She looked up. Mr. Millman was simply looking at her.
“My mom said it was important to die well,” Nita said at last, “so she wouldn’t be embarrassed later.”
Mr. Millman just nodded.
For a few moments they sat there in the quiet. “She had it right, I think,” he said. He paused, then, looking at Nita. “Now it makes sense to ask. Are you all right?”
Nita thought about it. “Yeah,” she said. “For the time being.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s cut it short for today. One thing, though.”
“What?”
“What about the card tricks?”
In the face of the more important things that were presently on her mind, the question seemed so annoying that Nita nearly hollered at him, “Don’t you think I have better things to do than card tricks
?” But she caught herself.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got one here…”
She fished around in her book bag and got out the deck of cards. Nita slipped it out of its packet and began to shuffle, hoping that the motion would help her hide the fact that her hands were actually trembling with rage. Okay, she thought. Calm down. You knew he was going to ask.
But Kit—!
“Am I supposed to pick a card or something?” Mr. Millman said.
“In a minute,” Nita said. She shuffled, then said, “Okay, name one.”
“The five of clubs.”
Nita knew where that one was because the deck had been stacked when she took it out of its little packet. She put the shuffled deck down on the desk, wondering whether she’d protected the back end of the deck well enough. Then she realized she should have asked him what card he wanted before she started shuffling. The trick wasn’t going to work.
I don’t care if it does or not
! Nita thought, I should make him play Fifty-Two Pickup with the whole deck.
She controlled herself, though with difficulty. She finished the shuffle and cut the cards into three piles. Then she narrowed her eyes and did a single small wizardry that she had sworn to herself she wasn’t going to use.
Mr. Millman turned over the third card. It was the five of clubs.
“That was fairly obvious,” Mr. Millman said, “that anger. And fairly accessible. We were talking about the stages of grieving earlier, how they don’t always run in sequence. Let me just suggest that when anger runs so close to the surface that it’s easily provoked by unusual circumstances, you’re quite possibly not done with it yet.”
Damn straight I’m not, Nita thought.
“It’s not a good thing, not a bad thing, just what’s so,” Millman said. “But you might want to think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past. Or might produce again in the future.”
“Right,” Nita said. Whatever good humor had come and gone during the course of the morning’s session, it was gone for good now. She picked up the cards, got up, and stalked out, making her way to her first-period class.
Right through history class, and right through the English literature class that followed it, Nita stewed. She was furious with herself for having lost her temper over Millman and the card tricks.
She was furious that she had let him see how furious she was. She was furious over the maddeningly calm and evenhanded way he had dissected her anger. She would almost have preferred that he yell at her. At least she would have had an excuse to walk out of there ready to, as her mother used to put it, “chew nails and spit rust.” She was so madNita stopped, literally, in midthought.
“What result this kind of emotion has produced in the past…”
She thought of the fury and desperation that had driven her, in the time before her mother’s death, to try the most impossible things to stop what was happening. And they still didn’t stop.
But some amazing things happened, anyway.
She had gone from world to world and finally from universe to universe, learning to hunt down and manipulate the kernels that controlled those universes‘ versions of natural law. And now she had to admit that it had been her grief and anger at what was happening to her mother that had made her as effective as she’d become.
The thought unnerved her. Nita wasn’t used to thinking of anger as a tool. It had always seemed like something you didn’t want to get accustomed to using, in case it started to become a habit, or started twisting you and your wizardry in directions you didn’t want to go. But if you’re careful, she thought, if you stay in control, if you manage it carefully enough — maybe it’s okay to use it just every now and then. Maybe managing it, rather than letting it manage you, is the whole idea—
Nita sat there staring fixedly at the blackboard. Her English teacher was illustrating the scansion of a sonnet there, but Nita wasn’t really seeing it. Okay, she thought. I forgive Millman his dumb card tricks. He’s given me something useful here. Now I just have to use it…
The bell rang, and her English class filtered out, muttering about the pile of sonnets they’d been given to analyze by the end of the week. Nita’s next class was statistics; she shouldered her book bag and wandered out into the hall, unfocused. Her anger was still running high, but it was strangely mixed with a sense of readiness. Nita couldn’t get rid of the feeling that time was suddenly of the essence, that she had to make the best of her present emotional state — in which she had been given a weapon that was primed and ready to go, a weapon too good to waste.
I don’t want to lose this
, Nita thought, making a sudden decision. This is important. I’m going to ditch the rest of my classes. I don’t care if they call Dad. He’ll know what’s going on.
Meanwhile, I need somewhere private to teleport from.
Nita hurried for the girls’ room. Between periods it was always full of people who didn’t feel like going through the hassle of getting a hall pass in their next period, and as Nita pushed into the smaller of the two girls’ rooms on that floor, she saw a couple of girls she knew there: Janie from her chemistry class and Dawn from gym. She nodded and said hi to them, found herself a stall, and sat down on the rim of the toilet, keeping the stall door pushed closed with her foot.
Well
, this is one of the less dignified moments in my practice of the Art, Nita thought, resigned.
Nonetheless, she sat and waited. As the five-minute period between classes went by, the room outside the stall door got very briefly busy, then less busy… then the room emptied out altogether. A few seconds later, the beginning-of-period bell rang. Okay, Nita thought, standing up, here’s my opportunity.
The door to the hallway pushed open a little. “Room check,” said an adult voice.
Nita flushed hot with annoyance. It was one of the teachers who checked the toilets after the change-of-class bell to make sure no one was hiding in there and smoking or doing something even less healthy. Who needs this? Nita thought, getting furious all over again. Her hand went to her charm bracelet just as the teacher pushed open the stall door.
The teacher — it turned out to be one of the gym teachers, Ms. Delemond, a tall, blond, willowy lady— stared in at Nita, but saw nothing, because Nita had just climbed up on the toilet seat, to avoid the door, and had availed herself of the simplest way to be invisible. A second or so later, Ms.