Rob whirls his fingers, and in front of him, a hole opens in the air. The dining room of the Johnson Family Manse appears, only just a little smaller, like we’re watching through a bubble-shaped TV screen.
Mom gasps.
I put my arm around her, as much to hold her back as to comfort her.
Hilde sits at the table, playing with her Barbies.
I don’t know, she whispers. She didn’t say bye or nothing. Did you see her—?
Then my voice, Are you worried about Mom?’
Mom jerks beside me as Hilde nods.
Would it make you feel better if I go get her? The images back up enough that I’m visible now. I am willowy, like Clotho. I had no idea.
I’m so focused on how much I look like both Clotho and Mom, I miss the next bit. Then Hilde runs at me and wraps herself around me. I look like a sturdy tree, but the expression on my face is one of complete shock.
Then I crouch in front of her. It’s okay. I promise I’ll bring her back safe.
Without the scary ladies? Hilde asks.
I freeze. Would the Fates know she means them?
I can’t glance at them, but Daddy does, as if he knows what Hilde means.
Without the scary ladies, I say to Hilde and I sound really calm.
Thank you, Hilde whispers, but the whisper sounds really loud in this quiet library.
You’re welcome, I say to her. I love you, Hilde.
She smiles at me. It’s a serious smile, and I missed it the first time. I missed how lovely it is, how precious.
Love you too, Brit, she says, and then the entire scene winks out, as if someone shut off the TV.
“Empath.” That single word, uttered by Clotho, echoes in the library.
Megan starts. “Yes?”
“Were you there when that child spoke?” Lachesis asks.
“Yes,” Megan says.
“Is it true?” Atropos asks. “Does that child love Brittany?”
“Yes,” Megan says. “Very much.”
“And does Brittany love her?” Clotho asks, not looking at me.
“Yes,” Megan says.
“And you, Karin Johnson,” Lachesis says. “Do you love Brittany?”
“Oh, my stars, yes,” Mom says. “More than you’ll ever know.”
“Is that true, Empath?” Atropos asks Megan.
“Yes.” Megan stands very straight, as if she realizes now that she’s testifying in some kind of court.
“Do you love Brittany?” Clotho asks Daddy.
“Yes,” he says firmly.
My breath catches. Really? He does?
“Empath,” Lachesis says, “is this true?”
“No,” Megan says.
Daddy takes a step toward her, hand raised. Rob raises his hand to stop Daddy, and the Fates snap their fingers in unison.
“No one shall use magic to harm anyone in this library,” Atropos says. “Is that clear?”
Rob lets his arm drop. “I was protecting my wife.”
“So noted,” Clotho says.
Daddy growls. “That woman—”
“Shut up, Zeus,” Lachesis says. “You had your chance.”
“We have asked a question of the empath,” Atropos says.
“So, Zeus doesn’t love Brittany?” Clotho asks.
There’s a lump in my throat. Mom slides her hand through my arm, as if she can sense my distress.
“I don’t think he loves anyone,” Megan says. “I don’t think he understands it. I’m not even sure he loves himself.”
“You don’t know anything about gods, Empath,” Daddy says.
Megan shrugs. “I may not,” she says. “But I can sense your emotions, and you’re pretty lacking on the love side of the equation.”
“Harsh,” Lachesis says to Clotho.
“Indeed,” Atropos says to Lachesis.
“If you do not love Brittany,” Clotho says to Daddy, “why do you want to save her from this place she lives in now?”
“She’s my daughter,” Daddy says. “No one treats my daughter like that.”
“Except you,” I say.
“Shush, child,” Lachesis says, but not harshly.
“Unfortunately,” Atropos says, “we have already ruled.”
My stomach clenches. Mom’s hand digs into the soft skin of my upper arm.
“But,” Clotho says, “we did not gavel down the ruling.”
“You, Brittany, may choose which life you prefer,” Lachesis says.
I don’t even have to think about it. “I want to go with Mom.”
