“I don’t think it would matter,” Wren said. Cath noticed she wasn’t arguing the “prettier, skinnier” point. “It sounds like he’s into your brain. I don’t have your brain.”
She didn’t. And Cath didn’t understand that at all. They had the same DNA. The same nature, the same nurture. All the differences between them didn’t make sense.
“Come home with me this weekend,” Cath said abruptly. She’d found a ride back to Omaha that night. Wren had already said she didn’t want to go.
“You know Dad misses us,” Cath said. “Come on.”
Wren looked down at her tray. “I told you. I’ve got to study.”
“There’s a home game this weekend,” Courtney said. “We don’t have to be sober until Monday at eleven.”
“Have you even called Dad?” Cath asked.
“We’ve been e-mailing,” Wren said. “He seems fine.”
“He misses us.”
“He’s supposed to miss us—he’s our father.”
“Yeah,” Cath said softly, “but he’s different.”
Wren’s face lifted, and she glared at Cath, shaking her head just slightly.
Cath pushed away from the table. “I better go. I need to run back to my room before class.”
* * *
When Professor Piper asked for their unreliable-narrator papers that afternoon, Nick grabbed Cath’s out of her hand. She grabbed it back. He raised an eyebrow.
Cath tilted her chin and smiled at him. It was only later that she realized she was giving him one of Wren’s smiles. One of her evangelical smiles.
Nick pushed his tongue into his cheek and studied Cath for a second before he turned around.
Professor Piper took the paper from her hand. “Thank you, Cath.” She smiled warmly and squeezed Cath’s shoulder. “I can hardly wait.”
Nick twisted his head back around at that. Pet, he mouthed.
Cath thought about reaching up to the back of his head and petting his hair down to the point at his neck.
It had been two hours since they watched the drawbridge lock into the fortress.
Two hours of squabbling about whose fault it had been.
Baz would pout and say, “We wouldn’t have missed curfew if you hadn’t gotten in my way.”
And Simon would growl and say, “I wouldn’t have to get in your way if you weren’t wandering the grounds nefariously.”
But the truth, Simon knew, was that they’d just gotten so caught up in their arguing that they’d lost track of time, and now they’d have to spend the night out here. There was no getting around the curfew—no matter how many times Baz clicked his heels and said, “There’s no place like home.” (That was a seventh-year spell anyway; there was no way Baz could pull it off.)
Simon sighed and dropped down onto the grass. Baz was still muttering and staring up at the fortress like he might yet spot a way in.
“Oi,” Simon said, thumping Baz’s knee.
“Ow. What.”
“I’ve got an Aero bar,” Simon said. “Want half?”
Baz peered down, his long face as grey as his eyes in the gloaming. He flicked his black hair back and frowned, settling down next to Simon on the hill. “What kind?”
“Mint.” Simon dug the candy out from the pocket in his cape.
“That’s my favorite,” Baz admitted, grudgingly.
Simon flashed him a wide, white grin. “Mine, too.”
—from “Secrets, Stars, and Aero Bars,” posted January 2009 by FanFixx.net authors Magicath and Wrenegade
NINE
Cath had an hour or so to kill before she left for Omaha, and she didn’t feel like sitting in her room. It was the best kind of November day. Cold and crisp, but not quite freezing, not icy. Just cold enough that she could justifiably wear all her favorite clothes—cardigans and tights and leg warmers.
She thought about going to the Union to study but decided to walk around downtown Lincoln instead. Cath almost never left campus; there wasn’t much reason to. Leaving campus felt like crossing the border. What would she do if she lost her wallet or got lost? She’d have to call the embassy.…
Lincoln felt a lot more like a small town than Omaha. There were still movie theaters downtown and little shops. Cath walked by a Thai restaurant and the famous Chipotle. She stopped to walk through a gift shop and smell all the essential oils. There was a Starbucks across the street. She wondered if it was Levi’s Starbucks, and a minute later, she was crossing over.
