"Well, ... you see, Dear, " Dad started, "I've been telling Ted here, for a while now, what a fine girl Erin is. How smart she is, and what a good cat...h she would be ... She's cute, too. It wasn't anymore than your father told me at about the same age actually, and it worked for me." Cute! You told him I was cute," Erin squealed near hysteria, and then she burst out in tears again."It's all right, Dear," Mom said, trying to console her. "He always called me cute, too. He still managed to marry. It had given her a sense of bodily awareness she had never had, making her agile and able to climb, jump and run better and longer than she had ever deemed possible.And it had turned out she was enjoying it even more than before to touch her whole body, every inch a clear sign of the progress she had made and all excess fat trimmed away.As she sat down on her bed – or rather a mattress on the floor because bringing a bed frame up here would be a bitch – Katja noticed the upcoming cold had only. “We’re under-age!” she hissed. “We’ll get in trouble!”I smiled and shook my head. “We’re in an Italian restaurant, about to eat authentic Italian cuisine at the start of a perfect evening. There are some occasions that call for a taste. If I’d tried to order more than that, it would have been crossing the line, but I’m sure you’ve had a sip or two at holidays even growing up. I know I did and it never hurt me.”“Yeah, but you’re perfect,” she scoffed. “Me, not so much.”“You seem perfect to me,”. ..Fascinating. Well, what else can you tell me? Why do you not expect self awareness?” I ask her. My skin is charging with that mysterious buzz again. “What am I feeling right now?”“Well, we don’t know what makes us all feel so… energetic. It’s something about this place, as far as we know, but we can’t gather anything more than observational evidence on the subject.”“As for self awareness,” Emily says, “that is also observational. Most people never seem to fully come out of the confusion that.