So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition (3 page)

But there was no chance of that, and the knowledge made her feel stupid for lying here crying. Finally she ran out of tears and pushed herself up on her forearms a little to squint painfully around and see where her glasses had gone after Joanne punched her in the eye. They were just a foot or two away, but they looked wrong somehow. Nita reached a hand out to them and picked them up by one earpiece. Her glasses immediately fell apart in two pieces, broken at the nose, and the shattered lenses rained down onto the wet grass in many small sharp pieces.

Nita moaned under her breath. Though her eyesight wasn’t incredibly bad, there was something weird about her eyes that meant she couldn’t have contacts, laser surgery was out of the question till she was older – not that the family could have afforded it – and her complicated prescription made the glasses expensive.
Mom’s gonna kill me so dead,
she thought, and dropped her forehead to her arms again in complete despair, simply not being willing to look at the world right now.

But as she did, underneath her, where it had fallen, the book from the library dug into Nita’s sore ribs. The memory of what she’d been reading suddenly flooded back through her pain and was followed by a wash of wild surmise.
If there are spells to keep things from dying, then I bet there are spells to keep people from hurting you….

Then Nita scowled at herself in contempt for actually believing for a moment what couldn’t possibly be more than an elaborate joke. She put aside thoughts of the book and slowly got up, brushing herself off and discovering some new bruises. She also discovered something else. Her favorite pen was gone. Her space pen, a present from her Uncle Joel, the pen that could write on butter or glass or upside down, her pen with which she had never failed a test, even in math. She patted herself all over, checked the ground, searched in pockets where she knew the pen couldn’t be. No use; it was gone. Or taken, rather—for it had been securely clipped to her front jacket pocket when Joanne and her group jumped her. It must have fallen out, and one of them picked it up.

“Ohh…!” Nita moaned, feeling bitter enough to start crying again. But she was all cried out, and she ached too much, and it was a waste. She stepped around the hedge and limped the little distance home.

Her house was pretty much like any other on the block, a white frame house with fake shutters; but where other houses had their lawns, Nita’s had a beautifully landscaped garden. Ivy carpeted the ground, and the flowerbeds against the house had something blooming in every season except the dead of winter. Nita trudged up the driveway without bothering to smell any of the spring flowers, went up the stairs to the back door, pushed it open, and walked into the kitchen as nonchalantly as she could.

Her mother was elsewhere, but the delicious smells of her cooking filled the place; veal cutlets tonight. Nita peered into the oven, saw potatoes baking, lifted a pot lid and found corn on the cob in the steamer.

Her father looked up from the newspaper he was reading at the dining-room table. He was a big, blunt, good-looking man, with startling silver hair and large capable hands—”an artist’s hands!” he would chuckle as he pieced together a flower arrangement. He owned the smaller of the town’s two flower shops, and he loved his work dearly. He had done all the landscaping around the house in his spare time, and around several neighbors’ houses too, refusing to take anything in return but the satisfaction of being up to his elbows in a flowerbed. Whatever he touched grew. “I have an understanding with the plants,” he would say, and it certainly seemed that way. It was people he sometimes had trouble understanding, and particularly his eldest daughter.

“My Lord, Nita!” her father exclaimed, putting the paper down flat on the table. His voice was shocked. “What happened?”

As if you don’t know!
Nita thought. She could clearly see the expressions going across her father’s face.
My God,
they said,
not again! Why doesn’t she fight back? What’s wrong with her?
He would get around to asking that question at one point or another, and Nita would try to explain it again, and as usual her father would try to understand and would fail. Nita turned away and opened the refrigerator door, peering at nothing in particular, so that her father wouldn’t see the grimace of impatience and irritation on her face. She was tired of the whole ritual, but she had to put up with it. It was as inevitable as being beaten up.

“I was in a fight,” she said, the second verse of the ritual, the second line of the scene. Tiredly she closed the refrigerator door, put the book down on the counter beside the stove, and peeled off her jacket, examining it for rips and ground-in dirt and blood.

“So how many of them did you take out?” her father said, turning his eyes back to the newspaper. His face still showed exasperation and puzzlement, and Nita sighed.
He looks about as tired of this as I am. But really, he
knows
the answers.
“I’m not sure,” Nita said. “There were six of them.”

