Anyanka's been human now for forty days, two hours and twenty-four minutes. She has an apartment and a class schedule and a driver's licence; she has a fake name that isn't Anyanka and isn't Aud, and she's already tired of the idiot humans all around her with their “Anya, are you coming to fifth period?” and “Anya, this speculation about Shakespeare's wife taking vengeance against him is very interesting, but your paper was supposed to be about the play” and “Anya, that's the mens' room”.

Forty days, two hours and twenty-six minutes; she has a car, and a library card with a picture on it she never posed for, and a wristwatch to remind her that this mortal life is ticking away, second by second.

For the first time in eleven hundred years, she needs to sleep and eat and brush her hair.

She's starting to answer to 'Anya' right away, even inside her head.

She's starting to worry that maybe this isn't just one of D'Hoffryn's tests.

---

Anya thinks that if she was a real Sunnydale girl, and she'd gone through all the grades like everyone else and not been eaten by a vampire along the way, she'd be good at math. It's black and white, with rules and clear instructions and a right answer and none of this “well, that's an interesting point of view, Anya, but…” crap.

Ms. Jeffries hates flunking her, and says she can't understand why she tests so badly when her transcripts from her old school are so great. Anya shrugs and feels a minute piece of gratitude that Xander didn't break Cordelia's heart until after the SATs.

Cordelia sits at the desk in front of hers in Ms. Jeffries' sixth period class, all the way across the room from Xander and the Slayer and the cuddly witch/werewolf couple and just on the fringes of the popular crowd. Anya can't keep up with binomial theorem and she spends a lot of time doodling in her notebook and thinking how she could have done better with Cordelia's wish — because if D'Hoffryn's trying to teach her a lesson about sloppy wishcraft and misdirected vengeance then she'd better learn it, by golly — and sometimes she just stares at the back of Cordelia's head and thinks about being human and how long it'll take for her hair to turn grey.

---

“Why are you here?”

Anya examines the fingernails of her right hand. Are they…? They're growing. One more stupid human thing to deal with. “I asked Mr. Cox why his classes are so boring they make me want to fall asleep and he gave me detention, so…”

For a second Buffy looks like she might laugh, before she snaps back into glowery-tough-Slayer mode. “No, why are you here, in Sunnydale. It's been two months…”

“Fifty-six days.” It scares her a little that she's already lost track of the hours and minutes.

Don't you have,” Buffy drops her voice, glancing at the few other students at the back of the room, “demony things to do?”

“Ex-demony things,” Anya reminds her, although she's guessing that if Buffy was going to kill her she wouldn't do it in the middle of detention with a teacher on the way and some bored eleventh-graders looking on. “I'm harmless without my power center. Good old loveable, harmless Anya.” She pastes on the smile she copied from a local news anchor and practised in the bathroom mirror. It's perky and non-threatening.

Buffy rolls her eyes and takes a seat. Anya spends the rest of detention drawing rainbows and ponies in her folder, just in case she's being watched for signs of demony things, and the fixed smile makes the teacher so nervous he lets them out a half hour early.

The sidelong look Buffy gives her as they leave the room is hard to read, but she doesn't have the bloodlust in her eye, so Anya feels pretty safe.

---

She doesn't set out to make friends with Cordelia. She doesn't mean to befriend anyone at this school, because the human children are confusing and stupid and the teachers act like they have some right to tell her what to do, but she's here because of Cordelia Chase — because in another world she let Cordelia die while the man who scorned her survived for undead vampire funtimes, and in hindsight she can see why that goes against the whole code of vengeance demons.

So there's a weird kind of bond there already, and after a few weeks Cordelia gets impatient with all the sighing behind her in math class and moves back a table to show Anya what she's getting wrong, even though it shifts her further away from the popular crowd. She's been trying to win them back, a sort of courtship dance that Anya's been watching with growing interest, because she feels like she'd understand humans so much better if she could just figure why Cordelia's so desperate for these girls' approval.

In the quad between classes Cordelia is correcting one of Anya's trig problems and Anya is watching her — the way she frowns when she concentrates, the strand of hair falling across her face — and trying to remember what she looked like through demon eyes, all swirling righteous fury and scarlet vengeance. “Geez,” Cordelia mutters, “eyeball, much? You're staring like a big freak,” she says, when Anya still doesn't get it.

She likes that Cordelia says what she's thinking. It makes it a lot easier to talk to her, and Anya goes for much the same approach in dealing with other humans.

“Your friends are stupid,” she says, trying it out. “They're boring and herd-like.”

“Yeah.” Cordelia shrugs. “But the herd's better than being the lame-ass one in the corner of the field by yourself.”

Anya's surprised by a tugging feeling in her stomach, even though she just ate. There's something she's heard people say and she nearly understands it now: “I… get that,” she says.

---

“Hey. There's a big red demon, four horns, Pash-something…”

“Pashtara demon,” Anya says automatically, and she may be flunking American History and English Lit and barely passing math, thanks to Cordelia, but she knows demons: “Go for the tail, but watch out for the venom spines. It'll nest somewhere cold.”

“Huh. Unexplained deaths at the meat-packing plant suddenly un-unexplained.” Buffy closes her locker. “Thanks.”

Anya's been human more than sixty days. She's learned that you can survive for days on just Milk Duds and Pepsi but you shouldn't, and that Christmas vacation lasts forever if you're by yourself, and that Sunnydale bartenders really care about that 21-or-over thing, and that asking the hot girl in your drama class if she'd like to have sex is some sort of big taboo even though she's eighteen and you checked the law very carefully.

