a little mad time [open]

[DINAH EVELYN DONALD]

Dinah nodded a few times as she thought of how boring a story would be if characters were perfect. "No, uh. Yes. Very boring. If Red Riding Hood hadn't gone off the path, it wouldn't have been a story. If Cinderella skipped the ball... Or if Alice had just stayed with her sister on the riverbank," she mused, trying to think if there would have been any point in those stories if the girls hadn't made a mistake in judgement. Maybe there was something to be said for not thinking things through all the time, but Dinah had a hard time not living in her head.

Then again, it wasn't like careful analysis of life had ever really kept her out of trouble. But usually wherever she wound up, it was because someone else had led her there; first her father, and then the CIA. Truthfully, her life would have been much more peaceful if she'd been better at deciding things for herself, but then, as they'd just determined, a boring life wasn't always better.

Unlike so many of their peers, Dinah didn't regret getting picked up by the CIA's child spy program. She missed her father, but he'd gone to jail, so she wouldn't have seen him anyway... no doubt, her mother would have made sure of it. No, she would have wound up back at her stepfather's house, and been the Cinderella of that story; except she didn't think any fairy godmother was going to show up.

"Oh," she replied, looking a bit sheepish as Anna pointed out she'd only been joking about selling the picture. "I knew that. But I think maybe you could sell it if you wanted to. I'm no expert on these things, and I have no idea how you would go about doing that, but... I think you could. If you wanted to," she rambled, looking down at the picture. "But then you already have a job, so maybe you're not looking for another." She looked back up and gave a smile. "Either way, thank you for the gift."

She looked momentarily put on the spot when Anna asked about her uninvolved ideas. "Oh, uh. Well, mostly just... going home or back to work," she admitted. "But I did... Well, there was a fleeting thought about going shopping. I need some new things. Clothes. But uhhh... The stores are usually so crowded." She hated crowds. "Maybe I can just order things online instead." It's what she usually ended up doing. "I usually do that. Except it's so hard to tell how things fit." And then she hated to return them, so she ended up with all these wrong items taking up space in her closet until the clutter made her stressed and she finally threw them out or donated them to a charity.