Special Episode: Trouble (Part I)
This episode is part of a larger story, Soft Touch. If you haven’t yet, you can go back and read it from the beginning right here.
Black jeans, black backpack, black hoodie. All the cheapest possible quality, but they keep her hidden in the dark veil of night. Crouched low on the rocky hilltop, she merges with the shadows and the inky-black sky, watching from a safe distance back.
The party is in full swing at the mansion down below. Luxurious black cars keep drawing up to the door to be met by a rushing valet, deposit their cluster of glittering guests, and roll back off down the coastal road. The sea and the rocky shore come right up to the back of the house. The surface of the ocean is illuminated in places by the light spilling out through the windows, dancing with the waves, with the movements of guests passing by the windows.
Laughter and music and talk drift up on the salty air, all the way to the hidden place on the hill where Calla is watching.
She’s keeping an eye on the crowd, watching for the caterers. They’ve mostly kept inside, but now a server drifts out onto massive huge white steps to offer sparkling glasses of champagne to the guests coming in. The uniform appears to be a white dress shirt, black pants, and a red bow tie.
Calla sifts through the ties in her backpack until she finds a red bow tie. She’s glad she guessed right on the white dress shirt and black pants. Could’ve easily been khakis, and that could’ve been a problem.
Once she’s got the correct uniform in her arms, she bundles it all up together and stashes it neatly in her little backpack. Then she shoulders the backpack and straightens up, her eyes flitting back to the palatial house.
It stands like a castle, all high wings and rough-hewn stone, complete with little turrets at its heights. Behind it is an old sea wall, half-sunk into the water, so that only the immense wooden columns that once supported it are even visible. Calla can’t even think how big the wall must have been. Based on the height and width of the columns, it was designed to keep out and withstand even the highest waves that might hit this coast.
Crumbled anyways, though, Calla notes with vague amusement. Mother Nature isn’t all that intimidated by walls.
This must have been a grand old building, once, but some uppity architect has partially modernized it, marring its facade with seemingly random glass walls and metallic touches.
It’s a masquerade party, and glimmering facades abound, masks on every face.
Security is tight at the door. Calla can see that, and she expected it.
She pulls the straps of her backpack tight. Draws her hood up over her buzzed hair. Pulls her black neck gaiter up until it covers everything from her nose down, so that only her eyes show.
She sets off silently, moving through the cover of the wooded hill, down to the rocky cliff at the back of the house, where the sea rushes through the towering wooden pillars. Calla is on the cliff’s edge to the far left of the house. A good angle of approach, since there’s no security here to deal with, but there’s a reason why they didn’t bother to post anyone here.
A steep, slippery cliff face stands between Calla and the house. A black wall of jagged stone, with equally jagged boulders breaking the surface of the ocean below. One misstep would mean a long fall into very shallow, rocky water, and it rises too high to get across any other way except its face.
Calla drops to a crouch. Rolls out her neck, stretches her arms. Then she leaps lightly out from the cliff face, holding onto its edge.
The swinging momentum of the drop means that for a moment she’s falling through the air with only her hands to keep her connected to the cliff, but she doesn’t let that moment extend beyond a fraction of a second. Her jump boot finds a foothold in the rock face, and her hand is already moving to seize hold of the next jutting piece of rock it can find. Her fingerless gloves have grips on them, affording her an extra stronghold.
With the very faint sounds she’s making completely smothered by the crash of the sea, Calla climbs, leaps, swings, and pulls herself along the front of the cliff face. She makes sure that her eyes always stay looking ahead of herself, not behind or below. As soon as her gaze falls on the next place to go, she’s there. Pieces of the cliff crumble away and vanish into the sea behind her, but she doesn’t stop to look at them.
Panting, she pulls herself up onto a flat, sturdy slab of rock on the far side of the cliff face. She’s still got no way into the house from here. There are no doors on the side of the house that fronts the sea.
Calla stops to gaze out at the first of the enormous, sea-worn wooden pillars that form the remains of the collapsed wall. They rise out of the sea like the trunks of gigantic trees that somehow lost their branches, crowns, and bark.
The sea crashes against the cliff as Calla crouches quietly in place for a few seconds, considering.
She backs up, then runs and kicks off of the cliff face, takes a flying leap to the first of the columns. Her fingers catch on the barely-visible bit of old netting wrapped around it, and she finds herself hanging off of the column in a crouch, her boots braced against the wood. The sea roils softly below her.
