I did my best to stay away from news casts and--sadly--the internet, and though both Jamie and Hiroki had agreed not to look either, a few articles had slipped through the cracks. "Do you think I'm more of a Velma or more of a Daphne?" I asked, tapping my pencil eraser against my chin. Hiroki and I were tucked away in a corner table at Higher Grounds and I had my notebook in front of me, the outline of my newest article carefully bullet-pointed out on graph paper to my left. Across from me, Hiroki didn't bother looking up from his sketch pad. "I literally have no idea what you're talking about." "That's not how you use 'literally'," I said. "It's a cartoon reference." He pointed at himself with his charcoal stick. "Not raised on your cartoons." A thick stack of photocopies landed next to me with a slap. "Neither," Jamie said, falling into the chair to my right. "You might be love-child material, though. Please tell me I'm not being compared to any of them." I cocked my head at the stack of papers, and poked it with my pencil. "If this is your epic Spock/Kirk fan fiction, I'm not sure I-" "It's everything I could find within a reasonable amount of time on psychopomps," he said, leaning his elbows on the table and rubbing at the spot on his arm where he'd been given fourteen stitches.
