“Do we need plates?” she asked … herself.

Ellie poked her head into the kitchen. “Hrm?”

“Let’s do something totally wild for a change,” Lenore says, taking a couple plates from the dishrack and passing them to Ellie. “Let’s use plates like some fancy grown-ups.”

“You are a fancy grown-up now, Lenore. You’re 18 and got your own place that you pay for on your own and you have a velvet chair and a dressing table with a mirror and that is fancy. And you have two tea sets. One is grown up. Two is fancy, especially when one of them is Gramma Jane’s.”

“You make a solid point, little me.”

“I know it,” she says, setting the plates out on the coffee table and sitting on the floor between it and the sofa. “Bring out some forks if you wanna be real adult about these fries.”

Lenore twisted the top on a bottle of ginger ale protecting her hand with the edge of her skirt and then opened one more, carrying both in one hand, she lifted two forks out of the caddy next to the sink for some adult fry handling.

Having set the table like a grown-ass woman, she sits on the arm of the sofa unlacing her boots and pushing them off with a toe wedged into the rim of the lugs and the leather, first the right, then the left. Wiggling socked toes freely, she glances at the clock. Almost 7. “Here, you’ll want this,” she says, tossing a throw pillow over to Ellie, and sliding down the front of the sofa next to her.

Ellie divvies up some pizza and Lenore hits play on the remote.

“How come the tarantula’s only got two eyes on the box?”

“Someone drew it wrong, is all. The one in the movie has normal spider eyes.” 

“Didn’t anyone notice before they put it on the box?”

“That’s not the half of it. Wait until the movie is over and you’ll have even more questions.”

7:03. A man fumbles through the desert in Texas-but-really-California and dies.

“His face! Ewww! This is already good.”

7:04. Lenore leans closer, resting her head on Ellie’s shoulder, “Happy birthday.”

“Yeah yeah! Happy birthday!”

In the flicker of the television, a new shadow wavered across the open pizza box. “Thanks!” said the new old Eleanor. 

“Holy shit,” says Lenore, scrambling for the lamp. It’s happening again? Again?

“Hi!” said Ellie, jumping up, “I’ll go grab another fork.”

Lenore tilts the lampshade for a better look at her younger self. This one is… “How old are you?”

“Twelve. How old are you?”

“I’m six,” says Ellie, coming back in, pointing the fork at herself, then turning it toward Lenore. “She’s 18 now. So it makes sense you bein’ twelve.”

“Hey Ellie,” said the new one. “What’s with the forks and the plates?”

“Oh, we’re trying something new.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah yeah. Bein’ fancy.”

Collapsing back into the sofa, Lenore’s speeding heart collided with her brain and accelerated through the grief chapter of a psych textbook: No. Not again. This isn’t real. How is this real? Why is this happening? Will this keep happening? What did I do? What can I do to make it stop? But what’s the point? Why bother when nothing can be done? It’s happened before. I’ll deal with this too. We’ll deal with it. We. Us. All of ...me. Finally at Acceptance, it lost its steam. She sits up, focusing on the two mysteries in front of her. “Well. This is happening I guess.”

“So what’ve I missed?” asks the twelve-year-old, scooping up a slice of pizza.

Ellie’s gotten up and is walking around her, peering at her from varying angles and distances. She beams and the room gets brighter, a newish development in things-Ellie-can-do. “We live on our own and got a cat now. His name's Philip. What’re we gonna call you?”

“Noni I guess. We’ll call you Eleanor now,” she says, turning to the oldest.

“Lenore. Everybody calls me Lenore these days,” she moves from the sofa to the floor to get a better look herself. 

“Lenore’s real into bein’ grown-up. She’s gotten real good at it too! We have real meals and fold the laundry and go to work with no skippin’.”

Noni leans in, squinting up at her, she reaches for a handful of Lenore’s hair. Long and inky blue-black it drips through her fingers. “This is cool.”

“Thanks,” Lenore says, not really expecting the approval of her middle school self.

“Your clothes are funny though. You’re like if an old-timey doll listened to The Cure a lot.”

Lenore shrugs and hugging her knees rests her head on them, looking at Noni sideways. “What do you remember? I’m trying to remember being twelve.”

Ellie, excitedly luminescing from orange to yellow to orange to pink to red now bursts. “I remember everything! We spent the summer walking dogs for money for comic books and snuck into the Faith No More show, and painted ghosts all over that tunnel. It was so much fun!”

“I only remember turning twelve. Well, and stuff before that—like being eleven—but nothing after that night Ellie showed up.”

Lenore takes a sip of her ginger ale. “Where’d Philip go?”

“I dunno. He didn’t say he had anywhere to be tonight.”

Noni’s eyes grew along with her open mouth. “Philip can talk?”

“Mmhmm. All cats can talk,” stated the smallest as the leading authority on Facts in the room.

Lenore still wasn’t really convinced Ellie and Philip were having conversations, but couldn’t deny all of the other things Ellie was able to do; luminescing, disappearing, and lately it seemed like she’d been able to alter people’s senses or maybe that was the whole trick. She sat upright, her legs now a lazy pretzel, dropping one fist onto her open palm. “Ellie can do all sorts of cool things. I wonder what you can do, Noni.”