“Six!” Nita’s mother came around the corner from the living room and into the bright kitchen—danced in, actually. Just watching her made Nita smile sometimes, and it did now, though changing expressions hurt. She had been a dancer before she married Dad, and the grace with which she moved made her every action around the house seem polished, endlessly rehearsed, lovely to look at. She glided with the laundry, floated while she cooked. “Loading the odds a bit, weren’t they?”

“Yeah.” Nita was hurting almost too much to feel like responding to the gentle humor. Her mother caught the pain in her voice and stopped to touch Nita’s face as she passed, assessing the damage and conveying how she felt about it in one brief gesture, without saying anything that anyone else but the two of them might hear.

“No sitting up for you tonight, kidlet,” her mother said. “Bed, and ice on that, before you swell up like a balloon. Look at these marks around your eye, what on earth made those?”

Nita pulled the busted glasses out of her pocket and put them sadly on the counter. Her mother looked at them with dismay.

“Oh, now this is just wrong,” she said softly.
“Nita.
What
is
it with these kids…”

“I couldn’t stop them, mom,” she said. “They think it’s fun to smash my stuff. Remember my MP3 player?”

Her mother sighed and pulled a paper towel off the roll, wrapped the bent frames in them, and slipped them quietly into a drawer. “We’re not going to be able to afford new ones this week,” she said. “Or maybe even next…”

“I can get by,” Nita said. “I’m not blind. Reading’s harder, that’s all…”

“Well, reading won’t be high on your agenda today, I don’t think,” her mom said, putting up a hand to stroke Nita’s hair a little away from her face, and picking a muddy leaf out of it.

Oh please,
Nita thought,
reading’s what I need more than anything just now!
Even without the strangeness of the book she’d brought home, the thought of just being able to retreat from this world into some scenario more ordered and sane, just for a little while, was irresistible. But she wasn’t going to put up a fight and add the you-know-straining-your-eyes-gives-you-headaches element to this situation. Things were bad enough.

“What started it?” her dad asked from the dining room.

“Joanne Virella,” Nita said. “She has a new bike, and I didn’t get as excited about it as she thought I should.”

Nita’s father looked up from the paper again, and this time there was discomfort in his face, and regret: he could clearly hear what she hadn’t said. “Nita,” he said, “I couldn’t afford it, really. Earlier on I was so sure I could get that one you wanted, but you know how things’ve been at the shop lately… I just couldn’t. I
wish
I could have. Next time for sure.”

Nita nodded. “It’s okay,” she said… though it wasn’t. She’d
wanted
that bike, wanted it so badly. But Joanne’s father managed the big chain hardware store on Nassau Road, and
could
afford three-hundred-dollar bikes for his children at the drop of a birthday. Nita’s dad’s business was a lot smaller and prone to what he called (in front of most people) “cash-flow problems” or (at home with the family) “being broke most of the time.”

But what does Joanne care about cash flow, or any of the rest of it? I
wanted
that bike!

“Here, dreamer,” her mother said, tapping her on the shoulder and breaking her thought. She handed Nita an icepack inside a Zip-Loc bag and turned back toward the stove. “Go lie down or you’ll swell worse. I’ll bring you something in a while.”

“Shouldn’t she stay sitting up?” Nita’s father said. “Seems like the fluid would drain better or something.”

“You didn’t get beat up enough when you were younger, Harry,” her mother said. “If she doesn’t lie down and lose some of the tension, she’ll blow up like a balloon. Scoot, Nita.”

She scooted, around the corner into the dining room, around the second corner into the living room, and straight into her little sister, bumping loose the topmost textbook in the small pile she was carrying, and scattering half her armload of pink plastic curlers. Nita bent to help pick things up again. Her sister, bent down beside her, gave Nita just one look and then said under her breath, “Virella again?”

Nita sighed and just nodded. Dairine was eleven years old, redheaded like their mom, gray-eyed like Nita, and precocious; she was taking tenth-grade English courses and breezing through them, and Nita was teaching her some algebra on the side. Dairine had her father’s square-boned build and her mother’s grace, and a perpetual, cocky grin. As far as Nita was concerned Dairine was a great sister, even if she was a little too smart for her own good.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Look out, I’ve gotta go lie down.”

