There had been points in time when my siblings and I had all elicited the pointed attention of worried teachers who made it their mission to deem us their charity cases. Many of the kids in the school we attended led troubled home lives, rife with issues we all ran across. Poverty was the big bad wolf of our area... White poverty struck hard by the circumstances of the Apartheid and the way the government held vicious authority over the citizens with a very strong, chained leash. So many children attended school in tattered, dirty clothing or a partial lack there of. It wasn't strange when Americans came to the area, thinking they were helping us when in all reality all they did was feed a drug-fueled traveler's market and give the rebels or gangs a cause to continue their derelict behavior. My siblings and I were all proof of this kind of circumstance; our mother was originally from the United States and married our father on an unorganized mission trip to Zimbabwe. Fancy, right? Wrong. That decision marred our lives with what might be comparable to a scarlet letter as all of our teachers knew our stories and paid close attention to what we may or may not have, may or may not do, and unfortunately... they cared for our attendance. When one teacher in particular had cast her attention on Finley in an undivided, specialized way he seemed to flourish. Little had I known they were art classes, which surpsised me now as I thought about it considering I generally had a good handle on the going-ons of our typical haunts. As a reminder of this time, Finley's artwork struck a chord I hadn't heard in quite a long while, causing me to fall silent and be unable to offer any kind of support or praise for the quite obviously talented work he wanted to show me.

Our moment was interrupted by a possibly opportune knock on the door. Was the pizza really here? With an unnecessary amount of exuberance, I abandoned all thoughts of Africa in a race to fling the door open and more likely than not startle the delivery boy. When the door had been flung open with enough force to have knocked it off, leaving two terribly ravenous men staring at a ... hold on.

Alexis?

Surprise doesn't begin to cover my immediate reaction as I gaped at her briefly. The woman had somehow found her way to my house which struck me as worrisome... But then again, weren't were instincts far more useful than most other species'? Perhaps it was the very essence of my magic or smell or whatever it was that was a prominent indicator of my existence in a given location that pointed the young were-fox towards my home. Or, perhaps she worked for Dominoes and with her had brought the wondrous creation the store had made for us. When her confusion about just what Dominoes was became evident, my expression changed into one of vivid dissatisfaction surely mirrored by my useless brother who had created some kind of pancake apocalypse only just briefly before.

"Jesus H. Christ," I started to say, clearly an exclamation of disdain that the woman has no idea what pizza is. Hell, I'm from another continent where I never even knew what pizza was and I have an undying love for the food now. "We can eat cookies while we wait for pizza," I offer, nodding Alexis into the house so I could shut the door behind her and lock it in preparation for another knock that would precede the delivery of our glorious breakfast pizza. "I cannot describe pizza to you. Clearly you don't have it, but you must now wait until it arrives and we can forcefeed it to you."

As an after thought, though I was deep in the middle of eating a cookie I paused to look at Finley and then back to the woman who, I noted, had blushed at our initial appearance. Okay, maybe it â€"was- strange that two men answered the door nearly naked.

"Finny, no one wants to see that. Go put clothes on." I turned to Alexis, amiable with a vague sense of humor riddling my features when I realized there was little space between the two of us and I was wearing the same amount of clothing as my scantily clad little brother. "Maybe I'll do the same. Make yourself at home, and if the pizza comes... There's money on the counter by the door."