Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“The more you tell her so,” Carmela said, “the more she’s going to think you’re in denial. And she’s just going to feel more sorry for you. She might even start worrying again.”

Kit rolled his eyes. If worrying were an Olympic event, Helena would have effortlessly qualified for any U.S. team. “You’ve told her the truth now,” Carmela said. “Isn’t that enough? Isn’t honor satisfied?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Kit,” Carmela said. “Let her be. Let her think her life’s actually the way she wishes it was. Don’t make her follow you places she’s just not built to go.” His sister’s voice was suddenly full of not only disappointment, but a pity entirely different from Helena’s.

“But you’re going to follow me there?” Kit said.

Carmela raised her eyebrows. “‘Follow’?” she said, and grinned. “Like I follow people! ‘Chase,’ maybe.” She stretched, then got up off the couch and started picking up more of the scattered laundry.

“Yeah,” Kit said quietly. “Okay.” He got up, too, and started helping her, and a few moments later the two of them followed Helena downstairs.

***

Having spell-transited into the shielded part of her backyard from Mars, Nita came into the house and realized that she was itching all over. Mars dust! she thought, trying to brush it off herself, and failing as usual: the stuff was aggressively static-charged due to the dryness up there. I need to change

She started heading upstairs to her room to do that but was distracted by finding her dad sitting in his lounger in the living room, looking at his phone. “Lunch hour?” she said to him as she passed.

“Yeah,” her dad said. “It’s quiet in town today I’m taking an extra half-hour.” But he looked distracted and didn’t glance up as he spoke.

Nita could guess what he was looking at: Dairine. “What’s she up to?” she said, pausing at the bottom of the stairs.

“That’s actually an artificial sun they’re playing around with,” her dad said. “She keeps getting in and out of it.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “I saw her doing that. It’s a simulator.”

“Something else weird about this—”

He pointed at the screen. Nita went to look over his shoulder. Her dad was indicating a text window on the little screen. Inside it, text— initially in the Speech, but translating itself on the fly— was rolling downward at considerable speed.

She squinted at it. Don’t know what to do about this— oh, wait, now I see— no, that’s all wrong. I wish he wouldn’t stare like that. I can’t concentrate when he’s looking at me all the time; don’t want him to think I’m not in control here! What was that reading? No, back off—

“Wow,” Nita said. “That’s Dairine thinking.” She smiled slightly. “Streaming consciousness…”

Her dad chuckled at the pun. But then he shook his head and put the phone down. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nita, when you said I might get more information than I wanted? I didn’t think that was likely. But now—” Her dad glanced at the phone’s screen. “I don’t know that this is the kind of thing I want to be seeing, no matter how concerned I am about her. I feel like I’ve been going through her diary. Worse than that.”

Nita stepped back behind her dad to lean against the nearby breakfront dresser, attempting to hide the fact that she was blushing red-hot with guilt. There had been a time, years before she’d become a wizard, when after a fight with her sister, Nita had found out where Dairine’s diary was hidden. Still furious enough that she didn’t care what Dairine or anyone else would think about what she was doing, Nita stole the diary and read it cover to cover. There hadn’t been anything in the diary that had been all that interesting …which at the time had made Nita even angrier.

Understanding that this new anger wasn’t at Dairine, but at herself, had taken Nita a while. And then the anger had turned to shame. She could now never think of that horrible episode—hunkered down in the corner of her bedroom before Dairine got home from school, turning the pages of the little pink-plastic-covered Barbie-splashed book—without feeling a hard, hot stab of shame and disgust with herself. And now she was stuck in it again.

But her dad didn’t notice. He was staring at the phone. “I had no idea what the inside of her head was like,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting something that was both so—adult—and so—” He stopped, shook his head. “So, I don’t know, fierce. And so absolutely focused. I keep thinking, have I just forgotten how it is to be thirteen? How immediate everything seems, how life-or-death? Or is it that Dairine’s just different? The inside of my brain was never anything like that, as far as I can remember. The only kind of thirteen-year-old I’ve ever been was a boy. Thirteen-year-old girls—”

He shook his head again. “When you’re a dad, you see them one way. Your baby daughter. But when I was thirteen, if I thought about them at all, I thought maybe they were some other kind of species. They didn’t do the things I did, act the way I did. They were a nuisance, mostly. Good for getting me in trouble.”

“Who, your sisters?”

Her dad smiled. “Them and their friends,” he said. “Funny how you never think about such things when you’re older. Like when your aunt Annie fell out of the tree when she was six, and told your grandpa I pushed her.”

Nita was still recovering from her own embarrassment, and wasn’t able to give this all the attention she would have at some less unnerved moment. “She didn’t?”

Her dad laughed, rueful. “She was the one with the Superman towel around her neck, not me! Grandpa was sure I did it, but your Gran made him see reason. Always her specialty.”

He sighed, looking back at the phone. “But… I don’t know. I don’t want to be seeing the inside of Dairine’s head. That’s just wrong. You need to find a way to turn that off.”

“I’ll have a word with Bobo,” Nita said. “He and Spot set it up. They can filter it.”

“And I’ve been seeing how Nelaid is with her,” her father said. “He’s stern. Maybe better at ‘stern’ than I am. I might be able to pick up a trick or two from him.”

Nita didn’t say anything, though inside she felt like smiling. It was not the kind of admission you usually expected to hear from your dad, and was all the more sweet because of it. “Aw, you do good stern!” Nita said. “Don’t knock yourself.” And she reached around to scratch her back. The Mars dust was getting to her again. I don’t just need to change: I need a shower.

“I wonder if that’s true,” her dad said, looking vague for a moment. “I wonder if I’ve done too much of the wrong kind of stern in the past, and now she’s looking for the right kind. Because…” He trailed off for a moment, then looked up at Nita again. “Sweetie, she’s away all the time.”

“But you know why,” Nita said. “She’s looking for Roshaun.”

“And about that,” her father said, looking actively troubled now. “There is— let’s just say there’s a certain age difference between them. I know what you’re going to say: he’s from another planet, there are cultural differences—”

Nita waved a hand. “Daddy, you’re reading too much into it. Sometimes a girl can have a best friend who’s a boy.”

Her father’s eyes dwelt on her, thoughtful.

Nita started to sweat, but decided that it was too late to stop now. “Okay, I know what you’re thinking. But besides that—”

“And that you’re both wizards—”

Nita laughed one helpless laugh at a dad who could both tease her and be serious at the same time. “Besides that— she’s not like me.”