"I do not know the word at least." Iomedae is planning to stay to do school! It sounds very important! She intends to study very hard and get it done with as fast as possible so she can get back to her job of fighting Evil.

Lily is currently utterly captivated by the fourth episode of Adventure Time. There are images moving on a big glowing box that Iomedae hadn't especially been paying attention to, but it's all drawings with lines and brights colors. It's near the end of the episode and the main characters are currently in a fight scene, though it's not very realistic and might be hard for Iomedae to recognize as a fight at all. 

Illusion-box! "Man will build the Heaven of God on world!"

Lily does not hear this at all because Finn and Jake are having ADVENTURES! 

Evelyn is still not going to hug Iomedae when she specifically said she didn't want that, but family TV-watching is a situation where sort of squishing in a bit is the usual thing to do. She has feelings, and it's easier to make them not Iomedae's problem because Iomedae is staring at the "illusion box" instead of her. 

"...Yeah," she whispers over. "This is a show for little kids and you're starting in the middle, but - we should find some shows with Spanish dubs, actually, I think you'd learn a lot from them." 

"I can study box but I not smart enough be box-maker."

....Evelyn is actually just pretty confused about why that was the response Iomedae jumped to? 

Still in a whisper, "- the pictures on the box aren't usually about how to make new boxes. This one is a pretend story for little kids, but there are stories for older kids or grownups, too, and - a lot of them are actual pictures, from real places far away, of real things that happened. So you can see things that happened in other places in America, without having to go there yourself. And we can make it talk in Spanish instead of English, so you understand better." 

" - yes, ma'am."

Evelyn feels like she handled that wrong, somehow, but she's been feeling that way about most of her conversations with Iomedae and probably she just needs to calm down about it. Also Lily is reacting to the peak dramatic moment of the episode by gasping and grabbing at Evelyn's sleeve, which is distracting. She puts her arm around Lily and half-watches the ending.

And thinks, vaguely, about what's on their schedule today. Saturdays have been very....well, not "low-key" exactly, but unscheduled at least, while it was just Lily here. But she feels like she has items to accomplish today - 

- right. She promised Iomedae that she would look into church food banks, and help figure out if they were trustworthy and wouldn't report illegal immigrants to the authorities. And then she completely did not do that, yet, because just writing her log notes took ages.

Also there's the question of the money Iomedae had on her. Both of those arguably need a response from the social worker, though Evelyn isn't going to hold off on investigating food banks if it turns out that Diel doesn't do email on weekends. 

She will, however, slip off as soon as she can - trusting that Lily will monopolize Iomedae's attention - and head to the study so she can log onto her email and see if there's an answer yet. 

Diel hates working weekends but you have to, in this line of work. The teenage runaway doesn't have any documents, so that's a bunch of paperwork with USCIS, and the lawyer who does that for the department is always swamped, so it'll be three years unless Diel does most of the work for the lawyer and just sends it over for approval, which means a lot of puzzling over forms. There are protections specifically for undocumented children who are taken into state care, so there are options even if it proves impossible to prove that Iomedae was born in the US, which is looking likely. The parents' names didn't turn up any matches. A call to an expert on the FLDS cults was if anything even more confusing. They felt quite strongly that a girl from one of those cults would not be going around calling herself a sword-bearing holy warrior of God. She's considering the possibility that Iomedae made all of that up, probably to cover being just a normal undocumented alien with a great imagination. No one can lie like a fifteen year old girl. 

Enrollment for school won't wait on that, in any event, though it sounds like the girl should get an IEP - she may or may not be actually disabled but she's illiterate and in high school, and the only way to get her additional services is the special ed system. She's in the process for scheduling an educational evaluation. Midyear transfers to high school are always kind of tough on kids anyway. 

There is also endless paperwork associated with the ongoing legal proceedings. Iomedae's going to need a court-appointed advocate to help her testify, and the whole case of course falls apart if she turns out to be a lying liar, which sure looks likely, and she has to conduct a risk evaluation and a referral to Iomedae for therapy because if she's not lying about everything then she was the victim of an attempted rape. 

