She shook her head, shrugging. At the same time, she started trying to cut the crust of the bread. Her top had only the two narrow straps at the shoulders, leaving the arms and the rest of the shoulders bare, and I could see tension there. It would have been easy to chalk it up to the effort of cutting through the thicker crust of the bread, but… Kenzie was very good at hiding what she was feeling.

“Talk to me. I can’t help if you don’t tell me what you’re feeling.”

“I don’t want to go back just yet. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what’s happening with my team or our team or the city or anything. This is nice, I—”

She turned her head to look at one of the screens that was floating around the television, tilting her head slightly.

I ducked my head down, until my chin was nearly touching my hands, which were flat on the table, trying to get a better look at her face.

She met my eyes.

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t want to be a problem, I don’t want to scare you away or bother you. It’s really obvious to me now that I can think everything’s fine and then it’s really not. I thought I was better and I’m not.”

“But?”

“But I want to stay. Just for a little while longer.”

“When I dropped you off that night, at the end of the day everything happened with Teacher, the staff said they were concerned, because you made those images, and they said it looked like a projection of Ashley with something that looked like—”

“Don’t—” Kenzie interrupted, her mouth partially full. She swallowed. “Don’t say it was A.I. It wasn’t A.I. It was just a picture and a few minor triggers. I still get flack for some stuff I did at the end of summer that wasn’t A.I. I got questions from Parahumans Online about it after, and then from the team, and I told Jessica, and Jessica had to double check it wasn’t A.I. because that’s the kind of thing that makes the heroes crack down on you and they checked and they agreed it wasn’t so no. No. Not A.I., no intelligence. If you say it was, I will actually get mad.”

“Not A.I.,” I said.

She huffed a bit and nodded. She took another bite, and chewed it more than necessary.