Inside it was exactly like every other Starbucks Cath had ever been to. Maybe with a few more professorial types … And with Levi briskly moving behind the espresso machine, smiling at something somebody was saying in his headset.
Levi was wearing a black sweater over a white T-shirt. He looked like he’d just gotten a haircut—shorter in the back but still sticking up and flopping all over his face. He called out someone’s name and handed a drink to a guy who looked like a retired violin teacher. Levi stopped to talk to the guy. Because he was Levi, and this was a biological necessity.
“Are you in line?” a woman asked Cath.
“No, go ahead.” But then Cath decided she may as well get in line. It’s not like she’d come here to observe Levi in the wild. She didn’t know what she was doing here.
“Can I help you?” the guy at the register asked.
“No, you cannot,” Levi said, pushing the guy down the line. “I got this one.” He grinned at her. “Cather.”
“Hey,” Cath said, rolling her eyes. She hadn’t thought he’d seen her.
“Look at you. All sweatered up. What are those, leg sweaters?”
“They’re leg warmers.”
“You’re wearing at least four different kinds of sweater.”
“This is a scarf.”
“You look tarred and sweatered.”
“I get it,” she said.
“Did you just stop by to say hi?”
“No,” she said. He frowned. She rolled her eyes again. “I came for coffee.”
“What kind?”
“Just coffee. Grande coffee.”
“It’s cold out. Let me make you something good.”
Cath shrugged. Levi grabbed a cup and started pumping syrup into it. She waited on the other side of the espresso machine.
“What are you doing tonight?” he asked. “You should come over. I think we’re gonna have a bonfire. Reagan’s coming.”
“I’m going home,” Cath said. “Omaha.”
“Yeah?” Levi smiled up at her. The machine made a hissing noise. “I bet your parents are happy about that.”
Cath shrugged again. Levi heaped whipped cream onto her drink. His hands were long—and thicker than the rest of him, a little knobby, with short, square nails.
“Have a great weekend,” he said, handing her the drink.
“I haven’t paid yet.”
Levi held up his hands. “Please. You insult me.”
“What is this?” She leaned over the cup and took a breath.
“My own concoction—Pumpkin Mocha Breve, light on the mocha. Don’t try to order it from anyone else; it’ll never turn out the same.”
“Thanks,” Cath said.
He grinned at her again. And she took a step backwards into a shelf full of mugs. “Bye,” she said.
Levi moved on to the next person, smiling as wide as ever.
* * *
Cath’s ride was a girl named Erin who’d put a sign up in the floor bathroom about splitting gas back to Omaha. All she talked about was her boyfriend who still lived in Omaha and who was probably cheating on her. Cath couldn’t wait to get home.
She felt a surge of optimism as she ran up the steps to her house. Somebody had raked the leaves—people who stayed up all night making mountains out of mashed potatoes rarely had the presence of mind for leaf raking.
Not that her dad would actually do that, the mashed potato thing. That wasn’t his style at all.
A fireman’s pole to the attic. Spur-of-th
e-moment road trips. Staying up for three nights because he discovered Battlestar Galactica on Netflix … That was the MO to his madness.
“Dad?”
The house was dark. He should be home by now—he said he would come home early.
“Cath!” He was in the kitchen. She ran forward to hug him. He hugged her back like he needed it. When she pulled away, he smiled at her. Sight-for-sore-eyes and everything.
“It’s dark in here,” she said.
Her dad looked around the room like he’d just got there. “You’re right.” He walked around the main floor, flipping on lights. When he started on the lamps, Cath switched them off behind him. “I was just working on something…,” he said.
“For work?”
“For work,” he agreed, absentmindedly turning on a lamp she’d just switched off. “How do you feel about Gravioli?”
“I like it. Is that what we’re having for dinner?”
“No, that’s the client I’m on.”
“You guys got Gravioli?”
