Lexi was so excited and pleased about the Packard in the garage that she ate breakfast.  Dr. Zheng was already up, and didn't seem to notice that she was coming in from outside rather than from her bedroom.  He did notice when she opened the cabinet and poured herself a bowl of cereal, though.

"Good morning, Lexi," he said, trying and failing to act as if he weren't shocked, as if she'd stop if he made a big deal about it.  He did make a note in his journal.  He made lots of notes in his journal.  Sometimes she wondered if he was going to write a whole book about her.  She didn't care right now, though, because she was happy about the car and in the mood to eat.  Breakfast, and then she'd go for a drive.  A very nice morning indeed.

She slid into a chair across from him.  "So this is Paris," she said, and shoveled a heaping spoonful of heavily-honeyed Rice Chex into her mouth.

"Actually, it's Michigan," Dr. Zheng said patiently.  "You're in your house in Michigan."

"I've been here before.  I think it was in a dream..."  Dr. Zheng said some other things to her, but she was tuning him out by then; her thoughts had moved past breakfast already.  At some point she was given a glass of nasty juice, and had to drink the honey-flavored milk that was left in her cereal bowl to wash away its bitter taste.

After eating she got up and went up the staircase next to the fridge, the one that led directly to her room.  Her intent was to take a shower, but by the time she'd made it to her room the pill had begun to put fuzz on everything.  Lexi sat on her bed for a moment (Malice, Nance, and Amy-Ann were all in it), which turned into almost an hour.  She had a waking dream that she had fallen out of an airplane and was tumbling slowly through the clouds, which were all pink.  Some of them purred as she went past them.  What was she planning to do, once she got to the ground?  Go for a drive, that was it.

The thought of driving spurred her back to her room, to the here and now, if that was what you could call it, and Lexi was suddenly a swirl of manic activity, rushing back and forth about the room, throwing on clothes (and simply throwing others) until she had a pleasing outfit.  On this day, that meant black jeans (which had been tighter the last time they'd been on, it seemed), a red turtleneck under a black T-shirt under an expensive red designer shirt that had belonged to Ren under a big bright yellow jacket, her yellow Doc Martens, and a black cloche hat to top it all off.  If she concentrated hard enough she could almost see the colors of her clothes.  Almost.  Cygnet had left a "cheer-up" mixtape for her, and she played it loud-ish.  She sang while she dressed, and attempted to dance a little bit, too, but fell down twice.

Zheng listened to Lexi sing and jump about while he wrote; her voice carried down the stairwell.  He wished that he'd have thought to bring a tape recorder, so he could remember the things she said, to better analyze them later.  At the moment she was singing in a distinct, nasal voice:  "Six-foot-two and rude as hell, I've gotta get him in the ground before he starts to smell..."

She seemed to enjoy juxtaposing violent imagery with her generally cheerful mien; there was a lot of anger in her, judging by that, the violent movies she enjoyed watching, and the horrific novels that lined her bookshelves.  She wouldn't talk about the source of her anger, but Zheng had made the obvious connection that it stemmed from Ren's death, and she was entering (or deep into) the anger phase of her grief.  That it always manifested itself as malice toward fictional characters was interesting.  He expected her to displace onto him, because he was convenient, but she was more likely to bang her own head against the wall than to lash out at him.  And if the images she enjoyed reciting for him were any indication, that was a good thing.

"We had our words, a common spat...so I kissed him upside the cranium with an 'luminum baseball bat, my name is Mud!" she sang.  Definitely full of malice...wait.  Zheng flipped backward through his notepad.  One of her cats was named Malice, wasn't it?  Yes, there was the list of their names.  And she clearly hadn't renamed it after Ren had died.  He smiled to himself.  Yet another wrinkle to the puzzle.  Lexi's peculiar mixture of disconnection from the real world and attention details was something he'd never encountered before.  Although she had no mental retardation to speak of, Zheng had watched Lexi recite from memory entire movies that she'd seen days ago, and that was the sort of thing that he'd only seen in autistic patients.  As far as he knew, Lexi didn't have an eidetic memory, either.