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“Parker?” a lilting British voice called from the hall. “Are you still here?”
“Yes.” Obviously.
“Why?”
“I was researching… stuff.” She had, in fact, been researching normal people stuff. Alice stuff. Because Peggy wanted to have coffee with Alice on Tuesday, which was not very many days away. And no matter what everyone else thought, Parker and Alice were not the same. Alice, Parker was pretty sure, would not have thought Sophie meant stealing coffee instead of a painting, for instance. (Parker was halfway through planning a heist on the coffee shop Peggy suggested when she realized this.) So unless she wanted to go through the utterly humiliating process of admitting that she needed Sophie’s help via coms for her coffee thing, she had a lot of research to do. “What are you doing here?”
“I fell asleep on my sofa. Lost track of the time.” Parker nodded. Sophie’s sofa was very comfy. She often took naps on it herself. “What are you researching?”
“Alice stuff. Do normal people sleep on your sofa?”
“What? Yes, I think it’s normal enough to take a nap in the office every now and again – wait…” Parker waited obediently while the clearly-still-tired Sophie tried to put something together. “You sleep on my sofa? In my office?”
“Well, yeah. I don’t have a sofa,” she pointed out. “Which is kind of silly, actually. I have a plant, and that’s not useful at all. I should get a sofa.” Hmmm… unless she wanted to pay for a sofa, moving it was going to be a pain. Maybe Eliot would help her steal one. He had a truck, and was also strong enough to help carry it. Oh! Sophie was still talking. Oops. “I wasn’t listening,” she admitted, cutting the older woman off.
Sophie sighed. “Why were you researching things for your Alice persona? You’re not planning a job, are you?”
“Coffee with Peggy.” It was almost like a job, but less fun, since there was no apparent point to it, besides making a kind-of friend. Not a real friend, because Peggy didn’t know Parker, only Alice, but something like one.
Sophie cocked her head to one side and kind of squinted a little bit, pursing her lips in an expression Parker had become intimately familiar with over the past few months. It meant ‘I don’t understand you, even though I’m trying really, really hard.’ “I don’t understand,” she said redundantly.
“I know.”
“Parker… why are you building up your Alice persona just for coffee with Peggy? You know you can go as yourself if you just remember to answer to the name ‘Alice.’”
“No, I really can’t.”
“Why not?”
Because Parker, whether called Alice or not, didn’t know the first thing about not-stealing coffee. “Sophie. What do people do when they get coffee?”
“Well… mostly they just sit and talk about things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Pets… hobbies… work… Oh, okay, I see your problem.”
Parker shook her head. It was worse than that. The whole situation was a problem. Before they got to the conversation part, she was actually going to have to buy coffee. Like with an order and everything. Because as far as she could tell, normal people didn’t just walk up to the Starbucks counter and take whatever happened to be ready at the moment. You couldn’t, if you wanted to sit there and talk after without being yelled at. And then they would have to sit at a table and talk, and she had no idea for how long, or what about. She could prepare topics for discussion, make plans for certain probable questions, like what to say when Peggy asked about Alice’s job or boyfriend, or if the other woman had a dog she wanted to talk about, but there was always a chance that she would say something completely unexpected. Then there were topics that Parker would have to choose, the hobbies that Sophie had mentioned, and they couldn’t be stealing things or planning to steal things or jewelry appraisal or jumping off of buildings, because none of those things were normal people things. Gymnastics might be. Maybe. If she never, ever mentioned any of the useful applications of it, and just talked about the keeping fit part. But Peggy wasn’t very fit, and Hardison had said something back when they did the mob wedding about how if someone’s fatter than you, you shouldn’t point it out (literally, or by looking better in the same dress). So that might be out.
“You have no idea,” she told Sophie. Sophie had probably never had to plan a single conversation ever. She wasn’t normal people either, but she was a lot closer than Parker. She was made of little bits and pieces of lots of normal people, that she could mix and match for any occasion. “Alice needs a normal-person hobby.”
The internet had suggested everything from reading books and watching movies (which seemed overdone) to walking dogs (she didn’t want to invest in a dog just for coffee) to any number of sports (all of which sounded pointless) to singing (which she was bad at) to cooking (which was Eliot’s thing). It was not very helpful.
Sophie had been talking again, but she changed what she was saying when Parker spoke. “Honestly, if you would just pay attention… I was saying you could talk about the movies you watch with Hardison, or borrow a book from Nate or Eliot, or what about drawing? You’re good at drawing.” Parker must have made a face, because Sophie said, “You are. I watched you play Pictionary at rehab. Do you do portraits and still life, too?”
Parker shrugged. “I guess I could.”
“Really? Here, draw me,” the older woman demanded, passing over a sheet of paper from the printer Parker never used.
Parker obliged her, complaining as she sketched. “But there’s nothing to talk about there.”
“But… what about light? Color? Line? You could talk about materials, subjects...”
“I don’t know any of that stuff. I just draw what I see. Here.” It wasn’t a very good drawing, a few lines and some hasty shading, but it caught the impression of Sophie’s profile in the light and the little twist of her lips and the quirk of an eyebrow… It was, she judged, enough to be recognizable.
“That’s… you’re infuriating.” She didn’t sound angry.
“Hey, you asked for it,” Parker defended herself, at a loss as to why Sophie would be infuriated because of a sketch she had asked for not a minute ago, and confused about why she would say so when she clearly wasn’t angry at all. It didn’t seem like something worth lying about.
“No, this is good, Parker. Really good. And it took you, what? Thirty seconds? The infuriating bit is that you don’t care, do you? Not even a little.”
Parker shrugged, suddenly feeling very on-the-spot. “It’s not a big deal. And anyway, I can’t talk about it. Movies are good. I’ll ask Eliot for a book, too. And a sofa.”
She headed for the door, only to pause when Sophie said, “Wait, Parker, it’s the middle of the night!”
“But there’s only five… four days until Tuesday,” she pointed out, correcting for the fact that it was already early Friday. “I need time to actually read the book, and look up anything I don’t understand.”
“But you can’t go barge in to Eliot’s house in the middle of the night.”
Parker snorted. She didn’t barge in. She just opened the door. Or a window. She liked to mix it up, depending on if Eliot was awake. That was what Nate called semantics, though, so she let it go. “Sure I can. And it’s an apartment. It doesn’t have any good places to hide, but it’s not hard to get in.”
“He’s going to kill you,” Sophie said, and she actually looked worried.
“He never has before,” Parker reassured her. “Even that one time he threw a knife at me, I totally dodged. See you later!”
This time she ignored the “Wait, Parker.” If it was anything important, she was sure Sophie would bring it up again eventually.