“Not yet. It’s a pitch. How do you feel about it?”
“About Gravioli.”
“Yeah…” He tapped the middle fingers of his left hand against his palm.
“I like the gravy? And … the ravioli?”
“And it makes you feel…”
“Full.”
“That’s terrible, Cath.”
“Um … happy? Indulgent? Comforted? Doubly comforted because I’m eating two comfort foods at once?”
“Maybe…,” he said.
“It makes me wonder what else would be better with gravy.”
“Ha!” he said. “Possible.”
He started walking away from her, and she knew he was looking for his sketchbook.
“What are we having for dinner?” Cath asked.
“Whatever you want,” he said. Then he stopped and turned to her, like he was remembering something. “No. Taco truck. Taco truck?”
“Yes. I’m driving. I haven’t driven in months. Which one should we go to? Let’s go to them all.”
“There are at least seven taco trucks, just in a two-mile radius.”
“Bring it on,” she said. “I want to eat burritos from now until Sunday morning.”
They ate their burritos and watched TV. Her dad scribbled, and Cath got out her laptop. Wren should be here with her laptop, too, sending Cath instant messages instead of talking.
Cath decided to send Wren an e-mail.
I wish you were here. Dad looks good. I don’t think he’s done dishes since we left, or that he’s used any dishes other than drinking glasses. But he’s working. And nothing is in pieces. And his eyes are in his eyes, you know? Anyway. See you Monday. Be safe. Try not to let anyone roofie you.
Cath went to bed at one o’clock. She came back down at three to make sure the front door was locked; she did that sometimes when she couldn’t sleep, when things didn’t feel quite right or settled.
Her dad had papered the living room with headlines and sketches. He was walking around them now, like he was looking for something.
“Bed?” she said.
It took a few seconds for his eyes to rest on her.
“Bed,” he answered, smiling gently.
When she came back down at five, he was in his room. She could hear him snoring.
* * *
Her dad was gone when she came downstairs later that morning.
Cath decided to survey the damage. The papers in the living room had been sorted into sections. “Buckets,” he called them. They were taped to the walls and the windows. Some pieces had other papers taped around them, as if the ideas were exploding. Cath looked over all his ideas and found a green pen to star her favorites. (She was green; Wren was red.)
The sight of it—chaotic, but still sorted—made her feel better.
A little manic was okay. A little manic paid the bills and got him up in the morning, made him magic when he needed it most.
“I was magic today, girls,” he’d say after a big presentation, and they’d both know that meant Red Lobster for dinner, with their own lobsters and their own candle-warmed dishes of drawn butter.
A little manic was what their house ran on. The goblin spinning gold in the basement.
Cath checked the kitchen: The fridge was empty. The freezer was full of Healthy Choice meals and Marie Callender’s pot pies. She loaded the dishwasher with dirty glasses, spoons, and coffee cups.
The bathroom was fine. Cath peeked into her dad’s bedroom and gathered up more glasses. There were papers everywhere in there, not even in piles. Stacks of mail, most of it unopened. She wondered if he’d just swept everything into his room before she got home. She didn’t touch anything but the dishes.
Then she microwaved a Healthy Choice meal, ate it over the sink, and decided to go back to bed.
Her bed at home was so much softer than she’d ever appreciated. And her pillows smelled so good. And she’d missed all their Simon and Baz posters. There was a full-size cutout of Baz, baring his fangs and smirking, hanging from the rail of Cath’s canopy bed. She wondered if Reagan would tolerate it in their dorm room. Maybe it would fit in Cath’s closet.
* * *
She and her dad ate every meal that weekend at a different taco truck. Cath had carnitas and barbacoa, al pastor and even lengua. She ate everything drenched in green tomatillo sauce.
Her dad worked. So Cath worked with him, logging more words on Carry On, Simon than she’d written in weeks. On Saturday night, she was still wide awake at one o’clock, but she made a big show of going to bed, so that her dad would, too.