Spotting a buoy further out on the water, Calla carefully maneuvers her way around to the far side of the pillar. She finds the buoy chain attached at the top of the wooden pillar, running all the way down to disappear into the ocean below.
She catches the salty old chain and gives it a cautious tug. It holds strong. She gets a good grip on it, as firm as she can. Her boots won’t help her on the slick wet wood, so she pulls herself up the chain using only her arms. She releases the chain only when she can catch the flat, rounded top of the pillar and pull herself the rest of the way up.
She gets to her feet, then gets low, running her eyes over the other wooden pillars. They’re plenty large enough to afford a safe place to land, but spread out too far to be jumpable. Although - with a little more momentum… the first one isn’t too far, it’s actually slightly lower than this one… and they’re very regularly spaced.
Calla backs up as far as she can, takes a running start, and leaps from the first pillar.
She’d never be able to make this if she had tried a normal jump, but as she flung herself into an all-out forward dive, she just makes it there. Her hands fly up to stop her from landing on her head, and then to push her off again.
In the shadows cast by the moonlight and the glow of the house, Calla silently flips her way across the pillars in one long, unbroken movement until she lands lightly on the last one, the one nearest to the house. From her perch on this pillar, it’s all too easy to leap down onto one of the stone turrets.
She straightens up to get her breath back, then resettles her hood over her hair and adjusts the covering over her face. Dusts off her hands, and lets out a soft, adrenaline-filled laugh beneath her breath.
She strides across to the door that lets out onto the turret. Locked, but upon closer examination, easily pickable. They’re not expecting intruders from this angle. Calla’s kit makes quick work of it, and she’s shoving her tools back into her backpack by the time the door swings shut after her.
She sets off down a dimly lit, winding set of stairs. It lets out into a wide, carpeted hallway. Calla checks her boots to make sure they won’t be leaving prints, then steals softly along down the hall, her hood hiding her eyes. Moving quickly, but silently.
Voices drift to her from further down the hallway. Without slowing down, she shifts into the shadows, melting into the darkness. She keeps moving as two party guests go past her, wound up in their flirty conversation, unaware of her just a few feet to their left.
Sticking to the shadows, Calla lets herself into a random room. It’s empty of people, too far away from the party to be part of it. Seems to be some kind of - upstairs living room? Calla can’t for the life of her see the point in that, but she’s not surprised, either. People with too much money never actually know what to do with all the empty rooms they have.
Calla crosses the grandiose sitting area, realizing that a few guests from the party must have passed through here at some point. There’s a half-empty champagne flute on one of the tables.
But something else catches Calla’s attention, stopping her where she is.
A piece of art, positioned in a place of pride between two huge bookshelves. A sculpture of a seated young woman, wearing a wispy dress, little more than a veil of transparent fabric. Her knees are hugged up to her chest, her head tilted down and to the side in sorrow, tears pooling in her eyes - but it’s clearly intended to be an erotic piece, based on how much attention the artist put into very specific aspects of it.
Calla looks at the sculpture with one eyebrow raised.
After a moment, she goes over and lightly pushes it to the ground. The shattering of stone and ceramic is satisfying, even muffled by the carpet.
She adds the champagne glass to the now-empty pedestal and knocks that over, too. That should make it look like a rowdy guest was responsible, instead of someone who’s always hated that sculpture.
“I think you just don’t understand it,” Ray said, when Calla obviously wasn’t impressed at the unveiling.
Calla remembers taking a long look at the young woman’s tear-stained, unhappy, uncomfortable face.
“Did you have a live model for this, Ray?” she asked.
“I couldn’t have gotten this level of emotion otherwise,” he laughed, as if it was a stupid question to ask.
Calla nodded at the woman’s miserable expression. “And did she come in looking like this already, or is this what she looked like by the time she was done sitting for you? The tears seem pretty genuine.”
“I may have needled her a little, but I was trying to capture something. She understood.”
Calla turned her skeptical eyes back to the sculpture. “And what is this supposed to capture, exactly?”
Ray apparently had to think that one through for a long moment, before coming back with: “A universal truth.”
