She sits next to Darren in English.
"He got it good," Bella says. "Under pressure. It was cool if you ignore the screaming terror."
And the fact that he got himself caught in it, too. Not that he will tell his sister that.
"I need to call my dad to come get me. Savannah, we're going to the Avalon Saturday, do you want to come?"
She glances between all present and says definitively, "Yes. I am going to be Darren's lady-shaped shadow for the next month."
Vernon retrieves a phone and offers it to Bella. "Mind if I get his number, too? I can get him in the loop faster that way."
"Yeah, sure." Bella adds Charlie as a contact and then calls him. Her pickup is arranged without further ado; she hangs up and sits down to wait.
She is dead serious about baking cookies. Her brother nearly died, she needs comfort food. Baking is a method to get aforementioned comfort food.
"If you're going to bring leftovers to school tomorrow such that I might get any can I put in a vote for snickerdoodles?"
She goes to make those.
"They're fine cookies," he says. "Besides, I'm pretty sure that baking cookies is for Savannah's sake, more than ours."
"Yup! I don't often bake, either, though. Because I tend to get obsessive with making things perfect and I fight with frosting. Usually, the frosting wins."
"Yes, but then I try to get them into interesting shapes and they turn into blob monsters instead."
"Drop cookies are the kinds where you spoon little blobs of dough onto a baking sheet and then they spread out into disks. Like oatmeal or chocolate chip ones."
"I wouldn't expect it to. I guess you could drop the dough into metal cookie cutters, and bake them therein, but I'd expect it to get too crispy around the edges."
"Yeah. So I just get annoyed and pout rather than trying to find solutions. My brainpower needs to be channeled to magic and such."