Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Whatever the case, here she was, sitting in the middle of the living room, talking a mile a minute and dominating everything, the way she liked to do. “And I told him that he wasn’t going to take me by surprise like that,” she was saying to Kit’s mama, “and he said to me, ‘Oh, really? Well, we’ll see how you do on the exam.’ And I just laughed at him! I mean, he never—”

Kit leaned over the chair nearest the dining room, And Helena caught the motion: her head turned, and she took him in. “Kit!” she said. “My god, Kit, look at you!”

She jumped up and practically leaped on him to hug him. Then she held him away from her. “You are six inches taller!”

“Seven,” Kit said. “Making up for lost time.”

Helena laughed and mussed his hair, then let him go and collapsed into the middle of the floor again. Kit tried to put his hair in order without making too much of an issue out of it, as there were few things he hated more than this particular gesture of sisterly affection. “How’ve you been doing?” Helena said. “You done with school yet?”

“On Tuesday.”

“That’s so great!” Helena said. And she glanced around. “Hey, where’s—” Then she stopped herself, and her face fell. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said. “I was going to ask you where Ponch was.”

“It’s okay,” Kit said.

“I’m so sorry about him,” Helena said, the laundry she was sorting momentarily forgotten in her hands. “It’s like he was here forever. It’s so weird with him gone…”

“I know,” Kit said. His mother hadn’t given Helena all the details, simply telling her that Ponch had “been in an accident,” which was true as far as it went.

“How are you doing?” Helena looked into his eyes as if that would be enough to tell her what she wanted to know.

Kit flashed briefly on the princess’s eyes, then turned his mind purposefully away from that subject. “I’m okay. Getting ready to kick back a little over the summertime.”

“Yeah,” Helena said, and paused, as if there was something else she could have said but was having second thoughts about. “So am I. You heard about the craziness, I guess…”

“Mela told me a little.”

Helena sighed. “Yeah,” she said, “so much for my poor broken heart.” But to Kit it didn’t sound all that broken. “Back to playing the field.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Carmela said, “considering the twelve million phone calls you’ve had this morning…”

“Oh, you know how it is,” Helena said. “Everybody wants to be in touch all of a sudden when they hear you’ve been dumped! It’s nice of them, but they’re all ‘Oh, my god, why aren’t you crushed?’ And I just have to keep saying, ‘It’s all right; I saw it coming; it’s not like I’ve been run over by a truck! There are a million other fish in the sea, yada yada yada…’”

Kit’s mama glanced at him with a resigned expression as Helena kept talking. There had been some joking in the family when mama had complained about the house getting “too quiet” when Helena went off to school. It’s not that Mela’s not talkative, Kit thought. But at least when she talks, she says something.

“Let me get rid of these before they pile up,” Kit’s mama said, coming into the middle of the room to pick up some of the laundry. “You want me to start these up?”

“Sure, mama. On delicate!” Helena shouted after her as she left the room.

“Delicate, sure…”

“You ever do any laundry at school?” Kit said. “Or have you been saving it up till you got back?”

Helena sniffed, that specific sound of scorn that made Kit realize suddenly how long it had been since he’d heard it. “Huh,” Helena said, amused. She craned her neck, looking up and past him, hearing the sound of Kit’s mama going downstairs to put the laundry in the washer.

“Look,” she said, in a lower tone. “While you’re here, there’s just something I wanted to clear up.”

Kit swung around and sat down in the chair he’d been leaning on. He thought he knew what was coming and was now wondering whether it would be smarter to just cut and run. But this was his sister, not some monster from another world. Theoretically.

“When I was home last, I was giving you a hard time about, you know.” Helena winced. “The weird things you were doing.”

Kit wasn’t sure where she was going with this and didn’t want to accidentally help her in the wrong direction. “And?”

“Well.” She straightened up, let go of the present piece of laundry, and sat there with her hands clasped in her lap, staring down at them as if they were unusually interesting. “For a while, before I went off to school, I was really worried about you, Kit. Seriously worried. I thought you were… you know.”

The Spawn of Satan? Kit thought. In league with the Forces of Darkness? But he said nothing out loud. If Helena was finally seeing sense, he wasn’t going to derail her.

“But I spent a while thinking about it, and finally I started to understand. I can’t believe it took me as long as it did, but you know how it can be, you hit something that you can’t really get to grips with, and you back away and dance all around it? Till you realize that maybe you misunderstood the situation from the very beginning. And once I understood that you weren’t doing anything, you know, evil, then it was all right. I just didn’t understand. I do now.”

And Helena looked at him with an expression of not just understanding, but— bizarrely— pity. “Why didn’t you just tell me that you’re a mutant?”

Kit sat perfectly still.

That… I’m… a what??

He turned slowly to Carmela, who was still sprawled on the couch, though she’d now propped herself up on one elbow to observe the proceedings. “Please tell her I am not a mutant,” Kit said, a lot more calmly than he needed to.

Carmela’s eyes glittered with mischief. “I don’t know,” she said. “It would explain a lot.”

It was more than Kit could bear, as it always had been when his sisters ganged up on him. There was something intrinsically unfair in having two of them who were older and more in control than he was. He still had the photo of the time when he was four and they’d all been playing soldiers, and Carmela had stuck a saucepan on his head, telling him it was a helmet. Then Helena had snuck up on them to take the photo, one Kit’s mom thought was incredibly cute and refused to get rid of. No one seemed to care that Kit winced every time he saw the thing, and the thought of some friend from school somehow seeing it occasionally kept him up at night. Unfortunately, even with extensive usage of wizardry, he had never been able to locate the negative.

And now here again was one of his sisters trying to saddle him with another image that was going to stick for years if he didn’t do something now. “I,” Kit said, “am not… a mutant!!”

“But you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Helena said with some compassion as she grabbed an armload of the laundry scattered around her and stood up. “It’s all right: I understand now.” As she headed out of the room, Helena paused by the chair, looking down at him affectionately, and mussed his hair again. “I can cope with you being a mutant,” Helena said. “Actually, it’s kind of cool. So don’t worry: your secret’s safe with me.”

And she went after their mama. “Mama? Did you start it yet? Don’t start it yet!”

Kit stood staring after her, openmouthed and fuming. Then he rounded on Carmela. “Are you going to let her get away with that?”

“Are you?” Carmela said.

Kit let out a long breath, thinking. Infuriating as Helena’s new attitude was, it was possibly preferable to the way she’d been acting when she thought that Kit’s wizardry meant he’d sold his soul to the devil. He shook his head. “But it’s not true!”