Calla could not stop herself from laughing at this sagely piece of humble wisdom. She honestly couldn’t. The ex gave her shit about it when they got home, a whole lecture about how she never supported his friends, how she didn’t make an effort with them. About how Ray was a great guy, and his art was really gonna take off.
“Guess it took off from the pedestal,” Calla laughs softly to herself, leaving the shattered bits of it behind as she treads back across the sitting room.
She peers out through the windows, and finds herself looking down on an open-air stone courtyard one floor below, framed on all four sides with interior walls of the house, a fountain bubbling in the middle. She opens the window, lets herself out through it, and closes it softly behind herself before she drops down into the courtyard.
There are shining windows set into every wall of the courtyard, and Calla can see guests and staff walking down the hallways through them. She lingers in the shadows, watching people pass by, waiting for her opportunity.
When one of the four hallways is empty, she rushes for the smallest and darkest of the doors set into the courtyard. This one is plain, simple, made of much cheaper wood than all the others. Hidden away in a corner, where no one would see it at first glance. In Calla’s experience, a door like this is one used by the people who actually keep the house running. A staff entrance.
She lets herself through, unsurprised to find the door unlocked. The caterers are probably using the courtyard as a shortcut to get to and from the party.
Her theory is proven correct when the nondescript hallway unexpectedly lets out into a huge kitchen.
The kitchen is a busy, bustling sea of movement. Caterers refilling their trays, chefs and sous chefs rushing to stir or flip the sizzling food on the stove, household staff accepting last-minute deliveries at a back door.
Calla drops down to a crouch, vanishing into the shadows by the door just before someone rushes through it with a full tray of stuffed mushrooms.
This looks like chaos, but chaos is the best for blending in.
When no eyes are on her, she streaks forward and drops low again, hiding behind a huge shelf overflowing with pantry supplies. She moves silently around the various islands and shelves and appliances in the massive kitchen, staying low, carefully keeping herself out of everyone’s sightline.
She reaches the door at the other end of the kitchen, unseen. She snags a blueberry muffin from the counter and sticks it in her mouth before she slips through the door. She finds herself in another sparse, quiet staff hallway. White lights buzz faintly above, a startling quiet after the noise of the kitchen. There’s only one thing in the hallway, a bar cart with backup supplies for the bar.
Calla chews thoughtfully on a mouthful of muffin for a second or two, then snags a full bottle of champagne from the cart before she heads down the hallway.
She finishes off the muffin as she goes, letting her backpack down from her shoulders. She quickly pulls out the bundled-up catering uniform, bright red bow tie and all. She wrenches down her face covering and pushes off her hood, just in time to round the corner and come face-to-face with two members of the household staff.
Making sure the uniform is visible, Calla hurries towards them, raising one hand in a wave.
“Oh my god, I’m so late!” she says urgently, rushing past them before they can get a good look at her. “Do you guys know where I can get changed?”
“Further up the hallway, door to your right,” one of the women answers, pointing past Calla. “Hurry, though! Trust me, the host will complain if you give him any reason. Especially tonight. This is his big artistic debut. Anything goes wrong, we’ll all be in for it.”
“I thought this was the lady’s house, not his,” Calla says, like she didn’t already know. “Isn’t she the one footing the bill for this whole thing?”
“Ray won’t let that stop him,” the woman says warningly, to an earnest nod of agreement from the woman behind her.
“Okay, thanks for the tip,” Calla calls back, then holds up the bottle of champagne. “Oh - one of the ladies in the kitchen said that the host wanted this brought up to his bedroom. Can you tell me where that is?”
“It’s upstairs, the big room on the east side of the house. With the mahogany door. Do you want me to take it?”
“No, thank you!” Calla is already rounding the corner, leaving her no time to protest. “I’ll just get changed and go right there!”
She lets herself into the staff bathroom. When she comes out a few minutes later, she’s changed into a gown fit for the masquerade ball.
Calla’s grandma has no shortage of stunning dresses to borrow, and this one is no exception. Glimmering as if spun from clouds, it sweeps all the way down to the floor, and climbs Calla’s shoulders in airy, ocean-blue waves.
Calla smooths down the silky locks of her long brunette wig, then fits the ornate black mask over her eyes. Her backpack has been stuffed down to the bottom of the bathroom trash can, along with all of its contents and her other clothes. But she kept the bottle of champagne, and her lock pick kit is hidden away.