“Want me to beat up Virella for you?”

“Be my guest,” Nita said. She went on through the house, back to her room. Bumping the door open, she fumbled for the light switch and flipped it on. The familiar maps and pictures looked down at her—the
National Geographic
map of the Moon and some enlarged
Voyager
photos of Jupiter and Saturn and their moons.

Nita eased herself down onto the bottom bunk bed, groaning softly—the deep bruises were starting to bother her now.
Oh jeez,
she thought,
what made me say that? If Dari
does
beat Joanne up, I’ll never hear the end of it.
Dairine had once been small and fragile and even more subject to being beaten up than Nita—mostly because she’d never learned to curb her mouth either—so Nita’s parents had sent her to jujitsu lessons at the same time they sent Nita. On Dari, though, the lessons took. About a month and a half after Dairine’s lessons started, one or two overconfident kids had gone after her and had been thoroughly and painfully surprised. These days Dairine was more than confident enough—and protective enough—to willingly take on Joanne and throw her clear over the horizon. Nita covered her eyes at the thought, wincing. The news would be all over school in seconds.
Nita Callahan’s
little sister
beat up the girl who beat
Nita
up
: wait’ll
you see the video!
And the trouble wouldn’t stop there…

Her door opened slightly, and Dari stuck her head in. “Of course,” she said, “if you’d rather do it yourself, I’ll let her off this time.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “thanks.”

Dairine made a face. “Here,” she said, and pitched Nita’s jacket onto the end of the bed, and then right after it chucked the book at her. Nita managed to field it while holding the icepack in place with her other hand. “Left it in the kitchen,” Dairine said. “Gonna be a magician, huh? Make yourself vanish when they chase you?”

“Yeah, right. Go curl your hair.”

When she was gone, Nita sat back against the headboard of the bed, staring at the book.
But why not? If this was
—
if it’s real, who knows what kinds of spells you could do? Maybe I could turn Joanne into a turkey. Like she’s not one already.
She laughed under her breath, though it hurt.
Or maybe there’s a spell for getting lost pens back.

…
Though the book made it sound awfully serious, as if the wizardry were for big things. Maybe it’s not right to do spells for little stuff like this? And anyway, you can’t do the spells until you’ve taken the Oath, and once you’ve taken it, that’s supposed to be forever.

Oh, come on, it’s a
joke!
What harm can there be in saying the words if it’s a joke? And if it’s not, then…

Then I’ll be a wizard.

Her father knocked on her door, then walked in with a plate loaded with dinner and a glass of cola. Nita grinned up at him, not too widely, for moving her face was hurting worse all the time. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Here,” he said after Nita took the plate and the glass, and handed her a couple of aspirin. “Your mother says to take these.”

“Thanks.” Nita took them with the Coke.

Her dad sat down on the end of the bed. “Nita,” he said, “this scene is getting a little too familiar, don’t you think?”

“Huh?”

He looked somewhat lost for words. “Once or twice, sure, this kind of thing can be expected to happen while you’re going through school. Personality conflicts. I had a few when I was your age. But it’s been getting to be a couple times a week, lately. You want me to speak to Joe Virella? Ask him to have a word with Joanne?”

“No!”

Nita’s father stared at his hands for a moment. “Then what am I supposed to do? We can’t let this keep happening. Pretty soon I’ll have no choice but to take it up with the school—”

“No, please
don’t!
It won’t help.”

“Nita. Something has to change. Why does this keep happening? You had the lessons!
Why don’t you hit them back?
”

“I
used
to! You think it made any difference? Joanne just got more kids to help.” Her father gave her a stern look: Nita flushed. “Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. But fighting back just gets them fixated on you. It doesn’t help.”

“It might help keep you from getting mangled every week, if you didn’t give up so fast!” her father said. The anger in her voice surprised her. “We can’t take them on for you, Nita! Don’t you think I wish I could? I hate to admit it, but I’d enjoy seeing
somebody
give that obnoxious rich kid a taste of her own medicine…”