"Why won't you eat?" Nikki asked Lexi while they were dawdling in the library.  Nikki was looking through Lexi's books and discovering that they read a lot of the same things, too (King, Barker, and Straub, to name a few).  Lexi had been dragging more car parts out of boxes, and had decided to arrange them in the library.  She'd moved boxes out of the way to create a car-sized space in the middle, and had an assortment of parts Nikki would have called junk, except they were clearly new.  After an hour or two of arranging, Lexi was taking a hot chocolate break in a sunbeam.  The snowstorm had broken for an hour or two, and the sun was dazzling on the white world outside.

"Hm?" Lexi swirled a melting marshmallow on her spoon.  She enjoyed her hot chocolate.

"I said, why won't you eat?"

"I'm...not hungry," she said, immediately losing interest.  "Why won't you let anyone be your friend?  Catholic girls are scary."

"What?"

She looked away, apparently drifting off into the mist in her mind.  "This film has been modified from its original format to fit your screen," she said.

"No," Nikki said, a little more forcefully.  "What did you mean by that?"

"God, Minerva! I was just joking!" she burst out.  Nikki suddenly figured out what she was talking about.  The two of them had watched Hudson Hawk that morning.  Bits of dialogue kept spouting out of Lexi instead of coherent conversation, like steam escaping from her mind.  Nikki guessed that it was the pills they had her on.  She wasn't sure she liked the effect they had on Lexi, but on the other hand if she was loopy, she probably wouldn't tell Eddie what she'd overheard.

"I'm going to the kitchen," Nikki told her.  "Do you want anything?"

"All I told you to do was follow the Hawk.  It's not like I said 'teach our nation's children to read.'"

"I'll take that as a no," Nikki said.  She left Lexi to her hot chocolate and car parts.

Lexi watched her go, surprised that Nikki was irritated.  Maybe she thought the quote game was part of her pink cloud.  Both Nikki and Eddie were under the impression that she'd been bothering to take the pills for the past couple of days, when actually she hadn't had one since the day after they had arrived.  Well, that wasn't true, there had been one, but she had thrown it up.  Thinking too much hurt, but Lexi had things to do, a car to build.  She listened until she could hear Nikki in the kitchen, then picked up a partially assembled mass-air meter, singing under her breath.  "Would you like to swing on a star?  Carry moonbeams home in a jar..."

She decided to take a break, and got up to go and play in the snow.  There was about two and a half feet of it, just like she'd wished for, and it had been there for three days and she hadn't even gone out and jumped in it yet.  What a waste of perfectly cool weather.

She got out in the cold and the white as soon as possible.  Some neighbors had come by on snowmobiles the morning after the big snow, to make sure that she was okay, and she walked on their tracks first.  The tamped-down trails had been almost covered by newer fallen snow, though, so she jumped off to slog through the heavy stuff.  It clung to her pants and pushed back at her in a delightful way.  She was sweating with delightful exertion before she got halfway around the house.

Around back the snow was deeper, as the land sloped away from the house slightly.  Lexi listened to her feet crunching in the stuff, and scooped up a snowball.  She looked back at the house, noticing for the first time that it looked a lot like the Addams Family's house from the back.

A voice echoed in the woods, faintly.  It was coming from the front of the house.  Nikki was calling her.  Lexi continued her circuit of the house at a slightly quicker pace, to see what she wanted.

Nikki smiled back when Lexi smiled and waved, but she was angry underneath it.  "Lexi, come on back inside, okay? It's cold out here."  She was bundled in a big dark green coat that looked bigger than she was.

Lexi said, "'Actually, it's Rome,' she said, as if it made a difference.  Are you cold?  You look four times bigger in that coat.  It's cute.  But you should have a hat on," she said, fully aware that she wasn't wearing a coat...or shoes.  Her socks were soaked with snow, but they were Ren's, they had some sort of neato-mosquito wicking ability that kept the cold away from her feet even when they were wet, at least for ten minutes or so.  "I shall jump around in the snow and then go take a hot bath.  You like hot baths too, don't you?"

"Inside," Nikki snapped.  "Now."

"Why won't you let anyone be your friend?"

"Stop asking me that."

"Oh, did I ask that before? I can never remember what I said out loud." Lexi turned and looked out toward the road.  "I need..." she said, then cocked her head, listening.  "There's a car coming!"  She began bounding through the snow toward the road.  She was clumsy; she fell twice.  The snow was so deep the world turned white, and she was buried until she was vertical again, and it was so shocking-funny she couldn't help but laugh.  She stumbled to her feet, looked back for Nikki and saw only another divot in the snow where the other woman had, presumably, fallen also.  When Lexi reached the end of the drive she jumped up on one of the open gates so she could see better.