“You may take your magic with you,” Atropos says. “You have earned it.”
“You mean I can practice magic again?” I ask. “I don’t have to wait for it?”
“That is correct,” Clotho says.
I glance around the library, at the millions of books that I haven’t read yet, and I think about all the rules I don’t understand.
My muscles still ache from lifting those boxes and the area above my left knee is bruised from the force with which Hilde hit it when she hugged me.
I bite my lower lip.
I’ve missed my magic, but in the wrong ways. I only want it to make my life easier or to irritate someone who has irritated me. My mom doesn’t have magic—yet, anyway—and she’s doing okay.
“Thank you,” I say, and everyone in the room relaxes at the same time. “But I’m not ready for magic.”
“What?” Daddy asks. “You can’t live without magic.”
“She has for three months,” Mom says to him.
“I can live without it just fine,” I say. “I’d like to stick to the plan.”
“You only have one chance at this,” Lachesis says. “We shall not make this offer again.”
“I know,” I say.
“Empath,” Atropos says, “is she making this decision calmly?”
“Yes.” Megan sounds surprised. “She is.”
“Then it is so,” Clotho says.
“We have ruled,” Lachesis says.
“Our decision shall stand from this moment forward,” Atropos says.
“Now,” Clotho says, “leave us.”
“Go back to your lives,” Lachesis says.
The Fates clap their hands, and the library vanishes.
Again.
FIFTEEN
MOM AND I tumble into the living room. Mom falls flat on the couch, and I trip over the rug, catching myself on the armchair. Pixie, who was asleep in the chair, bolts straight upright and flees toward the stairs.
Beauregard backs into the dining room and barks.
“Are you all right?” Mom asks.
I nod. “Are you?”
“I will be.” She gets up and puts her arms around me. “Thank you.”
I lean into her hug. “I hope you don’t mind that I’m staying.”
“Mind?” She pushes back from me and looks me in the face. There are frown lines around her eyes. “I love having you here, Brit. I’m sorry that we’re not treating you well.”
“You’re treating me just fine,” I say. “Really. I wouldn’t have come back otherwise.”
“Hey!” Ivan shouts from the stairs. “They’re home!”
“Shhh.” Karl steps into the living room from the kitchen. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
Mom gives him a look that I guess means I’ll talk to you later. “What time is it?” she asks.
“After eight,” Karl says.
“You missed dinner,” Ivan says.
“And I promised Hilde you’d wake her up when you got home,” I say to Mom.
Mom smiles at me, then kisses me on the forehead. “I do love you, you know.”
“I know,” I say.
“Bet you’re hungry.” Ivan has made it down the rest of the stairs in record time. “Dad saved dinner for you. We had pizza.”
“You splurged,” Mom says to Karl as she heads toward the stairs.
“It’s been a weird day,” Karl says.
“Yeah,�
�� I say. Then I remember the phone. “Mom, wait.”
She stops at the base of the stairs.
“Daddy, um, destroyed—you know that phone you gave me?” I look at Karl. “My father showed up at work today, and broke it.”
“Your father?” Karl asks, but he’s not looking at me. He’s looking at Mom. And he’s looking worried.
“You said it was a weird day,” Mom says to him. “You were right.”
“I’ll pay for the phone,” I say. “I have a job now, and I owe you, and—”
“We’ll get your father to pay for the phone,” Karl says.
“When pigs fly,” Mom says. Then she laughs. “Which might be sooner than we all think.”
She puts her hand on the railing and pulls herself onto the first step. She looks as tired as I feel.
“Don’t worry about it right now, Brittany,” Karl says. “Your mother and I will decide how to handle it.”
I blink hard, expecting tears at the kindness, but no tears come—not because I’m unnaturally calm, but because I don’t feel the need to cry right now.
Old habits might die hard, but they do die.
But not all habits should die.
“Do you think it’s okay if I call my sisters?” I ask Karl.
