I could hear her not asking what I’d thought of Val. Before I blurted out something I’d be sorry for later I said, “Where is he from again? Ors—Orsk—”
“Orzaskan,” Mom said carefully. “I have to keep looking it up.”
“And why’d he leave?” I said as neutrally as possible.
I felt her shrug. “The latest bunch of government gizmoheads don’t like academics, and he’s a professor of philosophy.”
Physwiz—the physics of the worlds—is sometimes called philosophy. I hoped not in this case. “And it doesn’t get much more academic than philosophy,” I said into Mom’s silence. Or as loopheaded as physwiz. But I’d never heard of even the most out-there creepo collecting shadows.
She turned me around to face her. “Maggie . . . I’m sorry he made a bad first impression on you. I don’t suppose you want to tell me what went wrong?”
That his shadow is too big for him and there was something out of a bad science-fiction movie on the wall behind his chair at dinner? Not to mention that shirt. I shook my head.
“Well, give him a chance, won’t you?” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
She stared at me a few seconds longer. I could see the thought bubble forming over her head. It said “teenagers.” I smiled, and she relaxed a little and hugged me again, and moved off toward the stairs. “You’ll lock up after you take Mongo out,” she said, which was Mom-speak for “It’s a school night, go to bed.”
“Mom,” I said. Mongo had appeared at the sound of his name, but I waited till Mom had gone upstairs and I saw the bathroom light go on. Then I put Mongo’s lead on like we were going out as normal. Our dining room used to be a garage. Now it’s a dining room, Mom’s office, and a coat closet. I paused at the dining room door and then flung it open and flicked the light switch on as if I was expecting to catch somebody at something.
There wasn’t anything there except a (mostly cleared-off) table and some chairs and the corner cupboards with Mom’s china and stuff, and a piece of Ran’s parka sticking out through the closed closet door. The space alien(s) had gone home with Val. I guessed that was something.
Mongo and I had a nice little cruise around the block while he examined every inch of the sidewalk, fences, trees, patches of grass, and the Watchguard call box on the corner and chose precisely the right six(teen) spots to pee. I locked the door behind us when we came in again, took his lead off—and went back to check that I had locked the door. I always lock the door. I didn’t need to check. I spent a minute staring at the floor, like I was watching for jagged-edged, wiggly shadows to eel under the locked door. For the minute I was watching they didn’t. Then I shut Mongo in the kitchen, where the official dog bed was (plus 5,214 dog toys so he didn’t have any excuses to eat chair legs), and went to bed myself. And dreamed about alligators and space aliens. But that’s my problem, right?
You already know how chapter one has to end: they got married. I told myself he was not my stepfather, maybe he was married to my mother but that doesn’t make him my anything father. (He even tried to adopt us. Ran said yes and I said no. I managed not to say “you must be dreeping kidding, no bugsucking way.”)
I was Mom’s attendant and I’d like to say I got a great dress out of it but we were broke. Actually it was a pretty good dress because Mom’s sister Gwenda brought their own mom and grandmom’s party dresses from her attic and told me I could pick one. Gwenda lives in their old family house, way upstate from us in Station. I like vintage as well as the next teenage girl with cash flow problems and wearing dead people’s clothes isn’t usually a problem but there was something a bit buggie about these. Maybe because I knew Great-grandmom had been a magician. It was Grandmom’s generation that got gene-chopped, and they’re still checking in case they missed something. You get scanned at birth and then you get another scan and they give you a blood test some time during adolescence—with girls you’re supposed to go back when you start menstruating. The scan made me pretty sick the second time, which is supposed to mean that I would have had the gene if it hadn’t been chopped. It must have been really, really rough for Great-grandmom and her daughters.
Or maybe I wasn’t hot-wired by the dresses because I was dreading the wedding. By heroic self-control I didn’t choose the black one with the grey lace and sequins although it was seriously electric, and picked out a pink and maroon one instead that looked a little less like the wicked fairy who’s come to curse the princess. Jill was helping me and pulled out a beigey-cream one that would have made me look like I had died (speaking of dead people) but looked terrific against her dark skin.
“Hey, babe, utsukushii,” I said, which is Japanese for “beautiful.” Mostly we insulted each other with the (approximately ten) Japanese words we’d looked up on the webnet to annoy Takahiro with. We only knew a couple of nice ones.
Gwenda laughed. “Okay, you have that one,” she said to Jill. Jill by special perk was invited to the wedding to keep me company; other than her it was just Mom’s family and friends. (Val didn’t seem to have any friends, and if he had any family they were still back in Whatsit-kan.) “And you can keep the black one too,” she said to me. “None of this has been out of the attic in thirty years. Nobody’s going to miss it.”
Gwenda herself was wearing this sharp emerald suit for the wedding, totally looking like the no-nonsense lawyer that she was, even if she was as broke as the rest of the family because she specialized in defending people accused of practicing magic. (I’m not talking about big evil-magician-with-electrodes stuff. Just a charm to cure warts or make hair grow, if it worked, the government would come after you.) She usually got them off (she usually managed to prove it was science really) and almost none of them could afford to pay her.
The problem with the green of her suit was the way the shadows seemed to like it. Bugsuck. Also shimatta. (Japanese for “damn.”) They liked my second aunt, Rhonwyn’s, blue dress too, but not as much as the green. Jill was busy twirling and maybe they didn’t like cream and beige and taupe. The pink and maroon in my dress was in panels, plus this lacy pink shawl Jill loaned me to hide that my dress didn’t quite fit (I’m hopeless with needle and thread) and I was telling myself they liked solid colors, although it was probably just that I couldn’t bear thinking of them crawling on me or my best friend. Although I had the feeling there was one particular shadow that was kind of following me around. It writhed along the ground after me. Uggh. If I’m not imagining you, Go. Away.
The shadows were particularly bad that day. I’d figured out by then that the shadows were worse when Val was tensed up about something. He was tense about having dinner at our house that first time. He was majorly tense on his wedding day.
Jill cried. Well, somebody should cry at a wedding, and I wasn’t going to. What bothered me the most—besides Val’s shadows—was that I was beginning to forget what having Dad around had been like. I remembered the loneliness, how tiny and broken our world felt when there were suddenly only three of us. Sometimes it was like there was only two of us because at first, before Tennel & Zeet hired her, Mom was working three part-time jobs and got home late every night. Our poky little suburban three-bedroom house felt enormous when I was the oldest person in it. I still remembered feeling tiny and broken. But I was forgetting Dad.
And now my world was full of shadows.
I was having some of these thoughts for about the six-hundredth time that day when Val turned around and caught my eye and smiled. I wasn’t anything like ready at that moment to be nice to my mother’s new husband and it must have showed on my face—and then Val’s shadows went crazy and I stared straight over his shoulder and I probably twitched or something and I may have taken a step back. Val went so still that that was as eye-catching as the stuff on the wall behind him and I looked back at him and he was staring at me and he wasn’t smiling.