That’s another fun thing about Leyla’s dresses: secret pockets. Always secret pockets.
Calla makes sure the dress won’t reveal her jump boots before she sets off down the hallway again. The bottle of champagne is icy cold against her palm, but she holds it carefully, making sure it won’t mess up her grandma’s dress.
Without breaking stride, Calla pushes through the door at the end of the hall and lets herself out into the party. In an instant, she’s swept up into a sea of shining dresses, glittering masks, upbeat music, and expensive black suits.
Calla cuts directly across it, making for the east side of the house. She goes through a set of gigantic doors, left open, into a sparkling marble hall. Chattering guests have drifted out to stand here, getting air after the close confines of the party. A sweeping, grandiose staircase with opulent blue carpeting leads upstairs. Calla makes right for it.
She goes up the steps, stumbling and giggling to make the champagne bottle more convincing. The security guy who happens to be at the top of the stairs gives her a hand when she pretends to trip. This area isn’t off-limits to guests. A few guests are gathered at the top of the staircase, watching the party over the banisters.
It’s all too easy for Calla to sneak all the way down the hall to the mahogany door, where she lets herself into Ray and Erica’s bedroom.
It’s cavernously big, with a massive bed, antique wooden furniture, and windows that span the entire room. More of Ray’s sculptures are on display, placed on elegant stands against the walls. No one is here, which Calla feels sure of after a silent moment of waiting in the dark.
Calla locks the door, then goes to the night table by the right side of the bed. It must be Ray’s, based on the contents of the drawer. Calla rummages through it, then pauses in surprise when she finds a brand new Rolex, still in the box. She wonders why Ray isn’t wearing it for the party, then realizes with a scoff that he’s probably got another, or something even more obscenely expensive.
Calla pockets the Rolex. Just a little something to cover her expenses. She’s doing a service, here, but no one is going to pay her for it if she doesn’t pay herself.
She closes the drawer and goes around to the other side of the bed. Erica’s night table has a framed picture of her and Ray. He’s smiling all innocently in it, looking every bit the caring boyfriend.
Calla takes the evidence to the contrary out from the hidden pocket of her dress.
She thought it might be weird to just leave the USB on the night table, and she was concerned that it might go overlooked, so she put it in a small white gift box. It is a gift, even if Erica is going to be heartbroken at first.
A sympathetic ache twists in Calla’s heart as she stands there, the little box clasped in her hands. She knows what Erica is about to go through. She knows it painfully well. She’s never met Erica, and she has fierce opinions about people who let themselves stay this wealthy, but she wouldn’t wish a realization like this on anyone. Even the memory of that crushing, gut-punch moment when Calla made her realization about her ex… the denial and disbelief as the image of who she believed he was crumbled apart in her hands, even as she desperately tried to hold onto the pieces, to make them fit into something she could understand…
It’s still too painful for Calla to think about for more than a few seconds. And Erica is in for a similar experience if Calla does this.
But Calla has to do this. She’s setting Erica free from a trap she doesn’t know she’s in.
Calla needs to move fast. Erica is about to publicly introduce Ray to the art world, with herself as his patron and champion, sponsor of a major exhibition. Who knows how much of her fortune she’s already sunk into his art, and into him? The Rolex alone must have been a chunk.
Calla knows exactly how Ray chose to repay Erica for her tireless love and support. Digging through the ex’s emails revealed that he was far from the only one in his friend group with seriously dirty laundry.
Calla hesitates, then gently places the gift box on Erica’s night table. She wrote the note by hand, but took great pains to obscure her handwriting.
From a friend.
After a second of consideration, Calla takes the framed picture of Ray and Erica and puts it flat, facedown on the night table. That should draw Erica’s eyes right to it. Her laptop is sitting on the dresser. All she has to do is plug in the USB, and all the evidence Calla compiled will be right there.
Calla crosses swiftly to the door and leans out through it. The security guy is about to head down the stairs, but he pauses in surprise when Calla calls out to him.
“Excuse me!” Her tear-filled voice immediately catches his full attention. “Could you please get Erica and tell her I need to see her? Right now. In her room.”
The security guy is coming closer, obviously concerned. “Who should I say needs her?”
“Tell her it’s a f-friend,” Calla says tearily, gazing up into his eyes. “She’ll know who it is.”
She won’t know, but Calla is counting on her coming anyways, if only to find out.