“After seeing your father?” Karl asks, and I tense. He smiles. “I would think it’s absolutely necessary. Use the phone in our room. You need quiet.”
“Thank you,” I say.
I have to stop at my room—my closet—because I haven’t memorized my sisters’ phone numbers. I hurry down the hall and pull open the door.
My bed is messy, because I didn’t make it well that morning, and my favorite sweater has fallen on the floor. I’ve never seen any place that looks nicer.
I grin at it, then rummage in my top drawer for the address book that Mom made me start.
I stop for a second and close my eyes, enjoying how it feels to be here. Enjoying my cramped personal space, right next to the busy bathroom.
Enjoying the voices of my family, having a loud discussion in the living room.
Enjoying the look of surprise on Orange’s face. He was asleep on the bed until I opened the door all the way. Apparently, my room is his hideout too.
Me and the cat.
I grin at him.
“It’s the best room in the house, isn’t it?” I ask him.
He squints at me.
“Shh,” I say. “Don’t tell anyone else. They’ll want one just like it.”
Maybe I’ll tell Karl to stop building me a special room. Maybe I’ll stay here until college, whenever that will be.
I have to focus on it.
Like I have to focus on my job. On the play. On school.
And on my family. My Wisconsin family—and my sisters.
I have a hunch my Greek family will take care of itself.
Because it always does.
I have no idea what the Fates are going to do to Daddy, but I have a hunch it won’t be pretty. And, as I think about it, I don’t really care either.
He’s had his chance with me. I hate the way he treated Mom. I don’t like the way he treated me and Tiff and Crystal either.
And I don’t have to deal with him anymore.
I find the address book with the precious phone numbers, and hurry toward Mom and Karl’s room.
I can’t wait to talk to my sisters. They’ll understand what I just went through. And maybe they’ll tell me about everything they went through too.
Because even though we’re far apart, we’re still close. Like the Fates. Only without the talking in order, the stupid library, and all the responsibility.
We get to grow up and make our own lives.
And I like that—more than I can say.
If you enjoyed the Interim Fates Trilogy, you might also enjoy the series that introduced the Interim Fates, the Fates Trilogy. Following is a sample chapter from the first book in the Fates Trilogy, Simply Irresistible.
ONE
“WHY DO ALL superheroes have to look like Superman?” Vivian Kinneally asked as she studied the interior of her nephew’s comic book. She was sitting on the stoop outside her apartment building, her eleven-year-old nephew Kyle beside her.
The sun cast its warm rays on the concrete steps and illuminated Kyle’s latest hand-drawn effort. In the week that Vivian had lived in Portland, the sun had been out every day. She had no idea how the city had gotten its rainy, gloomy reputation.
“He doesn’t look like Superman,” Kyle said, craning his neck over the double-page spread that rested on Vivian’s knees.
“Yes, he does.” Viv traced the hero’s chin, feeling the pen marks beneath her finger. “See? He’s got the same lantern jaw that Siegel and Shuster gave the original in 1938. He’s even got the dimple in his chin.”
She loved that dimple. She had always thought—and never admitted aloud—that the Siegel and Shuster Superman, the original, was the handsomest man she had ever seen. Even if he was only a creation of paper and pen.
“Superman doesn’t have a dimple,” Kyle said.
“Sure he does.” Vivian smiled at her nephew. Kyle was thin and bookish, his round glasses sliding to the bottom of his nose. His fingers were stained with ink, and the fleshy side of his palm had traces of the red he’d used to color the book. “Take a look, especially in the first thirty years or so, before he got associated with Christopher Reeve.”
“I didn’t want my character to look like Superman,” Kyle said. “Spider-Man doesn’t look like Superman.”
Kyle wrapped his arms around his waist and leaned forward, extending his Nike-covered feet down three steps. Vivian’s brother, Travers, kept Kyle dressed like the athlete he would never be. Vivian wondered how Kyle would do now that she had relocated here.
