“We're all getting a might cranky and a ..."

That was it. Mindy just started shouting at Chris, Robbie shouted at Mindy, Chris tried to calm Robbie down. It was about five minutes before anyone realized that Jane was missing.

Jane found herself crying . . . again. She wanted to stop, but couldn't. Mindy had been right. The only thing she was good at was crying. Even Red had admitted that Jane's burst of aggression the day before had been fueled by emotion, and Jane figured that the emotion in question was fear. She had wanted to be helpful, but all she had done was make Mindy angry, and Mindy had always been so sweet before.

Jane knew she wasn't of much use to the Strays. She couldn't even steal a loaf of bread if it meant survival for the people that had tried to befriend her.

"Could you even do it for Red?" she asked of a dark street. Jane stopped.

"She's going to be so disappointed in me." Looking around, she realized she had wound up in her old neighborhood, and it made her skin crawl just a little bit. She walked in the opposite direction of where her apartment had been . . . she didn't want to encounter her ex-landlord. Just the thought of what he had wanted her to do to "help pay the rent" sent shivers down her spine.

She soon found herself in the parking lot of the Taco Shack, a place she had worked at just a few weeks earlier.

"It seems so much longer," she told herself. She had used to work there and take some of the leftover food to . . ."Ben!" She couldn't believe she had forgotten about him! Ben was a homeless man who lived in a cardboard box just a few streets down. He was more than a little bit crazy, but he seemed so incredibly happy when Jane had stopped by. She brought him food and listened to his stories. There were moments when he had almost seemed at peace.

Jane dug through her pockets and found a buck-fifty. It was about all she had left from. . . wait a minute.

"They owe me a pay-check!"

She walked inside the restaurant and asked to speak to the manager.

Luckily, it was the same one she had worked for. He was surprised to see her, seeing as she had simply vanished two weeks earlier. She told him that she had been injured, which was true, and that she had been recuperating (also true). She was able to get her last check and hurried over to her other job (Big Al's Fried Chicken) and repeated the process before heading to one of those open-late check-cashing establishments that stole a portion of her money for the honor of paying out the check. But she didn't care. She pulled out her wallet and went to an ATM. Since she hadn't paid her rent that last month, she still had about four hundred dollars put away, giving her a grand-total of seven hundred after all was said and done. She couldn't believe she hadn't thought of this before, but this was also her first trip above ground in several weeks.

"Great," she thought, coming down from her temporary high.

"Now I've got seven hundred dollars. What the hell do I do with it?" She walked back over to the Taco Shack and purchased a few items off the value menu. She'd need to conserve money if she were going to "Do what? Run away? Away from the only people who have ever taken you in? But what about what Mindy said?" She walked towards the alley where Ben usually slept, her brain working overtime. The idea of running away was so deeply engrained in her character . . . but Red. Her skin grew warm and her heart fluttered more than a bit when she thought of what had happened in that big, comfortable bed.

Someone had touched her and made her feel . . . special . . . safe.

Someone who had helped answer some questions about her life.

She saw a bundle of rags with ragged breathing. She knelt next to the pile and pushed away the rag covering the face, verifying it was Ben.

"Ben?" she asked quietly.

The old man sat up suddenly, gripping what looked like a sharp stick.

He didn't so much look at her as he did stare through her. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust.

"Jane? You crazy little leprechaun . . . you scared the . . . (cough) . . . shit out of me."

Jane had jumped back and was trembling, cursing herself. She should have known better than to surprise him. Bums that slept too heavily or unarmed tended not to wake up.

"Sorry," she said mildly.

"I'm sorry I haven't been around lately. I...