- Evelyn's email is kind of disconcerting. It makes it seem more implausible - though not impossible - that the girl is lying about her religious-cult upbringing. She asks in reply for Evelyn to ask the name of the girl's church and any important figures or gurus or whatever in it. She doesn't think they can get funds to feed migrant workers in Nevada just because it'd be helpful to a foster kid, but the girl can spend her allowance on it, if Evelyn believes in giving an allowance, though Evelyn should first of course make sense she's not involved in a gang there or anything. Kids rarely abscond alone; they have somewhere in mind to go, friends or a boyfriend or something. 

She doesn't think they have any legitimate grounds to confiscate Iomedae's money that Iomedae went into care with just because Iomedae earned it under the table. She's not delighted about a kid who is a risk to abscond having hundreds of dollars, though, so if Iomedae does happen to want to donate it to the poor that'd be good, and if Evelyn is very worried about Iomedae leaving they can take the money and put it in a bank account for Iomedae to have when she turns eighteen.

That's a surprisingly irritating email to receive. 

Evelyn can't actually complain that it's an unhelpful response, because a social worker who checks her email on weekends is already going pretty above-and-beyond, but it's - she doesn't like the tone, or the attitude, or something. But it's no good spending all her time grumpy at social workers, especially not when they are actually trying to do their jobs. 

There is no particular acknowledgement of the food bank volunteer gig plan, which Evelyn will take to mean that it's not a problem and doesn't call for any special paperwork. Diel also didn't tell her not to help Iomedae set things right with the migrant workers' kids, just that Social Services didn't have funding for it, so Evelyn is just going to - take that as implicit permission that it's okay to do things that don't require funding, and of course she's going to go there with Iomedae and not let her run off with a gang. She'll...have to tell Iomedae something about the money and what Social Services recommended, and Diel's answer was unhelpful, she...will think about that more in a bit.

....She reads the email through again, more carefully, before deciding how to reply. 

Evelyn really doesn't think Iomedae is lying about her religious background. Iomedae may or may not be holding back important facts about a wide variety of other things, but Evelyn doesn't actually think a fifteen-year-old with dubious English could pull off an act this well, especially not across a language barrier, and she's quite sure Iomedae isn't pretending to have worse English than she really does. But...a lot of that is her gut sense from having interacted with Iomedae longer, it makes sense that Diel buys it less. And - well, part of it is that Evelyn kind of sees it as her job to believe kids unless given a very good reason not to. Anyway, the fact that her parents' names didn't show up in the system doesn't feel especially meaningful - who knows if they were even transliterated correctly, the police must have had to wildly guess at US spelling - and the fact that Iomedae doesn't relate to God specifically like a fundamentalist Mormon also doesn't feel like conclusive proof that she's not intensely religious. 

(She...might not have been born in the US. Evelyn is definitely starting to consider that it would be more believable for an unusual religious group with a language none of them recognize to exist under the radar if it's in another country. And if it were in a much poorer other country, that would make a lot more sense of Iomedae's feelings about wealth and technology. Maybe her parents weren't deliberately shunning technology at all, maybe they just genuinely lived in Third World conditions. Somewhere in South America? It's not impossible that Iomedae, lacking any context about anything, could have travelled hundreds or even thousands of miles on her quest for a holy order, without necessarily realizing she was crossing international borders - or maybe she did and that's one of the things she's concealing, but it would surprise Evelyn a bit given her intense scrupulosity about obeying the law. Anyway. Evelyn is not going to bring that up with Diel because it feels like it introduces a lot of complications and she's still kind of miffed with Diel.) 

An educational assessment seems sensible, even though Iomedae is definitely not intellectually disabled. She's bright and diligent, but she's still a very long way behind, and wants to make it up as fast as possible, and funding for extra classroom support or tutoring will help with that. It also seems fine to wait on putting her in a mainstream high school, volunteering at a food bank will give her some of the social immersion and language exposure she needs and Evelyn can work with her at home. 

The court case sounds messy. It's not the first time Evelyn has tried to support a child through testifying in court, and some of those kids had been through much worse than Iomedae, but this sounds tricky to navigate in different ways. Evelyn does not think Iomedae is lying about what happened but she recognizes that how credible she comes across to a judge is in some ways more relevant. It's also not the first time Evelyn has faced that challenge, and seethed in rage at the fact that abused children often act in ways that make them seem less rather than more credible to adults. It's frustrating but it is what it is. She'll just have to try very hard to make sure Iomedae understands the process and how to approach it.

