“Maybe he went on his Ordeal,” Dairine said, “and ran into something he didn’t like.”
“Maybe. But as usual, that’s sealed data. No way to find out about it unless he decides to say something, and I won’t be asking.” Nita took a sip of her tea. “Anyway, I’m going to open up a doorway into the Playroom. At least that’ll be a little interesting for him, if not exactly off-planet. And we can work without being interrupted. Also, it’ll give him a chance to put his spell through a dry run in a place where he can’t hurt anything.”
“Smart.”
“I hope so. I got a segment of the Playroom’s space booked for exclusive use late this afternoon—that’s the soonest he can get over, which is fine, we’re not done with school till around then. I’m going to stealth-shield that whole area way in the back where the sassafras trees are, and anchor the portal there.”
“Yeah, I know the spot.”
Nita looked at Dairine with slight concern. “I just didn’t want you to come back from something and find the energy signature back there had gone peculiar, and then get panicky.” At the thought that somehow, someone had come back without warning, someone you’ve been missing . . .
“Like I’ve got the energy to get panicky about anything right now . . .” Dairine said, gulping down some more coffee.
“It’s when you’re bleary like this that I start worrying what you might do if you did get panicky,” Nita said. “Make a note, though, and let Spot know about it, okay? And if you’re not busy, stop in, if you want to. I wouldn’t mind you looking him over . . . seeing what you think.”
“Okay.” Dairine guzzled some more of her coffee.
Nita shook her head. “You’re really getting into that stuff, aren’t you?”
“Yup. Tom’s full of good advice,” Dairine said.
“Oh, is that who got you started. No wonder the jar looked familiar.”
Dairine nodded, got up, and headed out with the mug. “You have school this afternoon?” Nita called after her.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ve got a couple of classes starting at three. I’ll see you there, then . . .”
No answer; Dairine merely went stomping back up the stairs.
Nita sighed, reached for a dish towel and picked up the first of the dishes from the rack while starting to review the Playroom portal spell in her mind. “Bobo,” she said, “text function to Kit’s manual?”
Open now. Go . . .
In the upstairs bathroom, Kit was just out of the shower, drying himself off and listening to absolutely nothing.
The house was blessedly quiet. His pop had left for work half an hour ago; his mama was working nights in ICU and wouldn’t be home for another half-hour or so. Carmela was asleep, as she too had gone over to afternoon classes at school and on weekdays steadfastly refused to greet the day before ten. Only time that worldgate in her closet gets any downtime . . . Kit thought.
He sat down on the toilet lid and sighed, then scrubbed his hands through his hair and tried to stroke it into some kind of shape that wouldn’t make him look like an idiot later in the day. That last haircut . . . Kit thought. Not sure it’s what I wanted. It keeps sticking up in all the wrong ways.
Yet at the same time, he remembered turning up in Antarctica the other day after sort of fluffing it up the way the barber had told him to, with some hair gunk, and when he finally tracked her down in that crowd and headed for her, Nita had looked at it and . . . Kit swallowed. He could still see that look. It made his stomach flip.
Is it insane to be still remembering something like that—how she looked at me two days ago?
Nothing’s normal anymore.
And then he started laughing at himself, there in the quiet. Like my life’s been any kind of normal since I picked up that weird book in the secondhand store a few years ago . . . But he had to admit, as the laughter ran out, that it was still bizarre how just one word could change everything.
Tell the truth, though, Kit thought, I dared her into saying it. He’d known that the word had been hanging in the air between them unspoken for a long time. And also to tell the truth, I was incredibly chicken about it.
I thought if it just got said . . . then the tension would go away. Because the tension between them had been getting tougher and tougher to bear, for Kit at least. It wasn’t as if people at school hadn’t been noticing for a long time that there was something going on with them. There were kids who were sure it was sex, and (when they hadn’t been able to dig up any evidence to confirm this) who then split further into two camps: those who were sure Kit and Nita were doing something secret and kinky (because why would they hide even being girlfriend and boyfriend otherwise?) and those who were certain that one or the other of them was a virgin who was using the other one as cover.
Gossip, oh God the gossip, you get so sick of it, Kit thought. How is this any of their business? But all around them was the pressure to be something that fit into a category everyone could understand—crushing, dating, messing around, platonic, religiously celibate, whatever. And the endless stares and the whispers and the knowing laughter, they got so old. The urge to stand in the middle of the hall and shout Yes, yes we are doing something together: we save the world! We’ve done it a bunch of times now, and I think we’re getting the hang of it!—it got strong sometimes, when Kit was feeling particularly tired or goofy. At such times he considered that it was probably a good thing that at least one of the school shrinks knew about wizards.
And he knew Nita felt the pressure as well. Unfairly, it seemed worse for her. The kids who thought she wasn’t hooking up with Kit thought she was frigid. The ones who did think she was hooking up with him thought she was an easy lay—though so far no one had worked up enough courage to say so in Kit’s hearing, which was just as well for them.
Problem is, he thought, sometimes I want to step in between her and these jerks but I can’t tell for sure when she wants that. Or even if. Certainly they’d saved each other from trouble often enough in the past. And he laughed again at the bland cover-all term “trouble.” Chased around Ireland by stone drow-trolls? Check. Stuck in the middle of a wizards’ civil war on Mars? Check. Nearly nuked by Ultimate Evil at the far edge of the visible universe? Been there, done that, got his ’n’ hers T-shirts . . . In fact it was getting to be sort of a joke that he and Nita should work out a schedule to make sure that each of them got an equal opportunity to be the hero, or alternately to be the person who got to feel idiotic about needing to be saved. But everything’s changing, Kit thought. Things we might have done six months ago and never thought twice about aren’t always the right things to do now.
And reactions to what we do aren’t the same either. Kit remembered how after he and Nita had been at Penn’s the other day, on the way back to his house he’d found himself reflectively rubbing the hand she’d held. His first thought on realizing what he was doing had been Oh stop it, you’re pathetic! But it had been kind of shocking at the time how automatically she’d reached for him after her annoyance at Penn grabbing her hand and getting all smoochy-smoochy with it. Kit had gone quite warm, blushing, and then, feeling humiliated, had thought, Oh please don’t let her see me doing that. Don’t let him see me doing that! And as it happened, no one had seen . . . which had been a relief.