Crystal Caves

by Grayson, Kristine

  “Yes,” I say. Even if they’re annoying in person, I miss that. I really, really miss that.

  My eyes start filling with tears, and that pisses me off more than anything.

  No. Wait. The fact that Megan would know that my eyes are filling with tears even if I turn away from her pisses me off even more.

  I don’t like Megan, I really don’t. I don’t like how she makes me feel. I don’t like how she pushes, and I don’t like that she makes me angry.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  Veronica tells me that her shrink always asks “What are you feeling?” and some of the other girls with shrinks agree that feeling is the word shrinks usually use, not thinking. But Megan knows what I’m feeling, and not what I’m thinking, and thinking is the only thing that I can keep (somewhat) private.

  “It’s none of your damn business,” I say, then realize how childish that sounds.

  “Crystal, when you’re in this room, your business is my business.”

  “And you won’t tell anyone what I say and blah, blah, blah.” I stand up. “I don’t care. I really don’t.”

  Tears are running down my face, but maybe if I don’t wipe them off, she won’t notice.

  “I miss my family. All of my family. I miss my home. I miss my room. I miss my sisters. I miss my life. And I left it because of you.”

  She hasn’t stood up, so I’m looming over her, but she doesn’t seem freaked out about that. Most people hate it when someone stands over them.

  She just folds her hands over her round little tummy and says, “You agreed to leave. You thought it was a good idea.”

  “I did not,” I say. “I didn’t want to go.”

  “You said you did.” Megan is so calm. I hate that she’s so calm. She should be mad too. “All I can go on is what you say—”

  “In this stupid room, I know,” I say. “But I wasn’t in this room. I was in Lost Angeles with Tiff and Brit and Daddy and you, and everyone wanted me to leave and live with Mother, except me, and I thought, how bad can it be—and you have no idea!”

  “You’re right,” Megan says. “I have no idea. Why don’t you sit down and tell me?”

  “That they hate me? That my little brothers make fun of me? That I don’t understand this place? That I want to go home? What else can I tell you? I don’t want to be here.”

  She sighs ever so softly, and says, “You promised you’d stay until the winter holidays.”

  “And then what?” I’m yelling now. I hope that makes her happy. It doesn’t make me happy, but I don’t know how to stop. So I start walking the length of the little room, and it takes all of my strength to keep my thumbs hooked on the pockets of my jeans. Because if my thumbs aren’t hooked, then I’ll slap those stupid plants to the floor and kick the pots.

  “Then we can talk—”

  “I’m already out of magic,” I say. “I didn’t want that either. And you all are going to make me wait to get it back until I’m really old. Older than Mother is now. That’s just not fair.”

  And in my head, I hear Danny’s voice, mimicking Owen, Fair is in July—whatever that means. Half the stuff in this town means nothing to me and the other half is just plain confusing.

  Megan sighs really loud this time. “I know you’re unhappy—”

  “Unhappy?” I ask. “Unhappy? Try miserable. I didn’t agree to this. Fix it.”

  “I can’t,” she says. “You gave your word you would try this. That binds you. It’s only a few months, and then we all get together and talk, and I would hope that this time you speak up—”

  “A few months.” I run my hand through my hair. It’s so full of gel that the strands stick together, and I wish I hadn’t done that. I almost—almost—slap a pot to the ground, but part of my brain knows better. “I don’t know if I’ll make it a few months.”

  “You’re strong, Crystal,” Megan says. “You’ll make it. Let’s see what we can do to get your mother to come—”

  “She’s never coming,” I say. “She hates anything to do with me. She thinks talking about feelings is stupid.”

  Megan opens her mouth, and I know what she’s going to say, and if she says it, I’ll throw one of the plants at her, I will.

  And as I have that thought, she closes her mouth, and nods, like some queen beckoning me to continue.