Then she stayed up an hour or two more, writing.
It felt good to be writing in her own room, in her own bed. To get lost in the World of Mages and stay lost. To not hear any voices in her head but Simon’s and Baz’s. Not even her own. This was why Cath wrote fic. For these hours when their world supplanted the real world. When she could just ride their feelings for each other like a wave, like something falling downhill.
By Sunday night, the whole house was covered in onionskin sketch paper and burrito foil. Cath started another load of drinking glasses and gathered up all the delicious-smelling trash.
She was supposed to meet her ride out in West Omaha. Her dad was waiting by the door to take her, rattling his car keys against his leg.
Cath tried to take a mental picture of him to reassure herself with later. He had light brown hair, just Cath and Wren’s color. Just their texture, too—thick and straight. A round nose, just wider and longer than theirs. Every/no-color eyes, just like theirs. It was like he’d had them by himself all along. Like the three of them had just split their DNA evenly.
It would be a much more reassuring picture if he didn’t look so sad. His keys were hitting his leg too hard.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Cath…” The way he said it made her heart sink. “Sit down, okay? There’s something I need to tell you real quick.”
“Why do I have to sit down? I don’t want to have to sit down.”
“Just”—he motioned toward the dining room table—“please.”
Cath sat at the table, trying not to lean on his papers or breathe them into disorder.
“I didn’t mean to save this…,” he said.
“Just say it,” Cath said. “You’re making me nervous.” Worse than nervous; her stomach was twisted up to her trachea.
“I’ve been talking to your mom.”
“What?” Cath would have been less shocked if he told her he’d been talking to a ghost. Or a yeti. “Why? What?”
“Not for me,” he said quickly, like he knew that the two of them getting back together was a horrifying prospect. “About you.”
“Me?”
“You and Wren.”
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t talk to her about us.”
“Cath … she’s your mother.”
“There is no evidence to support that.”
“Just listen, Cath,
you don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
Cath was starting to cry. “I don’t care what you’re going to say.”
Her dad decided to just keep talking. “She’d like to see you. She’d like to know you a little better.”
“No.”
“Honey, she’s been through a lot.”
“No,” Cath said. “She’s been through nothing.” It was true. You name it, Cath’s mom wasn’t there for it. “Why are we talking about her?”
Cath could hear her dad’s keys banging against his leg again, hitting the bottom of the table. They needed Wren here now. Wren didn’t twitch. Or cry. Wren wouldn’t let him keep talking about this.
“She’s your mother,” he said. “And I think you should give her a chance.”
“We did. When we were born. I’m done talking about this.” Cath stood up too quickly, and a pile of papers fluttered off the table.
“Maybe we can talk about it more at Thanksgiving,” he said.
“Maybe we can not talk about it at Thanksgiving, so that we don’t ruin Thanksgiving—are you going to tell Wren?”
“I already did. I sent her an e-mail.”
“What did she say?”
“Not much. She said she’d think about it.”
“Well, I’m not thinking about it,” Cath said. “I can’t even think about this.”
She got up from the table and started gathering her things; she needed something to hang on to. He shouldn’t have talked to them about this separately. He shouldn’t have talked to them about it at all.
* * *
The drive to West Omaha with her dad was miserable. And the drive back to Lincoln without him was worse.
Nothing was going right.
They’d been attacked by a venomous crested woodfoul.
And then they’d hidden in the cave with the spiders and the whatever-that-thing-was that had bitten Simon’s tennis shoe, possibly a rat.
And then Baz had taken Simon’s hand. Or maybe Simon had taken Baz’s hand.… Anyway, it was totally forgivable because woodfoul and spiders and rats.
And sometimes you held somebody’s hand just to prove that you were still alive, and that another human being was there to testify to that fact.
They’d walked back to the fortress like that, hand in hand. And it would have been okay—it would have been mostly okay—if one of them had just let go.
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