“You’re welcome,” Kit’s pop said as soon as Carmela let him loose and more or less went dancing out of the living room and up the stairs to get her tablet and start making notes and plans.
Kit’s pop shook his head, shook the paper back out into something like a readable configuration, and went back to his reading. As he did, Kit turned to Nita and said silently, She just lay there with her sad face on and let us run interference for her, didn’t she!
Yep, Nita said. She owes us one.
Good, Kit said. And meanwhile… “Looks like we get to have a party!”
A second later the sound system up in Carmela’s room fired up with a raucous British-accented voice more or less screaming over a noisy drum solo, “It’s CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAS!!”
Nita snickered. “Ronan,” she said, “has a lot to answer for…”
***
An hour or so later, Nita was upstairs in Carmela’s bedroom, sprawled in her desk chair with her manual open in her lap, while Carmela was lying on her stomach on her bed and scribbling notes in her tablet at about a mile a minute. That thing must have some handwriting recognition program, Nita thought. But then, it’s Crossings tech… it would have.
Having gotten the “yes” from their folks, Carmela was now acting oddly at a loss, as if she’d secretly expected to be turned down and now wasn’t sure what she should be doing. “Decorations,” she was muttering.
Nita glanced up at that. “I thought you decided you were going to use your normal ones.”
“What? Oh. Not for Filif! For the house.”
“We’ve got lots of time yet to think about that.”
“Not if we don’t want to miss the holiday rush! The sooner the better. Anyway, the stuff’s starting to turn up in the stores already anyway…”
Nita sighed, as that was all too true. “Still.”
“And another thing,” Carmela muttered, hurriedly flipping over virtual pages in her tablet and starting to make another set of notes. “Allergies. Food allergies…”
She can plan an invasion and not turn a hair, Nita thought, but she can’t stay focused on a guest list? This really is a big deal for her. “Mela, you’re coming at this backwards.”
“Huh?”
“Guest list first. Food allergies later.”
“I’m just trying to get ahead of things…”
“Right now the only one you’re getting ahead of is yourself. Deep breath!”
Carmela took it, though for some moments she seemed reluctant to let it out again.
“Mela!” Nita said. “Relax.”
She let that breath out with some difficulty. “I just want it to be nice for him,” Carmela said. “He’s so special… and I don’t want him to be disappointed.”
Her first alien crush, Nita thought, and just smiled. “He won’t be,” she said. “You know him. Always ready for something new, and in love with it when it arrives, whatever it is.”
“And oh gosh, he’s going to need something to root in. Maybe one of those custom compounds they’ve got at the Demisiv sleepstore at the Crossings…”
“Mela!” Nita said. “Daddy just puts him in the flower bed when he turns up. With maybe some bark chips! So later for custom bedding. Guest list!”
Carmela let out another heavy sigh and turned to a clean “page.” “Guest list,” she said.
Nita stretched in the chair and glanced down at her manual. She’d long since told the list of active wizards she knew personally to arrange itself to the front of the main directory. Now she started paging through that section, checking people’s public calendars, where available, against the sleepover / party dates. “So. Filif.”
“Goes without saying.”
“Sker’ret.”
“Ditto.”
Both of them paused then, thinking of one of the original puptent group who would not be there: Roshaun. More or less in unison, they sighed.
“Yeah,” Carmela said. “Well. …You and me and Mom and Pop and Dairine and your Dad and Kit.”
“Uh huh.”
“And Spot.”
“Right.”
“Ronan.”
“Mmm,” Carmela said. Nita glanced at Carmela with amusement, not entirely sure whether the sound was simple acknowledgement or approval. Ronan wasn’t particularly forthcoming about how he actually took Carmela’s more or less continuous flirting with him, but Nita noticed that he never really came out and told her to stop it.
And having mentioned Ronan and Kit in the same breath, naturally the next thought was—
“Darryl?” Carmela said, beating Nita to it.
“I don’t know.” Nita looked over his listing in the manual. “He’s showing availability, but that might just be for errantry. The dates are starred, and the star says ‘subject to preparedness issues.’”
“Meaning he’ll bow out if he feels overstimmed.”
“Well, sure. But the whole holiday time might be iffy for him. We were talking a couple weeks ago and he told me that as far as his personal well-being goes, and the way he’s been doing better at managing it, he’s been trying not to freak his parents out too much. Trying to break them in gradually.”
Carmela snorted with laughter. “Darryl?”
Nita smiled. In the matter of handling his autism, as with his handling of nearly everything else, it was hard to imagine Darryl doing anything “gradually”. These days he tended to jump in enthusiastically with both feet and then deal with the fine details as they came up. “He told me at one point,” Nita said, “that he was thinking about trying to get his parents to perceive wizardry as just a new way to be non-neurotypical.”
“If anyone can do that, he can,” Carmela said. “So if he’s trying to ease them into the idea that the holidays are less of a chore for him these days and he doesn’t need all that supervision, maybe we should just let him decide what to do about this? Put him down for ‘maybe yes maybe no’ and let him get back to us?”
“Yeah. If he needs to blow us off, he will and he won’t feel guilty about it.”
Carmela scribbled for a moment. Nita stretched, propping her feet up on Carmela’s desk and thinking. “S’reee…” she turned a page in the manual.
Carmela looked up. “Um. How do you invite a humpback whale to a sleepover?”
“The usual way! You put her in a people suit.”
Carmela blinked. “Oh. Yeah.”
“Especially because it’s easier for S’reee than for most whales. When she got hurt that time and I healed her, we got blood-tied. So she has less trouble shapechanging to human these days, the way I have less trouble going whale when I need to.”
“Oh.”
“But no,” Nita said with some regret. “Says here she’s on sabbatical right now. Personal leave.”
“For what?”
“Uh, the manual won’t say. It’s one of those confidentiality things. But I suspect it’s about private time with her honey.”
“Her what??”
“She’s dating. A very nice bull from up around Vancouver somewhere. He’s a food critic.”
“A what??”
“You want to know where the best North Atlantic krill is,” Nita said, “Hwii’ish is your go-to guy.” It had taken her a while to understand that all the Earth’s oceans throbbed with a vast network of cetacean communication, a sort of sonic version of the Internet; and that Hwii’ish was essentially a foodblogger, and fairly famous among his own kind. But he didn’t care about fame: what he was interested in was wizards, most specifically S’reee. “But who knows?” Nita said. “Send her an invite anyway. She might be able to get away.”
Carmela made a note.
“Tom and Carl?”
“For a sleepover?”
“Huh? Oh, no, just for the evening party.”
“Sure, if we can get them.” Nita flipped from Tom’s page to Carl’s. “It lists them as ‘on call’, but they might be able to get away.”
“The Twychild?” That was Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet, a special kind of twin, both of them favorites of Nita’s from the big group they’d met up with during the Pullulus War.