floating around like an oversized tinkerbell

Karolina had almost forgotten what day it was. It wasn't until the late afternoon that her phone beeped to signal the arrival of an email.

From all of us here at the Dean Foundation, we wish a very Happy Birthday to you, Ms. Dean!

It was January 28th. And Karolina was turning 23. And it didn't feel like much of anything. It wasn't a significant birthday in any legal sense, and it wasn't one of the culturally important ones, either. But even more than that... Karolina's relationship with her birthday had been pretty weird ever since her parents' deaths. Kinda hard to have a birthday and not think about the people who were the reason you were in the world in the first place, you know?

So she wasn't going to be making a big thing of it this year, either. The same as every year. But she had gone down to J,GoB and bought a box of vegan cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles. And then a small package of those cute little candles meant for birthday cakes from elsewhere in town.

And now she was in her kitchen, trying to decide whether she felt like being this dorky or not.

[ooc: Open for visits and calls and texts, should you feel a reason for any of those! ETA: NSFWness down-thread!]

Apart from going to class, Karolina had spent yesterday mostly hiding out and dealing with the horrors of having handwavily been a guy all weekend. That meant also that she'd missed out on celebrating her birthday in any kind of a significant way.

She was seventeen and a day, today. Slowly edging towards eighteen and adulthood.

She wasn't so sure how she felt about that. She'd braved the outside world, anyway, to get a sixpack of strictly vegan cupcakes from the mainland on her way back from therapy. Getting an entire cake had seemed wasteful, but she wanted to do something nice for herself. And cupcakes were nice.

Also, they were really cute, so she probably couldn't be blamed if she just stood by her desk admiring them for a while. Right?

[ooc: Open door/post! I'm still home sick though, so SP may occur as my attention span flounders, but gdi I already had to skip mentioning her birthday yesterday.]