The smoothie gave her a headache. It grew darker as the clouds crowded in
further. She walked home, eager to avoid the advancing veil of rainfall that
draped in front of them. Dark shapes, the proceeded steadilly from the south
like a funeral procession for the sunshine.

She made it inside just as the initial drizzle began. The rain wouldn't get
much more intense than that-- no drenching thunderstorms were likely. No it
would just mist, and drizzle, and seep from the sky interminably for days.

Bec put her book, unfinished still, back in its correct place on one of her
bookshelves (organized-- unlike any of her other possessions-- by author and
then chronologically by publication date). She thought about switching her
computer on, but her headache persuaded her that she didn't really want to
squint at a monitor and concentrate.

She took an aspirin and lay on the couch in the living room. It was another
three hours until Lucy was due home.

Reluctantly, she picked up the remote control for the television. It was now
official: she was desperately bored. She winced as she pressed the power
button, expecting her headache to worsen as some loud spastic show was bound to
spring to life. She turned the volume down automatically and didn't leave the
channel on long enough to find out what the show was; caught a flash only of
styled, plastic-perfect faces. It was probably a soap.

She flickered past what was ovciously a talk show where a small angry man
shoved his finger at a large angry man and a live studio audience cheered. Next
an infomercial with a sculpted bronze woman demonstraging an exercise machine
flashed a phone number in large red letters.

Bec flipped faster, annoyed by the decadence of so many channels offering so
little. She finally stopped flipping when the screen turned monochrome. It was
an old Errol Flynn swashbuckler. She sighed and leaned back on the couch,
relaxing just as the aspirin began to kick in. Errol swung across the room from
a chandelier.

The movie was still showing when Lucy got home-- early. She slumped down on the
couch next to Bec, smelling of air-conditioned office.

"Hey. Got off early today. What's this, The Princess Bride or something?"

"If you recall," said Bec, moving herself to the other end of the couch, "that
film was in color."

Lucy nodded vaguely and bent forward to pick up the remote.

"Mind if I change it? There's this thing with Jimmy Joe coming on."

Bec sighed. Before she could think up an appropriate protest, Errol Flynn's
final dashing sword fight with the villain blinked away, to be replaced with
entertainment news. Jimmy Joe's thing wasn't on yet. Instead, a perky woman
whose hair didn't move talked about a celebrity charity ball. Her very white
teeth sparkled as she interviewed actors and musicians about the charity, which
involved providing cool clothes and CDs to disadvantaged kids.

Then another segment came on with gossip about various public figures, most of
which involved who was dating or divorcing whom, and who else was in a rehab
program for some type of addiction.

"So when's the thing with Jimmy Joe?" said Bec, lolling her head backward and
staring at the ceiling.

"I don't know. It's coming up soon. They keep talking about it coming up next."

"I can't believe how vapid this infotainment stuff is," she continued, trying
to make up her own ending for the Errol Flynn movie. Harth and Galatea
Greenthorne had joined Errol, and all three had dispatched the evil guards on
their way up to the top of the tower, where the bad guy was hiding.

"I can't believe you use words like 'vapid.' It's fun, it's glamorous. Just a
little bit of harmless indulgence!"

"Funny you don't say that about books," said Bec sourly, sitting up straight
and looking at Lucy.

"Yeah, but these people are real," replied Lucy, gesturing at the latest
segment with her remote.

Bec looked over at the screen carefully.

"That woman hasn't got a real body part on her. Boob job, tummy tuck, collagen
lips, dyed hair... Gimme a break."

Lucy sighed in exasperation, and the show broke for commercials. Bec folded her
arms and began to stew. Lucy was always butting in, dragging her superficial,
media-saturated interests along with her. Bec may have been living in even more
of a fantasy world, but at least in her fantasies, the people had personalities.

As the commercials blared on, she started to wonder why she even bothered
pretending to play along with it all-- working to earn money to buy things she
saw on television, ad infinitum. She didn't really believe in any of that, and
yet if an outside observer compared her with Lucy, apart from reading they
weren't all that different in lifestyle. But it all felt so artificial to her.
And if the norm was to be fake, then why couldn't Bec choose what kind of fake
she wanted to be?

For one thing, she didn't want to be perky, or have hair that didn't move or
white teeth, and she definitely didn't want to look like a celebrity. She
wanted to be clever, and brave. She wanted to be assertive, instead of just
letting Lucy have her way because it was easier.

And she wanted a sense of justice. In the real fake world, people were always
making a show of doing good things whilte they were really being selfish. In
Bec's fake world, people would either fight evil for real, or just be evil, and
they would mean it.