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.
If they hadn’t stood there on the edge of the Great Lawn, holding this little bit of each other, long after the danger had passed.
—from “The Wrong Idea,” posted January 2010 by FanFixx.net author Magicath
TEN
Professor Piper wasn’t done grading their unreliable-narrator scenes (which made Nick crabby and paranoid), but the professor wanted them all to get started on their final project, a ten-thousand-word short story. “Don’t save it till the night before,” she said, sitting on her desk and swinging her legs. “It will read like you wrote it the night before. I’m not interested in stream of consciousness.”
Cath wasn’t sure how she was going to keep everything straight in her head. The final project, the weekly writing assignments—on top of all her other classwork, for every other class. All the reading, all the writing. The essays, the justifications, the reports. Plus Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays writing with Nick. Plus Carry On. Plus e-mail and notes and comments …
Cath felt like she was swimming in words. Drowning in them, sometimes.
“Do you ever feel,” she asked Nick Tuesday night, “like you’re a black hole—a reverse black hole.…”
“Something that blows instead of sucks?”
“Something that sucks out,” she tried to explain. She was sitting at their table in the stacks with her head resting on her backpack. She could feel the indoor wind on her neck. “A reverse black hole of words.”