“Is there some kind of emergency?”
“I need to see her right now,” Calla wails quietly, letting her voice break. “It’s an emergency to me.”
This last bit seems to reassure the security guy that it’s not actually an emergency at all, but he still heads off in a hurry down the stairs.
Calla waits until he’s gone, then slips out of the bedroom. She closes the door after herself and goes back downstairs. Her ocean blue dress whirls and dances softly around her as she goes, the wavy brunette lengths of the wig trailing after her. She draws some admiring eyes, but she’s made it to the door before anyone can talk to her.
She quietly slips out through the main entrance. One of the valets offers to have her car brought around, and she politely declines, promising him there’s a car already waiting for her just a little further down the road.
The jump boots, hidden beneath the dress, mean she can walk down the coastal road away from the house at a good clip. It’s a curving road, so the house falls out of sight as soon as she goes around the bend. And just like that, she’s clear.
Calla stops where she is and lets out a long, slow breath.
She crosses the street, staying low and out of view, bringing the house back into her sights. She slips her phone from the little holster beneath her dress, just up her thigh. She unlocks it, has a look at the software she’s quietly been running on the security system at the house. It’s been preventing the cameras from recording anything, and it reports back that there have been no errors on that front.
Calla tightens her grasp on her phone. The only thing she can do now is hope that Erica hasn’t already made the big announcement, that she came upstairs in time to -
A violent crashing sound shatters the easy noise of the party. Calla looks up sharply, just in time to see one of Ray’s sculptures come sailing through the window of his and Erica’s bedroom. It spins and arcs through the air, then drops like a rock into the ocean, where it shatters against its surface before disappearing beneath it.
Calla stares with her eyebrows all the way up, then smothers a gasp behind her hand as another of Ray’s sculptures comes soaring through the destroyed window and tumbles towards the sea. Then another. Erica is on a rampage.
Calla watches the fatal journey of two more sculptures, laughing softly to herself.
One by one, the ex’s piece of shit friends fall. And their women, betrayed and lied to at every turn, like Calla - they know the truth, and go free.
“Onto better things, Erica,” Calla whispers, and melts away into the shadows.
~~~~
Calla kicks back and holds up the Rolex, walking it along her fingers. Inspecting the links for any imperfections, but mostly just relaxing in the adrenaline afterglow.
Her feet are up on her desk, crossed at the ankle. A frosty glass of whiskey sits by her computer, along with the plate and crumbs of the sandwich she just demolished. The wig and dress are piled on her bed, and she’s back in one of her mom’s flight suits, knotted at the waist above her tank top. Bathed in the multicolored glow of her desktop set-up, which glimmers brightly on all of her piercings.
She’s feeling good, cozy and contented, happy with her night’s work. Her muscles are pleasantly sore, a good ache that she loves.
She’s smirking to herself, imagining what the ex would say if he knew. He would think she’d lost her mind, and he’d be furious. Both nice thoughts, good thoughts.
But… something is gnawing at Calla. Through all the warm satisfaction, some uneasy internal voice is trying to tell her something. The more she tries to ignore it, the more aware of it she becomes, until suddenly it’s at the very center of her mind.
It’s dawning on her that any guy who knew about this would think she’d lost her mind.
Oh, and I’m a thief, by the way. I break into places when I feel like it, sometimes to take things and sometimes to leave things. Yes, it’s dangerous and illegal, but that’s part of what I love about it. Trouble runs in my family, so I love it. Is that okay? Are we still on for a second date?
Seriously, how do you spring that shit on any prospective boyfriend? All Calla has to do is put herself in his shoes for two seconds, and she can see how this looks, how it sounds. Even if he doesn’t assume she’s joking or think she’s lost her mind, who wants that much trouble on their hands?
Any new boyfriend would also have to be cool with the fact that Calla is working on her temper and her extreme trust issues. He’d have to be someone honest, that’s non-negotiable - and he’d have to be someone she could eventually trust with her family’s secret.
That’s a tall fucking order.
Calla sets the Rolex aside, her expression slowly falling. Getting back out there is so hard already, without this factored in. It hasn’t really mattered, because she hasn’t liked any of the guys she’s been on dates with enough to tell them too much about herself, anyways.
But it’s definitely occurring to her now, and adding to the seemingly insurmountable mountain of obstacles standing between her and any chance of finding someone. Who could possibly be the right one, given the confines?
