FALL, 1997

As the two fictional women once again raced off their cliff on a now well-worn videotape, Joyce at last asked a question about the man she now knew she should have never brought home.

"Before the fight, what did Ted threaten you with?"

It was too soon, as Joyce now found out. Buffy didn't look at her, though it seemed to be the result of attention to the movie that by now they had both surely memorized, all the way down to the cringing deputy's submissive hand-gestures.

"So you believe now that he threatened me?"

Which stung. Where did the drugging begin and where did her own loneliness and its attendant willing suspension of common sense end? Cookies versus companionship. Not for the first time, Joyce wondered if the legendary movie now rolling its credits should have taken the former victim more to task for not doing earlier what she could have done, little though that was. How had a sensible business owner become one of those mothers you saw on the TV news, speaking in terms yet loving about their children's brutalizer, found one night in a bar?

"That's not fair."

Buffy reached over to the coffee table, and grabbed the copy of The Illiad that Willow had loaned her as a possible book report subject. She held it up

"Does the name Cassandra ring any bells?"

She put it down, stopped the tape and then began to rewind it for yet another viewing.

"Mom, let's not do this now, okay?"

A common hot button between mother and daughter was a poor reaction to the perception they were being told what to do.

"Look. I believe that he threatened you. That's obvious. I was wrong to ever believe him. But despite what that weaselly coward of a Principal says, you don't pick fights. So what did Ted do or say that got you so upset?"

What Buffy was about to tell her mother was a blatant but necessary lie. Yet it still contained enough of the truth to sidestep for now the world of the Vampire Slayer.

"He showed me a perfect copy of pages of my diary, complete with handwriting I would swear was my own. In this version, I was doing coke, heroin, and tons of alcohol. I was servicing both Willow and Xander, and did striptease at the Bronze to support it all. Ted said that if I didn't behave and let you and him happen, he would use what he had to have me locked away---in a mental health facility."

Until Joyce got an explanation about what looked like a crazy man turning into a cloud of dust and dirt some months from then, no words could have hit her harder.

"I wouldn't have let him do that to you. Not even if he gave me ten thousand trank-cookies."

Not true, she knew. The cookies and such had their desired effect. Only the prospect of actually seeing her daughter arrested for murder had even started to shake off Ted's eerie hold on her.

"Please, Mom. Just let it go. Ted is gone. He's not going to put either of us anywhere."

In her mind's eye, Joyce saw two docile fools with a marriage failing on many fronts sign their child into a place that was supposed to help. But almost immediately, the charges to their health care plan were triple what they'd been quoted. They began to find articles about the overuse of institutionalization with teenagers. They met other parents who told stories of teens who made Buffy's delusions seem like devotion to a favorite TV show by comparison. It had been a mistake. And it had not diminished the secretiveness one little bit.

"But honey--I would have stopped him, this time."

Buffy nodded, and looked over, one eye between tearing and not.

"And what about last time?"

She could take this bull by the horns. Confront the fact that committal should have been outpatient therapy. Tell her about the other family member in that clinic, and how fear of her had caused Joyce and Hank to trip. Tell her at long last that she was not quite as alone as she assumed. That someone she was already close to had been born that way.

"Let's watch T&L again, okay?"

But it was the wrong time for more heart-rending, therapeutic or otherwise. The confrontation couldn't go well, the one secret was stunning, and the other could even render her daughter catatonic.

"Good. I'll make more popped maize."

Joyce clamped down on her words perhaps a little too hard, then, leading later on to such stellar phrases as 'Can't you just stop being the Slayer?'.

"Pop the Corn On The Cob flavor, honey."

And it had to be this way, because driving off the cliff was not an option.