  “And she thinks you’re stupid and she thinks anything to do with Daddy is stupid and she’s decided magic doesn’t exist even though someday she’ll be magical, and she’s also decided that every time she goes to Mount Olympus someone drugs her and lies to her or hypnotizes her so there’s no talking to her, besides, she’s like this Really Important Person who doesn’t have time for her real kids, let alone me, and—”

  “Her real kids?” Megan asks. She would jump on that, because it’s the least important thing I said.

  “Ethan and Danny and Fabian and Gordon. Her real kids. Me, I’m just the mistake,” I say, and as I do, I calm down just a little. Facts are calming, even if they’re ugly facts.

  “She’s said that to you?” Megan actually sounds shocked.

  “And everyone else,” I say. “Hasn’t she said it to you?”

  Megan shakes her head. “I’ll call her. I’ll get her here next week.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say. “There’s a better chance of sending me home than there is of you seeing Mother again. Tell you what. You get her to come here and have a session, and then I’ll come back, okay?”

  “No,” Megan says. “You gave your word that you would do this every week. It’s one of the things all three of you agreed to. You have a lot to work out—”

  “And our mothers agreed too, didn’t they?” I ask. “And part of what we’re supposed to do is work with them. Well, if I’m not worth working with, then I don’t need to be the only one doing the work. I—”

  “You’re not,” Megan says, and now she stands up. She’s giving off her I think we should hug vibe. I ignore it. “I agreed to work with you too.”

  “Whoopee ding,” I say. “You just judge me and ask stupid questions. You’re not working with me. No one is working with me. I’m done.”

  “Crystal—”

  I raise my hands so she doesn’t have to keep talking to me anymore. I back away, and then I walk from the room with as much dignity as I can manage.

  Megan just makes me miserable, and Mother’s not trying, and I can’t talk to Tiff and Brit, and I can’t go home, so why should I even play this game anymore? If no one else is trying, why should I?

  I slam my way out of the office, then take the stairs because the elevator will make me feel like I’m in a cage.

  I burst onto the street filled with honking and people walking by and construction noise. Nobody cares here either. One guy in a suit gives me a startled look, then walks around me, but no one else looks at all.

  I take a deep breath. The air tastes like exhaust and burned coffee, nothing like the fresh air from home.

  Where I can’t go for months and months.

  I’m on my own.

  I just have to figure out what I want to do next.

  FOUR

  I WALK DOWN the streets of New York. The buildings tower over me, and cars zoom by. People stream in clumps from one traffic light to the next.

  I learned traffic first, then lights, then how to negotiate all of it—the people, the cars, the sheer noise. I can’t tune it out, although Veronica says I will after a while, but I don’t have to pay attention to every shout, every honk, every banging door any more.

  I keep my chin up and don’t make eye contact, weaving around people like they’re moving statutes.

  I have a credit card. I could just get a hotel room, or I could figure out how airplanes work and fly to Tiff or Brit and hang out there, maybe move in with one of them. (Oh, yeah, that would work. Because they’d just call Megan, or their moms would throw me out or something, because we all gave our words, like that means something.)

  I walk past th
e big complex that’s Lincoln Center, with the confusing traffic circle and the subway entrance right in the middle of all of that, and think of giving it all the finger (because Agatha says that’s a New York thing to do, giving everything and everyone you want to diss the finger), but I don’t. It’s not Lincoln Center’s fault that it’s become a thing for me.

  It’s my brothers’ fault for making fun of me because I don’t know New York landmarks. My half brothers. No one in my family is a full anything. My half brothers have full siblings, but I don’t. I’m the product of a one-night stand (or maybe a one-week fling—Mother won’t tell me, exactly, and Daddy can’t remember), and the only way Mother knew I was Daddy’s girl was the magic that sparked from my fingers in the delivery room itself.

