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It was a sunny afternoon, and Rumi was not fighting demons.
Instead, she was sitting criss-cross applesauce on a brightly-colored carpet surrounded by twelve toddlers, each wobbling in various stages of juice box-fueled chaos. She was here for the preschool’s charity party—smiles, photos, and free cupcakes, all in the name of good PR. She didn’t mind though. The demon-hunting could wait a day.
“Okay, kids,” the teacher said, clapping her hands before ducking out to refill the snack table, “Be nice to Miss Rumi, okay?”
The toddlers immediately swarmed her like the world's cutest horde.
“Hi, Miss Woomy!” one boy chirped, getting her name completely wrong and shoving a glittery dinosaur sticker onto her knee. “This is Clawboy and he eats people, but only bad ones.”
“Cool,” Rumi nodded solemnly. “That’s good. We only eat bad people.”
Another girl flopped down beside her with a juice mustache and said, “I like your hair. It looks like cotton candy but my mom says I can’t eat hair anymore.”
Rumi blinked. “I think that’s a good rule.”
And then came her —a little girl with tangled pigtails and a serious expression that didn’t match the glitter star stuck to her cheek.
“I wanna say…” she began, fidgeting with her sparkly pink skirt, “cause you look like my dog.”
Rumi tilted her head, smiling. “Your dog?”
“Yeah!” The girl nodded so hard her whole body wobbled. “And my dog’s name is Pretty because of the flower, and it was yellow. I like yellow. Do you like yellow? My mom never liked yellow. She also didn’t like Daddy. She said he’s a good-for-nothing whore.”
Rumi froze .
The room fell into slow-motion silence. The other toddlers were too busy trying to turn paper towels into capes, but Rumi was just trying so, so hard not to laugh.
Her lips twitched. Her hand shot to her mouth. She cleared her throat and said, “Um. Whore… means not a good person.”
The little girl gasped. “Like when I bite my cousin?”
“Worse,” Rumi said carefully. “But only if your cousin really deserved it.”
“Oh,” the girl nodded thoughtfully, like she’d just learned something very important. “I’m gonna tell my grandma that.”
“Please don’t,” Rumi said with a soft smile.
Another kid popped up in front of her holding a half-eaten cracker. “Can you kill the vacuum? It lives in my house.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“My tummy hurts,” another one announced, “but I ate a crayon and it was the blue kind, so I think I’m okay.”
“Blue is the safest flavor,” Rumi agreed, without missing a beat.
They crawled into her lap, they tugged at her sleeves, and one of them tried to braid her ponytail using a rubber lizard. It was chaos, but warm and silly, and the kind of mess that felt like a vacation from fighting soul-eating demons.
A chubby toddler leaned his entire weight on her arm and asked, “Miss Woomy, are you a princess?”
Rumi paused.
She looked around at their bright eyes and juice-stained smiles, and nodded.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “Today I think I am.”
Just outside the playroom, Mira and Zoey were supposed to be helping refill the water cups and supervise painting, but they’d both stopped in the doorway, watching Rumi with identical wide grins.
“She’s a natural,” Mira whispered, sipping a juice box she definitely stole from the snack table.
Zoey snorted. “She looks like she got tackled by a glitter tornado.”
As if on cue, a toddler near Rumi loudly declared, “I peed but it’s a happy pee ! Not the bad kind!”
“I take it back,” Zoey said, blinking. “She’s a brave natural.”
Rumi caught sight of them over the toddler crowd and shot them a helpless look, mouth twitching into a barely-contained laugh.
“Don’t you dare leave me alone in here!” she mouthed.
Mira and Zoey exchanged a glance.
“Rock-paper-scissors to see who goes in?” Mira offered.
Zoey cracked her knuckles. “Loser has to sit through story time and pretend to understand toddler logic.”
They played.
Mira lost.
With a resigned sigh and a fond smile, she stepped into the chaos and knelt beside Rumi, who instantly looked relieved.
One toddler pointed at Mira and asked, “Is that your mom ?”
Rumi grinned. “No, that’s Mira. She fights demons.”
The toddler nodded solemnly. “Cool. Can she fight my stepdad?”
Zoey, watching from the door, laughed so hard she almost dropped her juice.