Seven hours later, nearing suppertime, they finish the trio of films. Leah had swallowed her many questions about technology and location, eventually understanding the setting to be fantastical and not real – though some of the bloodier scenes had hit a little too close to her past experiences. Even despite these, and the sometimes confusing assumptions the films made, she was able to enjoy the story.

“Thoughts?”

That had been the question, between every segment of the epic. Leah had tried to give intelligent answers. Apparently she had been sufficiently surprised by the surprising moments, and entertained by the humorous moments, that Gloria and Tonya felt their efforts had been a success.

Gloria – it was easier to think of her as that with Tonya always using it to refer to her – took on the responsibility of cooking for everyone. After a full day of nibbling Leah is hardly hungry for a proper meal, but she eats to be polite.

The meal is one she’s seen advertised in many stores; something called a hamburger. Watching the preparation, Leah extrapolates that the main components are ground beef and a bun, covered with absolutely anything you want. Gloria pulls out a jar of pickles, some lettuce, a tomato, a block of firm cheese, mustard – Mustard! How long has it been? Oh Gods, why’s it so yellow? – mayonnaise, a tomato-onion sauce that smells like sugar, a chunky green sauce that smells like vinegar, and a large jar of semi-fermented cabbage strips.

Leah goes the conservative route, only adding those toppings she clearly recognises. She understands easily enough, after the first few bites, why it is such a popular street food. A new thing to add to the list of ‘things to take home.’

She borrows change from Gloria to take the bus, terrified of the noise the whole way, and they arrive at work together. Jen notices, and makes an unreadable face of either approval or smugness; Leah can’t figure it out, and doesn’t try. She goes straight to punching in and starting her opening tasks.

No-one else makes any comments or gives any looks, and the night progresses normally. Leah walks home in the evening, enters her apartment, and immediately strips out of two-day-old clothes and gets in the shower.

The hot water is a marvellous feeling – and this stuff doesn’t even smell like sulphur, which was always the drawback to Valerin’s hot baths, Leah thinks in satisfaction, letting it run over her face. It does, however, have a mild chemical smell, one she remembers vaguely from the linen-dyer’s.

She stops mid-wash. It had been a long time since she’d thought about home. Not just her home world, that was frequent enough – but home, in the early days. She realises that if she is going to face this world’s version of her family she’s going to have to come to terms with a lot of changes.

She puts on a set of soft clothes for sleeping – she noticed, both last night and at the girls’ night, that most people in this world seem to have special clothes just for sleeping, looser and softer than day clothes – and lies down on the bed, distracted.

Soft mattresses. That’s another luxury I could get used to. The springy material and plush covering is pampering, and she is starting to get comfortable with the idea that she deserves to be pampered.

So. Family. What’s my plan?

She can almost hear the voices of the five pitching in: Meredith’s stern certainty saying she needs to arrive early and observe from a distance; Kain’s quiet patience saying that she must pay close attention to who is likeliest to side with her, and be ready to roll with anything; Iris’s stubborn defensiveness saying she should always lead the conversations, to make sure no-one has the chance to try and pull the rug out from under her with an unexpected question.

What would Vivi say? She always had the most common sense, and this isn’t a situation for tactics; this is interpersonal stuff. I need wisdom, not smarts. No offence, Vivi.

Leah has scoured the rooms for a diary, a memoire, a notebook, anything that might give hints to the previous Leah’s disposition, history, upbringing, or even just her turns of phrase. No such luck. Very unfortunate. If I show up using a whole new vocabulary and series of expressions, people will notice.

Although, her mother didn’t notice at all the whole time she was here. Maybe this world’s Leah has been away from home so long people won’t notice small changes.

Leah flips through the sections of the wallet, looking for things that might give away any small clue. She finds a pocket full of faded old papers, with inventories on them. Receipts, she remembers someone saying. When people purchase drinks at the bar, they take their receipt to prove they’ve bought it – or something, I’m not quite sure.

One at a time, she reads through them. Grocery lists, mainly, with such strange ingredients as “chickpeas” and “jalapeños” and “tuna.” Alcohol lists, mainly wines and something called “sherry,” with occasional odd names like “breezy” or “spritzer” or “popper.” Frequent receipts from a particular shop whose address is not far from the apartment, of something called “XL hot oolong +tapi pearl +mango jelly” – always the same entry, $8.70 every time.

Leah decides she ought to pass by the mystery shop, though probably not enter; if the people within know her well, it would be easy to slip up and reveal that she is not herself.

