrong about me. Then I wouldn't even know who was driving." Bella taps her head to indicate what is being driven.

"If I ever catch you being wrong about you, I'll let you know."

"Will you sing me a little song?"

"I don't actually know if I can sing."

"Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream," begins Bella, in a voice that is well within human average.

Elizabeth giggles.

"Gently down the - You're not gonna sing? It's a round."

"I don't sing. Which is why I don't know if I'm any good at it, and also probably why I don't know what a round is."

"You don't wanna find out, either?" asks Bella, puzzled but not pushy. "A round is when everybody sings the same thing but offset - if you were going to sing you would have started with the rowing line when I started the gently line."

"Well, now I know what a round is."

"Yeah. Most of them are nursery rhyme type things like Row Row Row Your Boat."

"Aha."

"You can stack them up a few people deep depending on the song, but if there are more people than lines then they start to group, obviously."

"Yeah, I can see that."

"If you had a country to run," says Bella, circling back, "what would you do with it?"

"Depends on the country, of course. And what the rest of the world's doing. I mean, I'd run it well, obviously, but there are a lot of different ways 'well' can go. And a lot of different ways to be able to run a country. The President of the United States has a very different job from the Queen of Fairyland."

"I would rather be the Queen of Fairyland, I think," says Bella. "The Queen of Fairyland probably gets to learn fairy magic."

"Not necessarily a plus. Some of those fairies are pretty nasty, I mean, in the pre-Disney versions."

"I read old books sometimes but not usually old fairytales," muses Bella, "what d'you mean?"

"I don't know, I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head except Hansel and Gretel and there weren't actually any fairies in that one, just lots of cannibalism."

"There's still that in the kids' versions I've seen," muses Bella. "Or at least threats of cannibalism."

"Yeah. But I mean... 'fairy' used to mean 'terrifying otherworldly creature who will steal your baby and replace it with an enchanted log'."

"What is the log enchanted to do?"

"Act like a baby for a week until the magic wears off."

"Why bother?"

"To throw off suspicion? I don't know. Fairies also don't traditionally make a lot of sense."

"Huh. I wonder if that's just lazy writing or if there's a way to interpret them that does make sense."

"Want to look up some fairy tales and sensify them?"

"Do you have a good collection of the kind of fairy tales with actual fairies in them?"

"We can check!"

Bella hops up and starts hunting for books.

There are some books of fairy tales available, although it is not always easy to tell which ones contain fairies.

"Not all old stories are this weird. Like, the Iliad is comprehensible and that's thousands of years old. And contains absolutely no log babies or people giving birth to goats, as far as I remember."

"I haven't read the Illiad. Is it fun or just comprehensible?"

"I'm not sure I'd say it's fun. But I liked it okay."

"It's about a war, right? Troy?" says Bella vaguely.

"Yep. Rivers running red with blood, Achilles dragging Hector's corpse around the city walls."

"Why did he do that? Corpses are heavy."

"He had a chariot. I think Hector killed somebody he liked and that was the only way he could think of to express how mad he was about it."

"I'd figure killing him would do it. Or did he not kill him personally?"

"Nope, killed him and then dragged him around afterward. I think there was a thing where how you treat dead bodies is really important, because of afterlife stuff or something, but the copy I read didn't actually explain."

"I'm pretty sure there isn't an afterlife," says Bella, "but if I ran one it wouldn't make a difference what happened to the bodies."

"Well, in ancient Greece they thought it did, I guess."

"How did they think they knew that?"

"Well, because they had all these legends and stuff about what the afterlife was like and how it worked, and nobody could be sure the legends weren't true, and they mostly agreed with each other, so why make trouble?"

"Yeah, but - where did the legends come from? Before they were written what did they believe and why did they stop believing that? People think a lot of weird stuff and sometimes I wonder about it."

"Well, when you think about it, most of what you know about the world comes from other people, right?"

"Yes, but they aren't getting it from legends. I guess there could be a conspiracy, but it doesn't sound like the ancient Greeks were running on conspiracy, right?"

"No. But people like explanations. So one person makes up an explanation for something that they think fits, and tells it to all their friends, and their friends each have their own interpretations, and they tell those to more people, and a while later you have a bunch of myths."

"I like our way better."

"What's 'our' way?"

"The way where scientists figure stuff out and if you wanted to and had the equipment you could check."

"People still do lots of the other thing, though."

"My parents both say they believe in religions. But they don't do much about them and Renée keeps changing which one."

"Yeah, that happens."

"Renée treats it like a hobby and not like a fact. It's not my hobby but I think that's pretty harmless. I think Charlie just doesn't want to deal with the hassle of coming up with a way to be that doesn't have anything written on that line in the metaphorical paperwork."

"Not a problem I've ever had, but a lot of people do, I've noticed."

"Well, that's creepy," says Elizabeth. "What do you mean, 'supposedly' true?"

"Well, for one thing I wasn't there, and for another it was a long time ago and Charlie might've forgotten details. And the kid has to have gone somewhere."

"There's lots of things that could've happened to him that nobody would've found him if they did," she says. "I don't know the abandoned house, where is it?"

"It's sort of north-west of town. If you go right instead of left like you're going to the reservation."

"Huh. Yeah, I don't think I've ever been there. How abandoned is the house? I guess nobody lives there, that's implied by 'abandoned', but is anybody taking care of it?"

"I don't think so? Charlie warns off people who are throwing rocks at it or whatever sometimes, so I don't think whoever's taking care of it can be a very good job if there's anyone."

"Hmm. Okay," she says. "Probably not very practically useful information, but thanks. You never know."

"You're welcome."

She smiles.