  Daddy showed up right after that. I had apparently tried to turn the entire delivery room into a womb (Hey! Daddy had famously said [at least according to Mother]. Smart kid. She knows what she wants.) Mother was anxious and terrified and not willing to raise a magical daughter on her own, particularly since back then, E’s father was making noises about revisiting custody, and so Mother just gave me to Daddy without asking many questions.

  Daddy, apparently, had to insist that Mother visit me every year so I would get to know the mortal side of my family. At least, that’s the story he told Megan. Mother has no idea. She just knew that visiting Greece—well, Mount Olympus—once a year was the requirement of getting me out of her daily life, so she jumped at it.

  I feel sick. My stomach aches and my shoulders feel like rocks. All the road grit and crap in the air make my eyes tear up. At least, that’s what I would tell someone if someone was walking with me. But the only people walking with me are the ones I’m carrying in my imagination.

  I stop by the big statue of some guy named Columbus as cars drive in circles around me. My heart always pounds here, because it feels very modern and confusing and dangerous, traffic going in circles, and people trying to get to the subway entrance and people trying to cross.

  I know if I can get into Central Park, the noise will ease (a little) and I’ll calm down just a bit, but I hate standing here, surrounded by the traffic, which almost seems like those monsters my family fought in the stupid myths everyone tells about them. I’ll take a minotaur any day over traffic roaring around a circle, with more traffic behind me.

  It’s not that far from the circle to the park entrance, but it always feels scary to me. Maybe because the city is weirdly open here—with lots of choices. You can go to the building with the globe in front of it (some famous guy’s hotel) or you can go to the TV studio for CNN (which I’d even heard of before I got here) or you can go to some apartments or other tall buildings that E tried to explain to me once. And then there’s Lincoln Center, the Center of All Culture according to Danny, and across from it all Central Park, which I had heard of before I got to New York; I just didn’t know what it was.

  And I didn’t know how it was the only place I’d feel halfway comfortable. If I could get across traffic.

  The light changes and I sprint, because I don’t want to be near those cars ever, and I stop near this gigandous monument, which I kinda love, maybe because it reminds me of home.

  You see, I’m the one who told E that the gold creatures pulling the seashell chariot on the top of the monument (which we had to stand waaaaaaay back to look at) were hippocampi. He’d never heard of them. Danny looked them up on his phone and said, as snotty as Gordon could be, Why don’t you just call them seahorses? Jeez. But they’re not seahorses. They’re Greek. The statues aren’t of my family—there’s someone called Columbia and someone called Peace—but they look like they’re of my family, like the stuff you see in Greece (the real Greece) all the time. Except for the big tall brick-like box thing.

  Still, I look at the Maine memorial as a little bit of home, although I think if you need a memorial to a ship in the middle of the city, the memorial should have my uncle Poseidon riding through it somewhere.

  I go to a nearby food cart and get a knish. I’ve fallen in love with the food in this city, which is a problem, considering how Mother wants me to control everything I eat. But as I get ready to pay for the knish—which is spinach, because it, y’know, pretends at healthy—I realize I don’t have to care what Mother thinks. I order a potato knish too, and I take them, plus a bottle of water, to a bench across from the monument.

  I sit a little sideways, so I’m looking at mostly monument instead of mostly traffic. The park’s behind me, and the air smells of falling leaves. It’s not really fall yet, but it will be soon, and everyone’s warning me that it’ll get really cold here in the winter, too cold for my Mediterranean blood.

  Maybe I won’t be here in the winter. Maybe I’ll be somewhere else.

  I’m trapped here, but if Mother’s not following the rules, I don’t have to either. I mean, what’s Megan going to do to me? Empath me to death? Her magic doesn’t have lightning bolts or big magic tricks or anything. She can’t hurt me.

  No one can, not with magic. Not here.

  Ignorance might hurt me, though. I really don’t know this place.

  I bite into the potato knish. The potatoes and onions steam out of the fried dough, and some fall on my jeans. Instead of brushing the food off like I was taught by one of the au pairs, I eat it, then wipe my hands on the napkin that came in the greasy little bag the street vendor had given me.