Calla sinks down in her chair, her heart sinking in her chest. She closes her eyes and tries to picture a guy who could maybe possibly match the description.
A few seconds later, she gives a start, then gives herself a don’t-be-ridiculous shake, blushing deeply.
To her immense surprise and annoyance, her thoughts have involuntarily gone to the man with the blonde hair and pretty green eyes who she had that brush with outside of Jamie’s apartment.
Ralph.
They only met that one time, but he’s been stuck in Calla’s head, for reasons she can’t explain to herself. At first she thought it was purely because the whole thing with him was so infuriating. She was simmering for hours after she got home, the rude things he said to her still ringing in her ears. She hadn’t meant to dissolve into a fury in response, but Ralph put her patience to the test and instantly broke it.
By the time Calla got home, she was regretting having gone so far as to slap his cigarette out of his hand. Feeling guilty, fretting a little about it. Regardless, her main takeaway from that whole thing was that it sucks when a guy as promisingly cute as that turns out to be completely insufferable.
Since that night, though, Calla’s not so sure what to think.
The moment when her eyes met Ralph’s above the lighter is holding its vividness in her memory much more than what came right before and after it. It’s brighter than the rest, humming with some kind of meaning and significance.
Calla doesn’t know what, exactly.
The way Ralph’s expression changed in an instant. He was all mocking and icy, ruining the appeal of his looks with every mean, nasty word out of his mouth. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was held motionless, gazing down at her in genuine, breathless, wide-eyed astonishment. Blushing, stammering over his own name, none of that coldness left in his voice. It happened so fast. Like Calla shattered a mask right off of his face, and he was helpless to pull the pieces back together.
Calla found the whole thing bewildering. She still isn’t sure what exactly happened between them in that moment, or if anything really happened at all. Maybe that’s why that handful of seconds has been on replay in her head, right up until Jamie called to say that Ralph had asked him to pass along a sincere, heartfelt apology for what he said.
Now Calla really, really doesn’t know what to think.
She doesn’t know Ralph at all, but she does know Jamie. She knows that he can’t lie for shit, so if he says something, that means to his knowledge it’s true. She also knows that he’s clearly a sweet-hearted guy, a cupcake - so how is it that he’s friends with Ralph, of all people? Ralph does not look like a cupcake.
But then the phone call from Jamie, the apology - and the fucking women’s studies textbook that Ralph had on him? What was that about? It was maybe the most completely perplexing thing about the whole situation. Calla was so curious about it that she eventually searched up the title. The book’s been out of print for two years, so it’s not like Ralph just needs it for a class he’s taking, or something. So - why? Why did he have that?
And the way he looked at her as he lit the cigarette for her. Calla had never seen eyes simultaneously so haunted, and so lit up with something like hope. An odd, strikingly unusual combination. Especially in irises that unusual, misty shade of green, reduced to the slimmest circles around his blown-out pupils, reflecting back the dancing flame.
“Just what the fuck?” Calla whispers out loud to herself, at a total loss.
She’s kind of smiling, though. In spite of herself. Ralph is a puzzle, and Calla loves puzzles.
She especially loves ones complicated enough to stump her, and she’s been stumped on this one for a while, now. She’s thought about this for hours and hours, but she’s still completely baffled about who Ralph is. All she has is the instinctive feeling that he’s trouble.
Calla loves trouble, and she has keenly-tuned senses for it. But she wouldn’t need them to know that Ralph is trouble. He radiates trouble, gives it off in spades, in every subtle way imaginable. Calla’s just not sure how he’s trouble. Or - maybe she’s just overthinking it way too much, because he’s really cute. Maybe she’s just seeing the trouble she wants to see.
She doesn’t know. No one has confused her this much in her life. Honestly, who is this guy? Why can’t she figure him out?
Then again… she hasn’t been using all of the resources at her disposal.
Calla looks over at her computer. She fights with herself for a few seconds, then gives in and minimizes all of her work stuff.
“What am I doing?” she whispers to herself, closing her eyes for a second.
But she does it anyways. Some voice within her, too insistent to be ignored, is telling her that she needs to know more about Ralph. For whatever reason, she needs to.
She pulls up a program she wrote herself, slips her headphones over her ears, and turns up the music.
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