“HNii’t,” S’reee said, “we can’t stay, you said you have to get back—“
Nita looked around her in shock. “S’reee, when did it get so dark! My folks are gonna have a fit!”
“Didn’t I mention that time didn’t run the same way below the water as it does in the Above?”
“Yeah, but I thought—“ Kit said, and then he broke off and said a very bad word in whale. “No, I didn’t think. I assumed that it’d go slower—“
“It goes faster,” Nita moaned. “Kit, how are we going to get anything done? S’reee, how long exactly is the Song going to take?”
“Not long,” the humpback said, sounding a bit puzzled by her distress. “A couple of lights, as it’s reckoned in the Above—“
“Two days!”
“We’re in trouble,” Kit said.
“That’s exactly what we’re in. S’reee, let’s put our tails into it! Even if we were getting home right now, we’d have some explaining to do.”
She turned and swam in the direction where her sharpening whale-senses told her home was. It was going to be bad enough, having to climb out of this splendid, strong, graceful body and put her own back on again. But Dairine was waiting to give her the Spanish Inquisition when she got home. And her mother and father were going to give her more of those strange looks. Worse… there would be questions asked, she knew it. Her folks might even call Kit’s family if they got worried enough — and Kit’s dad, who was terminally protective of his son, might make Kit come home.
That thought was worst of all.
They went home. It was lucky for them that Nita’s father was too tired from his fishing — which had been successful — to make much noise about their lateness. Her mother was cleaning fish in the kitchen, too annoyed at the smelly work to much care about anything else. And as for Dairine, she was buried so deep in a copy of The Space Shuttle Operators’ Manual that all she did when Nita passed her room was glance up for a second, then dive back into her reading. Even so, there was no feeling of relief when Nita shut the door to her room and got under the covers; just an uneasy sense of something incomplete, something that was going to come up again later … and not in a way she’d like.
“Wizardry…” she muttered sourly, and fell asleep.
Ed’s Song
“Neets,” her mother said from where she stood at the sink, her back turned. “Got a few minutes?”
Nita looked up from her breakfast. “What’s up?”
Her mother was silent for a second, as if wondering how to broach whatever she had on her mind. “You and Kit’ve been out a lot lately,” she said at last. “Dad and I hardly ever seem to see you.”
“I thought Dad said it’d be fun to have Dairine and me out of his hair for a while, this vacation,” said Nita.
“Out of his hair, yes. Not out of his life. — We worry about you two when you’re out so much.”
“Mom, we’re fine.”
“Well, I wonder… What exactly are you two doing out there all day?”
“Oh, Mom! Nothing!”
Her mother looked at her and put up one eyebrow in an excellent imitation of Mr. Spock.
Nita blushed a bit. It was one of those family jokes that you wish would go away, but never does; when Nita had been little and had said “Nothing!” she had usually been getting into incredible trouble. “Mom,” Nita said, “sometimes when I say ‘nothing,’ it’s really just nothing. We hang out, that’s all-We… do stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Mom, what does it matter? Just stuff!”
“It matters,” her mother said, “if it’s adult kinds of stuff… instead of kid stuff.”
Nita didn’t say a word. There was no question that what she and Kit were doing were adult sorts of things.
Her mother took in Nita’s silence, waiting for her daughter to break it. “I won’t beat around the bush with you, Neets,” she said at last. “Are you and Kit getting… physically involved?”
Nita looked at her mother in complete shock. “Mom!” she said in a despairing groan. “You mean sex? No!”
“Well,” her mother said slowly, “that takes a bit of a load off my mind.” There was a silence after the words. Nita was almost sure she could hear her mother thinking, If it’s true…
The silence unnerved Nita more than the prospect of a talk on the facts of life ever could have. “Mom,” she said, “if I were gonna do something like that, I’d talk to you about it first.” She blushed as she said it. She was embarrassed even to be talking about this to anybody, and she would have been embarrassed to talk to her mom about it too. Nevertheless, what she’d said was the truth. “Look, Mom, you know me, I’m chicken. I always run and ask for advice before I do anything.”
“Even about this?”
“Especially about this!”
“Then what are you doing?” her mother said, sounding just plain curious now. And there was another sound in her voice — wistfulness. She was feeling left out of something. “Sometimes you say to me ‘playing,’ but I don’t know what kids mean any more when they say that. When I was little, it was hopscotch, or Chinese jumprope, or games in the dirt with plastic animals. Now when I ask Dairine what she’s doing, and she says ‘playing,’ I go in and find she’s doing quadratic equations… or using my hot-curlers on the neighbor’s red setter. I don’t know what to expect.”
Nita shrugged. “Kit and I swim a lot,” she said.
“Where you won’t get in trouble, I hope,” her mother said.
“Yeah,” Nita said, grateful that her mother hadn’t said anything about lifeguards or public beaches. This is a real pain, she thought. I have to talk to Tom and Carl about this. What do they do with their families?… But her mother was waiting for more explanation. She struggled to find some. “We talk, we look at stuff. We explore…”
Nita shook her head, then, for it was hopeless. There was no explaining even the parts of her relationship with Kit that her mother could understand. “He’s just my friend,” Nita said finally. It was a horrible understatement, but she was getting hot with embarrassment at even having to think about this kind of thing. “Mom, we’re okay, really.”
“I suppose you are,” her mom said. “Though I can’t shake the feeling that there are things going on you’re not telling me about. Nita, I trust you… but I still worry.”
Nita just nodded. “Can I go out now, Mom?”
“Sure. Just be back by the time it gets dark,” she said, and Nita sighed and headed for the door. But there was no feeling of release, no sense of anything having been really settled, as there usually was when a family problem had been hashed out to everyone’s satisfaction. Nita knew her mother was going to be watching her. It griped her.
There’s no reason for it! she thought guiltily as she went down to the beach, running so she wouldn’t be late for meeting Kit. But there was reason for it, she knew; and the guilt settled quietly into place inside her, where not all the sea water in the world would wash it out.
She found Kit far down the beach, standing on the end of the jetty with a rippling, near-invisible glitter clutched in one hand: the whalesark. “You’re late,” he said, scowling, as Nita climbed the jetty. “S’reee’s waiting—“ Then the scowl fell off his face when he saw her expression. “You okay?”
“Yeah. But my mom’s getting suspicious. And we have to be back by dark or it’ll get worse.”