  New York’s not that bad if I have to hole up somewhere. There’s a million great hotels, and no one would have to know why I was there. I wouldn’t have to go to school, and—

  I shiver. If I don’t go to school, what would I do? I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. I actually am making a place at school. I’ve got friends, even if they aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy, and they can’t finish my sentences like Tiff and Brit. My friends are at least helpful, and they’ve done more to keep me alive in this city than anyone at my mother’s house.

  I look over at the hotel with the globe. The hotel’s name is emblazoned across the front. For a long time, I thought the “trump” in the name was bragging. Like, you’ve trumped someone else for being in that hotel. I said that to Melanie and she laughed at me and corrected me, telling me the hotel is owned by some guy named Trump and he puts his name on everything, and it is kinda like bragging and trumping only really déclassé. I actually had to look up that word on my phone, and I decided I liked it. I could achieve a really snotty tone, and say everyone was déclassé.

  That hotel is supposed to be really fancy. All of the hotels around the park are. There are good hotels in Manhattan and “fleabags” according to Veronica, which I guess have fleas or something. The fleabags are dangerous and cheap and for tourists only. I know there are hotel sites on the web where I could look all this stuff up, because I’ve seen them advertised. (I’ve been watching too much TV, and Tiff is wrong: you don’t learn everything from TV, just enough to get by, kinda.)

  Maybe I won’t go home. Maybe I’ll just march over to Trump whatever and give them my credit card and run up a big bill. I imagine it for a minute, going home every night to some fancy room…with a TV and room service…and it wouldn’t be that different from the apartment, except it wouldn’t have the staff and the stupid boys.

  I sigh. I’d be even lonelier in the hotel.

  I finish the first knish and am too full to start the second. But I want it, and Mother would hate it if I get fatter, and to hell with her, and I eat it, licking my fingers when I’m done. I feel a little queasy, but I also feel triumphant.

  I have a really nice room and some friends, and I have to stay here until we all meet for the winter holidays. I know Tiff and Brit would be mad at me if I show up at their places, and their mothers would have fits if I sent plane tickets or something to some other city where we could all meet. I mean, if the mothers got mad at iPhones, imagine how they’d feel about paid vacations?

  I could run away all on my own, like those heroines in the movies, the ones who seem stronger b
ecause they have adventures. I could take my magic credit card, and go all over the country, and do good or just see how different America is in real life than it is on TV.

  Mother would be fried—at least, once someone told her I ran away. She’d probably be relieved too. It would be the excuse she needed to disown me.

  And when she disowned me, she’d cut off my magic credit card.

  I let out a breath of knishy air. I have a room, I have friends sort of, and I have unlimited money.

  If I don’t try to impress Mother and if I ignore Megan, I might be able to stick it out until the winter holidays.

  That feels like a real decision, one I’ve made all on my own, maybe for the first time in my life.

  And instead of feeling good, it feels…scary. My heart’s pounding like I’ve run a race or something, and I want to look over my shoulder to see if someone was watching me while I was sitting here thinking.

  Or if someone has read my mind—or my emotions.

  I glance around looking for Megan, but she didn’t follow me to the park. Which is good, because I’d’ve given her what-for if she had.

  She’s not part of my life anymore.

  I’m just going to hang on and pretend to be the perfect daughter at Mother’s (whatever that means), the perfect student at school (if I can), and the perfect friend to M, V, & A.

  I’ll do what I have to do to survive.

  FIVE

  MY RESOLVE MAKES it all the way to dinner. Which, Tiff would say, was longer than she would have expected.

  Me, I expected to stay resolved for the rest of my life. Brit would probably have said (nicely, because Brit’s usually nice) that my expectations of myself are always unrealistic.

  Megan would’ve added that I let my sisters define me, even when they’re not here. And then I have to remind myself that I’m not going to think about Megan ever again.