We had two audio jacks plugged into the laptop. Sveta had a pair of headphones. Since I was sharing the ear-buds with Rain, I had audio only in the one ear, which was fine with me, since it let me keep an ear on our surroundings.

In my right ear, Parker’s swears matched up with the subtitles on the screen.

“Shit,” Sveta said, with a serious expression on the face she wore as camouflage.

The thrown objects marked the point it stopped being a teenager’s tantrum and became something else. The lady with the boa gripped the edge of the counter, staring Parker down. Others stood from their seats.

‘Fuck you and suck on frozen shit, you act like you’re all that, but you’re a mess! I can’t believe I actually looked up to you for a minute there!’

‘She gave you a place to live.’ This from D.J.

‘She gave me fucking slavery! I joined up to have fun! I wanted to drink and fucking actually do shit and instead I’m your bitch! I’m done!’

‘You can always leave,’ the girl with the shark tattoos running from armpit to waist said. ‘We won’t get in your way.’

‘Nicky might,’ D.J. said.

‘Nicky isn’t here,’ shark girl said. ‘If you’re gonna leave, now’s good.’

Parker swayed on the spot, as if leaning hard enough to one side could be the motivation to go. She looked at the woman with the feather boa and then immediately looked away. ‘Can I collect my pay?’

The woman with the feather boa shook her head slowly.

‘If you leave, you leave all the money you’ve earned on the table,’ D.J. said.

Parker became visibly agitated at that.

“Walk away,” Sveta murmured under her breath.

Parker didn’t.

“Do we intervene?” Sveta asked, quiet.

“What we’re watching is out of date,” I said. “We’re… six minutes behind on the broadcast, because we keep pausing.”

We were only free to pause because the other group was staying current. Rain skipped ahead, catching us up. Visual glitches muddled the screen. As it resolved, the squares and blocks of text falling away, Parker could be seen in the kitchen, cleaning up, downcast.

Rain flipped backward a bit, giving us one-frame glimpses of the outcome. Parker subdued, resuming her work in the kitchen. A few seconds before, we had Parker with a stricken expression on her face. A moment before that, ‘Nicky’ was at the door.

Played in the right order, ‘Nicky’ had come back, and the fight had gone out of Parker.

Of course, Parker was just a superimposed image. Nicky wasn’t a tanned blonde with cornrows at either side of her face. D.J. wasn’t a surfer dude, the girl with the shark bite tattoos wasn’t his side chick, and the woman with the boa wasn’t the silent leader of the group of pirates.