(Evelyn has no idea if Iomedae wants therapy or would benefit from it, she seems pretty untroubled about the 'attempted rape' aspect, basically all of her distress about her own situation is around whether she can morally eat food when other kids are hungry and/or whether she's breaking laws and God will abandon her for it. She might benefit from therapy about that but also Evelyn can very easily imagine a therapist - most therapists - approaching it in a spectacularly unhelpful way.) 

...Money, right. It would be convenient if Iomedae wanted to donate it, sure - though Evelyn is less worried than Diel seems to be that Iomedae will run away at this point, and if she did decide to then not having money wouldn't stop her. Evelyn is pretty sure that donating it won't address the real source of Iomedae's anxiety, though. Her best guess of what Iomedae is worried about is that - either the police and/or US government will think worse of holy warriors of God because Iomedae failed to properly conduct herself, or maybe that God will personally judge her for disobeying laws?

She could tell Iomedae that it's not within the legal rights of Social Services to take her money, however it was earned? ...Iomedae will be confused and make faces if she says that. That entire conversation would be vastly easier to have if Iomedae had better English, but that's true of a growing pile of conversations and they can't all wait two weeks. 

Ugh. 

She writes back a short email thanking Diel for her prompt reply and hard work on sorting out Iomedae's complicated paperwork situation and agreeing that an educational assessment is a good idea. She promises to ask Iomedae what her church is called in her own language - since that might be google-able or recognizable to a religion expert even transliterated into English - and details about its gurus, and maybe any specific rituals that Iomedae hasn't seen the local churches engaging in. Maybe they want to consult a comparative religion professor or something, rather than just a FLDS expert? 

She sends the email, and heads back to the lounge to see how the kids are getting on. 

Iomedae is obeying the instruction to treat Lily more like she is four or five! Four and five year olds love sneaking games where you pretend you can't find them even though you can. Does Lily love those.

Lily DOES! She has played lots of hide-and-seek with Mummy and she is VERY GOOD at hiding and sneaking! She knows all the good hiding places in the lounge and kitchen!

(She's not very good at hiding quietly rather than making squeaky excited noises without noticing she's doing it.) 

Wow that's adorable. 

Evelyn smiles at Iomedae. "You're really good with kids. I'm going to try to look up church food banks now and call them to see if they're open today, okay?" 

Iomedae will not lie but she is willing to foolishly and loudly look in wrong places first! Especially implausible wrong places that make Lily giggle.

"Yes, ma'am."

Evelyn smiles at her again and heads back to the study and does some Googling. 

The St. Vincent’s Food Pantry is apparently Catholic and looks very legitimate to Evelyn. It's annoyingly not open on weekends. Probably that's normal and she just hadn't previously had reason to investigate whether food banks operate on Saturdays. She sends polite friendly emails to the contact emails provided anyway, saying that her foster daughter would love to volunteer for a Christian charity and she would like to talk to someone whenever convenient about details. She spends some time skimming the website. They have an immigration legal services branch of the St Vincent charity organization, apparently? She can't tell at a glance if it's the sort of thing that would help with illegal immigrants. 

She should try to find Iomedae a priest or minister to talk to, but the number of different denominations of church is overwhelming and she's not...actually 100% sure which one Iomedae had been attending before with her migrant community. Probably Catholic but she should, like, check, and it would make the phone call marginally less awkward. Evelyn feels pretty weird about calling up a list of churches on a Saturday. It gives her a sort of squirmy nervous feeling like she's about to get in trouble with the teacher, which feels like an embarrassing character flaw now that she's pointing it out to herself, but anyway it's not an emergency - or that likely to work on a Saturday - and it probably will go a lot better if she has a few more important conversations with Iomedae first. 

...She Googles for ESL educational resources aimed at teens, because Iomedae will pick up more English vocabulary sooner or later just with immersion but she might pick it up faster with structured learning and Evelyn is impatient. Google is not spectacularly helpful at this, but she finds some vocabulary worksheets that don't look completely useless or like they're for six-year-olds, and some videos that actually seem pretty useful for Iomedae in general? There's a series where an actor goes to various places - a grocery store, a clothing store, a doctor's office, a pharmacy, a school, the DMV - and narrates it very slowly and clearly and there are lots of freeze-frame shots where the object being named is highlighted. There are bad CGI animations. The acting quality is giving Evelyn secondhand embarrassment and she would be mortified to show this to, say, Jeremy at age 15, but she doubts Iomedae will notice or care. 