She stops. I could do it as a trial run, she realises. I could test and see how they expect me to behave, how they talk to me, what sorts of questions they ask me. I mean, for all I know this is a huge store and they won’t remember me at all, but if they do, it’s a fairly safe practice session. ‘How to be Leah Louise…’

She reopens the wallet and pulls out the Medicare card from its slot.

Leah Louise Armande. Phew, yeah, got this, no problem.

*

The shop is – nominally – a tea shop. Throughout every nation Leah had visited with the five, she had only ever come across black tea in Bair, and even there it is prohibitively expensive, drunk only by wealthy merchants and noble families.

The caravan merchant was a big tea drinker, she recalls. The business parlour. Big room, lots of little tables, lots of people discussing trade. Kain said it seemed like the sort of opulence you only get from working the black market, and Meredith nearly collapsed from shock, worried that someone might have overheard the accusation.

Leah snickers at the memory, bits coming back to fill in the gaps – the dim lighting, the warm salt air off the wide, slow-moving river. The smell of the tea. He’d invited the group there only once, but he’d invited Leah a couple times afterwards as well. Distantly she wonders how he’s doing, in the year since she last saw him.

She recognises the smell here, easily enough, but that is where the similarity stops.

The shop is barely more than a single room, though a prep area is visible behind a beaded curtain at the back. A tiny counter divides the back, with a cash register at one end and plastic plants and shiny waving cat statues along its length. Screens on the walls advertise the menu. There are no tables, but a counter runs the length of the side and front walls, with narrow stools pulled up to it – all occupied. Though tiny, the place is extremely busy.

“S’been a while!” the girl at the counter says with a wide grin, when Leah reaches the front of the line. “We thought you’d moved away, or gone over to the competition.”

“Oh? Uh, no, just got…busy with work.”

“Now, I think I remember your usual…” The girl punches in an order, and Leah watches the elements flash up on the screen.

XL Hot Oolong Tea

+Tapioca pearls

+Mango jelly

“Looks right to me,” Leah says, pulling out her card. She pays, and the cashier scribbles the order on an immense paper cup, sending it back to the workers in the prep area. The cashier gestures to the other end of the counter, where people wait to pick up their ordered drinks and leave.

Two minutes pass, and a small woman with a passing resemblance to some of Kain’s family comes out, carrying a cup. “Large iced Oolong with peach jelly?”

Someone reaches past Leah to take the cup, and Leah steps out of the way. The man who steps forward looks at her out of the side of his eye, does a double-take, then grins.

“Hein, sa fait longtemps que je’n’t’ai pas vu ici.”

“Mhmm!” Leah says with a friendly smile, noncommittally.

“T’as décidé d’essayer un autre spot? N’ai j’pas dis, c’t’ici le meilleure shoppe pour le boba hors de Montréal? Es’c’que t’as essayé leur jelly? Fucking bon.” He punctuates the last statement with a long pull from the straw.

“Extra large hot Oolong with tapioca and mango?” The woman is back, and Leah half-lunges to grab the cup.

“Thank you, goodbye,” she says, nodding both to the server and to the man.

She runs outside, aware of her rudeness, but crushed by despair. French. People here speak French. People who recognise Leah think of her as someone who speaks French.

This…is an oversight.

The man is looking out the front door at her, shocked and insulted.

Great, I’ll never be able to go back there again. She takes a sip of the drink. Gods above. This is fucking good. Damn, and I just decided I can never go back to that shop…

She jogs to the library, drinking the tea as she goes but trying to make it last. The “bubbles” and jelly are a bit of a texture shock, but once she is used to them she finds them fantastic.

At the library, she remembers the way to the language section from her initial inquiry into possibly learning Arabic.

Please please please be easier than that…at least I know it’s written in the usual letters…

She pulls out a translation pocket guide, English-to-French in one half and the other way around in the other half. She carries it towards the counter and pulls out her library card.

“You can’t bring food in here,” someone says, and Leah looks around to see Tiffany. “Oh, hello. Learning a new language?” She tilts her head to read the book, then frowns in confusion. “I remember you as being pretty fluent in French?”

“Uhh.” Leah tucks the book further under her arm. “It’s for someone else.”

“Oh! Oh duh, stupid me.” Tiffany smiles. “But for real, no drinks.”

“I’m on my way out,” Leah says, and hustles off to the counter. She hides the drink at her hip as she checks out the book, and rushes home to begin reading.

