When Rona asked, "How did you get used to knowing you're, you know, not who everyone thought you were?" she paused for a moment and remembered:

It was the night she realized chicken fingers get cold way too fast, and no amount of mustard could possibly make that gummy feeling be replaced by warm crunchies. She was sick, or so she remembered, and Mom had made her chicken fingers with mustard in a side plate, warmed and pungent and sharp to the tongue. (It's a paradox, honestly, the way she remembers all this even though it never really happened, but maybe the monks were creative like that.)

Anyway, she remembered the chicken fingers. She was really young, or so the monks said, lazing about in bed in the middle of the night. They were still in LA, and it was only a cold, the same type kids get all the time where one nostril gets all stuffed up like it's filled with cotton and the other one feels like the Mississippi, and she was just laying there. Spread-eagle, staring up at stick-on glow-in-the-dark stars that Mom put on her ceiling the summer before. And her head hurt, and her throat scratched, and she could still feel the cold chicken in her mouth even though she had brushed her teeth like a thousand times that night.

And there was a thump. Maybe at first she was scared that it was something in the shadows of her room (which wasn't real, because the large apartment in LA couldn't have been big enough for a third bedroom, unless the apartment were remodeled, but maybe the monks had employed Frank Lloyd Wright), and maybe she huddled under the covers a little lower, sniffling as quietly as she could but not liking the salt-goo on her upper lip. Another thump, a mild curse, and she knew it was Buffy. Buffy always went out at night, God knows why -- Dawn thought maybe Buffy had a boyfriend, but wouldn't he come up with her?

Dawn knew Buffy thought she was asleep. So when big sis went to the bathroom, Dawn snuck into her room, looking at the big bag Buffy had left out. She knew Buffy would be long, so with a swipe of her nose with the back of her hand and a singularly ungraceful plop to the floor, she opened the leather satchel and peered inside.

And she saw a knife. And a bottle labeled "Holy Water." And a big. Pointy. Stick.

Buffy came in, suddenly, pissed as hell. "Dawnie!"

She closed the bag she'd never really touched and stared at her sister in wide-eyed apology. When Buffy gave her a small cross instead of a smack upside the head, she was confused.

"Don't go outside without that," Buffy said.

"Why?"

"Just -- don't." And Dawn knew, somehow, that the things that go bump in the night? So totally real.

So when Rona asked, Dawn smiled and said, "Nobody's ever who everyone else thinks they are."