She hasn't learned yet what it means when somebody says “Thanks” with their eyes sliding away from you like that, whether it's sarcasm or they're pissed they needed your help or they're still not sure you're not going to kill them and all their friends. Which is unfair, because Anya's pretty sure that even if she got her power center back today, she'd let most of Sunnydale High live, unless somebody made a very specific wish or Mr. Cox made them sit through his slideshow on the life cycle of the mayfly again.

She does know that the response to a thank-you is “You're welcome,” though, so she says that. Then she says, “You're not going away.”

Buffy frowns at her. “You're friends with Cordelia, right? I just… is she okay?”

“I don't know,” Anya starts to answer, because maybe there's some event for establishing if you're friends with someone or not, but Buffy says “Oh,” very quietly and leaves before Anya can even get to the second part of the question.

---

“Everyone's saying you put the moves on Astoria.” Cordelia hasn't looked this gleeful in the whole time Anya's known her. Maybe this was how she always looked before her heart was broken, Anya thinks, and surprises herself; she's never cared before about what anyone was like pre-vengeance. “Is it true? Were you being serious? You can tell me, I'll only tell five, maybe six other people.”

Anya pushes her cafeteria lunch around her plate. “Humans are strange and confusing,” she complains, and freezes at her own stupid mistake, but Cordelia's pouring her milk as if nothing's wrong.

“Yeah, Willow told me about the you being an ex-demon thing. Yay for Sunnydale. Weird girl in my math class? Sure, demon, why didn't I go there first?”

They're alone at the table; it's the first time Cordelia's chosen to sit with her when there's a space at Harmony's clique.

Anya rests her chin on her hands. “I'm over a thousand years old,” she says experimentally.

“Astoria's eighteen,” Cordelia says, making a face like the milk's gone bad. “May I be the first to say, ew?”

“My body's eighteen,” she says — because is it ever, with all the sex now, please signals it keeps sending to her brain when Percy West smirks at her in the hallway or Buffy shows up to school in a skirt too short to be practical for slaying. “Don't you think it's stupid to be so hung up about sex? All these rules, where it has to be one guy with one girl and blah — you know, most of my vengeance could have been avoided if people just relaxed. Wouldn't it just be easier to say 'hey, I want you, take me'?”

Cordelia's a little flushed in the face as she says, “Sure, I guess so,” and she doesn't seem to want to talk about it any more, although for the rest of lunch she keeps looking over at where Astoria and Harmony are whispering together.

Later in math class Anya has to poke her when Ms. Jeffries asks her a question; Cordelia blinks, and drags her gaze away from Buffy Summers long enough to answer.

---

Anya has been human for over four months. She has a car and an apartment and a checking account, and she has a pile of textbooks from school, and Cordelia's handwriting in her math book, and a note from Ms. Jeffries saying she's doing much better, good work, Anya. She has a regular seat in the cafeteria and on weekends she goes to the movies because she thinks it'll help improve her colloquial English.

There's a chance that this is still a test. Halfrek was abandoned for more than a year once, and she proved herself by carrying out a spectacular vengeance with no powers, not even ordinary witchcraft, just paranoia and human weakness and old-fashioned malice.

She sits up most of the night, even though tomorrow's a school day, thinking it over. For a moment, dozing on her couch, she wakes up and reaches for the empty space where her power center should be.

She walks through the doors of Sunnydale High with two forged notes in her bag.

---

“So,” Buffy says, holding up a slip of paper as Anya clicks the door closed behind her, “I'm guessing you're the supervillain behind this?”

“Anya, tell her this is some weird demon thing,” Cordelia rages, “because I did not write that note.”

The janitor's closet is a lot smaller than Anya expected from Cordelia's stories about making out with Xander in here. Not so small, though, that Buffy and Cordelia needed to be pressed so tightly together when she opened the door.

She's beginning to feel the warm glow of a job well done.

“I had to make a choice,” she says. “I could renounce my demon past and join the side of evil-fighting…”

“Tell me there's no 'or' here,” Buffy says. She sounds a little out of breath, one hand just brushing the edge of Cordelia's skirt. “Renouncing demons, good. Welcome aboard.”

“Or,” Anya says, “I could go through with my original job. Vengeance against Xander for breaking your heart.”

She's interested by how loud just breathing sounds in the small space. Cordelia's eyes are wide.

“My heart's actually okay right now,” she says. “No smiting necessary. Really, we're good.”

Buffy says, “Show of hands: those against vengeance? Okay, pretend Cordelia and me can actually raise our hands…”

“But then I decided,” Anya says, moving the small step towards them that the enclosed space allows, so that she's almost pressed into Cordelia's side, arm going around Buffy's waist, “I can do both.”

“What,” Buffy says slowly, “you're going to take a nice vengeance on Xander…?”

She can see the moment that they both get it. The tension goes out of Buffy all at once; Cordelia licks her lips, considering. “He cheats on me with a girl,” she says. “I get with two even hotter girls. Vengeance achieved.”

“It was my last piece of work,” Anya says modestly, wondering how to decide who gets her first human kiss in a millennia and whether it's against some kind of rule to flip a coin. “It had to be a good one.”

---

If it was a test, she thinks — much, much later — then she failed. After a thousand years, she failed, and she's nothing now but an ordinary person. Nothing but Anya.

She finds she doesn't mind so much.