Settled in on the couch, slurping at the straw for the last drips of tea, she starts flipping through the book, looking for essentials. The bulk of the text is individual words, all sorted alphabetically but not according to any alphabet order she knows. At the very middle are ten pages of ‘essential phrases,’ in both languages.

“How are you?” “Comment ça va?”

“What is your name?” “Comment appelez-vous?”

“Where are the bathrooms?” “Où sont les toilettes?”

“What time is it?” “C’est quoi l’heure?”

Leah groans in despair. There isn’t even any consistency between the question words! ‘How’ and ‘What’ are both ‘Comment,’ except for when ‘What’ is ‘C’est!’ I don’t even know if words are in the same noun-verb-adjective-whatever order, or if they shuffle things around all the time like they do in Algic and Ched. It took me long enough to learn Volsti, I can’t master French in two days.

She takes the book with her to work, figuring she’ll at least be able to ask for help with the pronunciations. The walk is long and warm, the late afternoon sun sinking down but its heat still radiating off the sidewalks and buildings.

Outside the club, she finds Bri and Michel loitering around a corner, smoking and chatting. She approaches them slowly, and eventually they notice her.

“Oh! You wanna join?” Bri holds out the little smoking stick, and Leah wrinkles her nose a bit at the odour – different from cigarette, less acrid and more bitter. “I take it that’s a no?”

“I just wanted to ask for a favour.”

“Shoot,” Bri says, bringing the smoke back to her lips and inhaling, the tip flaring red.

Leah holds out the book, open to the first page of phrases. “How are these pronounced?”

Michel takes the book in one hand and the smoke in the other. “Oh geez, Leah, you don’t know even this much French? I thought North Africa – and yes, I remembered that it’s not the Middle East, thank you very much – ” Bri snickers at him a bit. “ – I thought they spoke a lot of French there?”

“Well, I didn’t, and I’d like to start learning.”

Bri looks over his shoulder at the book. “And you don’t even know bonjour?”

“Bawshooh?” Leah attempts.

Bri’s lip curls. “Christ, you really mean it. You don’t know French.”

“Yes, haha, I’m an idiot, I know.”

“No, I just didn’t realise.” Bri takes back the smoke and finishes it with one last deep inhale, flicking the last twist to the side and stomping it out. “This’ll take time, we can’t do it before work.”

“Tomorrow?” Leah suggests.

“What, you have a deadline?” Bri asks jokingly.

Leah shrugs.

Michel flips through the pages. “Do you need all this memorised?”

“I need to be able to answer basic questions with basic answers.”

Michel looks at her sharply. “You don’t have a job interview, do you? Please say you don’t have an interview.”

“No?”

“A date, then?”

Bri elbows him. “Don’t be stupid, she’s dating Gloria.”

Both of them laugh a bit at Leah’s blushing and stammering.

“Well anyway, if not dating her then at least not actively looking to date anyone else.” Bri’s eyes narrow. “What do you need it for, then?”

Leah shuffles. “If I’m staying here, I need it.”

Bri shakes her head. “Why choose Quebec if you can’t speak French? Just for your birth family? They better be worth it.”

Leah stutters a bit, then sighs. “It makes sense in my head. Just go along with it, even if my questions seem dumb, okay?”

Bri nods. “Pretend you’re an alien, gotcha.”

“A what?”

Bri and Michel laugh again. “C’mon, Gloria told me she’d showed you Star Wars, you know what an alien is. Someone from another planet. It’s an expression meaning ‘explain this non-judgementally to someone like they don’t even know the basics.’”

Leah thinks, then frowns indignantly. “Are you telling me I could have been saying that all this time, instead of beating around the bush and stumbling through things blindly?”

Bri shrugs while Michel laughs. “What can I say, it was fun to watch you blunder into trouble. My favourite was when you didn’t know what a tip was.”

“I personally liked ‘what are limes?’” Michel says, reminiscently.

“They’re lemons, but green! Why not call them green lemons?” Leah laughs at herself even as she says it, and the others join in and start walking to the back door of the club.

“Oh you’re gonna like French,” Michel says with a smirk, handing her the book back. “Well, we can at least teach you some greetings before the start of the night, how about that?”

She nods, and the three of them run through some basic words and phrases, explaining every syllable slowly and clearly. Leah listens carefully, filled with an overwhelming warmth and gratitude for the people she’s found here.