milliways_bar | (no subject)

There had been yelling, that Saturday morning. Rae's mother had come home from an early grocery-shopping trip to find a vegetarian version of Charlie's sausage-hashbrown pie cooking in the oven, and a ten-year old alone in the kitchen, reading while she waited for it to finish. Charlie had gone to open the coffeehouse hours before Rae woke up, leaving Rae alone in the house, as happened often enough. And, it being a cold, dreary, January day, Rae had wanted something heartier and more warming than cereal with milk for breakfast.

Rae had shown her irate mother that everything was all right, that she had been extra-careful and safe while chopping onions and shredding potatoes, chopping up kale and cooking everything (which hadn't phased her mother a bit), and explained that she'd cooked for herself when left home alone loads of times before and had been just fine (which actually made things worse).

It's just as well that the door to Milliways appeared in the door to Rae's room, where she had been sent. The girl was still hungry, and still smarting - from the assumption that she couldn't do it on her own just as much as from being grounded.

And there was a kitchen, easily within reach now. She wasn't technically leaving her room, since her room didn't deign to show up when she had opened her bedroom door. That isn't her fault at all.

So there is a young girl in the Milliways kitchen, this morning, shredding potatoes using a large cheese-grater and generally illustrating her opinion that adult supervision is something that happens to other people.