“Actually,” Vivian said, “they all look like Superman. They have to. They need the muscles and the strong chin. Could you imagine wearing one of those costumes if you had a weak chin? You’d look like—”
“Michael Keaton in Batman,” Kyle said before she could. She’d made that argument before.
“You said you wanted to know what I thought,” she said.
“After you’ve read it,” Kyle said. “I think this one is really different.”
Vivian smiled at him. Kyle’s greatest dream was to become a comic book writer. Travers said that was her fault. Vivian had the most extensive comic book collection of anyone she knew—and she knew a lot of comic book fans (although most of them weren’t twenty-seven year-old women).
When she was a kid, comic books had been her escape. In them, she found people with secret identities and super powers, mutants who decided to fight on the side of all that was good and right. She had a super power too, although she had never thought of it as that, at least not when she was growing up. Then it had simply been something else that marked her as different.
She hated being different so much. She was teased by her peers. She used to look at the superheroes and daydream that someday she would meet one, and he would sweep her off her feet.
She could even imagine the panel art: an entire page with Superman or Batman or some other square-jawed (and dimple-chinned) superhero with a cape, carrying her in his arms.
Vivian slid her own round glasses up her nose and stared at Kyle’s art. He was spectacular for someone his age. There was a confidence to his work that most young artists lacked. His stories were still derivative, but she knew that originality took time—and Kyle had plenty of time.
She raised her head, seeing if she got a sense of her brother Travers. She was psychic, and there were some people she was particularly attuned to. Her brother Travers was one of them. So was her younger sister Megan. And, until a few weeks ago, Vivian had been attuned to her Aunt Eugenia too.
“You okay, Aunt Viv?” Kyle asked.
The family question. Everyone was always worried whether Vivian was all right. It had started before she could even remember. She would say things or get a funny look, and e
veryone would panic. Then, at thirteen, she’d started to black out, and her parents had taken her to specialist after specialist to see if there was some physical cause.
Then her Aunt Eugenia had come to visit. Mysterious, wealthy Aunt Eugenia, whose age no one knew and whose exact relationship to Vivian’s mother was unclear as well. Vivian’s grandmother once said that Eugenia wasn’t a blood relation at all, but a close, close friend who had wormed her way into the family’s hearts through deeds of goodness.
With family members who talked like that, was it any wonder that Vivian had fallen in love with comic books?
She smiled.
“Aunt Vivian?” Kyle was peering at her, his face owlish in the bright light.
“I’m all right,” she said, the words so familiar she didn’t have to think about them.
Aunt Eugenia had told the family that Vivian’s blackouts were normal, that her power was growing stronger. Vivian’s mother had gotten upset over the use of the word power until Aunt Eugenia made Vivian’s mother admit what she had always feared about her daughter—that Vivian had an amazing psychic talent, a talent that seemed to be growing worse (or better, depending on one’s perspective).
The blackouts faded once Vivian hit high school, but by then, she was the weird kid. She wore glasses, she had been too skinny, and she had passed out all through middle school. Sometimes she blurted out things that other kids had only been thinking, and eventually they all stayed away from her.
Vivian put her arm around Kyle. He was going to face that horrible world in a few years. There was nothing worse than middle school, especially for a sensitive kid.
“Dad’s coming, isn’t he?” Kyle asked, looking down the street. This was a side street downtown, with a great view of the mountains, rivers, and bridges, and the added benefit of very little traffic.
“I don’t sense him yet,” Vivian said.
Travers had taken the car into the local Jiffy Lube to make certain it was ready for the long drive home. When he returned, he expected Kyle to be ready to leave.
Travers wanted to stay with Vivian—and Kyle had argued for it—but they had other obligations. School was starting next week, and Travers had enrolled Kyle in some expensive gifted and talented program that no one had even imagined yet in Oregon. Kyle was heading home, and Vivian didn’t argue with the decision.
Brittany Bends Page 15