Also they should go shopping today. Iomedae needs some clothes that fit her properly (and are sufficiently...modest?...or whatever it is she was clearly looking for when they went through the ottoman of spares), and they could do with a grocery run. Shopping with Lily sounds vastly less exhausting if Iomedae is also there to keep her entertained - not that Evelyn would consider it her responsibility, just, Lily will predictably be better-behaved and both she and Iomedae will have a good time - and Evelyn wants to see Iomedae's FACE when she encounters Costco. And then maybe they can do an activity together, Lily benefits a lot from burning off some energy. 

It's not urgent, though, it's still only midmorning. Evelyn wanders out to watch the hide-and-seek game and wait for a natural break before interrupting. 

Iomedae is quite bored with hide and seek by now but everyone has always commended her diligence and it is among the important virtues. (Diligence, obedience, chastity, ambition, courage, conviction, and charity, the local priest said.)

When Evelyn comes out she will find Lily for the last time and then look expectantly over at Evelyn.

Evelyn will smile at Iomedae and give Lily a cuddle when she runs to her. "Lily, love, why don't you go play with your dolls for a bit? I want to talk to Iomedae." It's not a private conversation exactly, this time, but definitely easier to have without a seven-year-old insistently interrupting both of them, and she's worked hard on getting Lily to the point where "playing with her dolls by herself" is a possibility, though quiet play is still a lot to ask. 

She beckons Iomedae over into the kitchen and sits down at the table. "So, I looked up a food bank - St Vincents, they're a church charity - and they aren't open on Saturdays. I sent a - message," Iomedae probably doesn't know what 'email' is, "but they might not see it until Monday, in two days. I'm pretty sure they would be safe for - people without papers - to go and get food, but I would want to talk to someone there about it before I could be totally sure. I can look for other places but it's going to be hard to find somewhere open on a weekend, and I think your friends will be okay for another two days. Is that okay with you?" 

"Yes, ma'am." She doesn't know what things are reasonable and what aren't in general but 'it will take a few days to get messages sent' is obviously completely reasonable.

Evelyn nods. Hopefully Iomedae isn't just saying that because she's uncomfortable disagreeing? Iomedae seems pretty confident about expressing her opinions in general but Evelyn is worried the conversation earlier might have made her anxious. 

"So I'm thinking about what to do today. I want to help you work on learning English and I found some things you can practice with. I also want to go shopping, we need to buy food for the house and I want to take you to buy clothes you like and that fit you. ...I also want to find a priest who you can talk to about God, because I know I'm not a very useful person to talk to about that, but there are a lot of different priests in Reno, and so I was hoping to ask you some questions about your church back home with your family, so I can figure out who would be best for you to talk to. Does that make sense?" 

"Yes of course! Need talk to priest about the money and about holy orders. Food banks closed on 'weekend' but market open?"

"Some of them are! Cities have a lot of markets. There's actually a farmer's market I like that's only open on Sundays - tomorrow - they have amazing produce. Fruits and vegetables and things." She doesn't usually shop there because it's pricy - the vegetables per se aren't too bad but she inevitably gets tempted into buying artisanal jam or something - but it's probably closer to what Iomedae is used to, and she might enjoy it. "But for today I think we want to go to Costco, which is - a very big market in a building, they sell food in big packages so it's good for big families." Three is not per se a big family but Jeremy will probably visit for dinner and he eats a LOT. 

"Workers shop Costco! I not go but I give them money for my part, twenty dollar a week, and treats for the children five dollar a week. A good market."

Iomedae is such a sweetheart. "Oh, that makes sense! It's really good for getting foods cheaper per meal than most stores, if you buy a lot at once, so it would be perfect for a big group of people trying to save money. And it has really yummy treats. I'll let Lily pick one kind of treat but you might have to help her decide. ...What sorts of foods were you usually eating, with the workers?" It might be reassuring for Iomedae to have foods she's used to here, though Evelyn is a little worried it was a horrifically unbalanced diet.