“Yes, and look who got to answer the call when it came,” said her mother. “Well, they’re sending their people over this morning. I just hope they’ll be gone by the time you get home.” She looked annoyed. Maj suspected this was because her mother, not being able to leave well enough alone, would stand over the installers and watch everything they did all day, and then afterward complain that she had lost a day’s work. There were few things better calculated to fray her temper.
Maj got up, stretched, glanced up at the repeater and did the little interior “blink” that shut her implant’s connection to it down. The work space behind her went away, leaving her in a kitchen rapidly growing brighter with the new day. “Yeah, I hope they’re gone by then, too,” she said. “Oh, one thing I have to do before I leave…order some sweats for Niko….”
“I’ll take care of that, honey.”
“Have fun. He takes a size thirty-six sneaker.”
“Is that a real size?” her mother said suspiciously.
Maj made her way down to the shower, chuckling.
Maj spent all that day thinking more about Laurent than about anything else. Her morning went by in a strangely disoriented way, and she had trouble concentrating on her class-work, which was unusual for Maj. She plunged through math and physics with no difficulties, but when she hit history, she found that the Teapot Dome scandal seemed unusually remote. Somehow, the history with which she had been dealing at home, the more recent events of a place thousands of miles away, seemed far more concrete and important. In her house, drinking her tea, was someone who had escaped from that history — a particularly nasty piece of it. And will he ever go back? Maj wondered. She couldn’t imagine wanting to go back to the place where he and his father had been forced to live in such fear. But at the same time, home was home. He may even love the place, Maj thought.
If that was the case, she wondered how he managed it. Maj tended to be very sensitive to the emotional atmosphere around her; a fight or a disagreement in the Green household would make the hair stand up all over her until it was resolved, and even then she would be twitchy about everything everyone said for a day or so afterward. He must have known, she thought, that they were watching him and his father all the time. I could never stand something like that. Yet at the same time, possibly it was something you could get used to, like air pollution.
Laurent certainly didn’t seem particularly damaged; though maybe this was simply because he was smart. Intelligence, applied to your daily circumstances, was probably a big help. And it was also possible that Laurent was simply a lot tougher than he looked. His slightly delicate appearance could very well be hiding a much more robust personality than you might expect at first glance.
Nonetheless, Maj fretted about him on and off all day, as if her mother wasn’t perfectly capable of taking care of Laurent while Maj was going about her own business. He’s only thirteen, she kept thinking; and yeah, said the back of her mind, a thirteen-year-old who is perfectly capable of being shipped thousands of miles away from his normal life at the drop of a hat, and hardly turning a hair. Maybe you should get used to the idea that there are other people at least as competent as you are, even if they are three or four years younger….
But the end of the school day still couldn’t come soon enough for Maj. She felt antsy enough to take the local bus home from her high school and walk the two blocks to the house, rather than walking the whole two miles as she preferred to. The last few steps, the last half block or so, she found herself hurrying, and she took the steps up to the front door nearly at a run.
But when she bounced in the door and looked around, everything was quiet. She wandered down the hall and saw that her mother’s office door was slightly open. Her mother was sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap. “Mom?” Maj said softly.
Her mother looked over her shoulder, stretched, and yawned. “Oh,” she said, “you’re back. I wasn’t expecting you for another hour yet.”
“This late in the year,” Maj said, “there’s not as much to do as usual….”
Her mother looked at her with barely concealed amusement. “I would have thought,” she said, “it might have more to do with our guest.”
Maj gave her mother her own version of what her mother described as “an old-fashioned look.”
“Oh,” Maj said, “I don’t know.” But she wandered farther down the hall before her mother could get any more of her guesses right.
“Nice try, honey. He’s online,” her mother called after her. “In the den.”
“Why does this not surprise me?” Maj said softly as she turned back to her mother’s office and leaned against the door. “Are the phone people done?”
“With the concrete part of the installation, yes,” her mom said. “They said we might lose service once or twice this afternoon before business hours are over — it seems they have to do some tweaking at the exchange. It shouldn’t affect us too much, though. I wouldn’t start anything vital right now, that’s all.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
Maj wandered down the hall again and looked in the den door, saw Laurent sitting there quietly in the implant chair. The Muffin was sitting in his lap.
Maj smiled a little and went into the kitchen. She dumped her book bags and the light jacket she had brought home from school with her, rooted around in the fridge briefly for some milk and a peach, and sat down at the table to line her own implant up with the doubler over the sink.
From her own work space she opened the transit door and looked through into the Muffin’s. Sure enough, in the midst of the ancient Cambrian rain forest, all waving with giant horsetail ferns and club mosses, there was Laurent, with a crowd of dinosaurs sitting or standing around him, while the Muffin sat a little elevated on a nearby rock and read to them all.
“‘Ay,’ Puck said. ‘I’m sorry we lost him out of Old England—’”
Laurent looked up at the slight rustling the dinosaurs made at Maj’s approach. He was wearing the new sweats Maj’s mother had ordered for him, and looked extremely relaxed.
“All right, you guys,” Maj said, “shove over…”
She pushed a couple of the larger tyrannosaurs out of the way and sat down on the grass next to Laurent, composing herself for the Muffin to resume.
“I was nearly done,” Muf said with some dignity. “You almost missed everything.”
“Well, go on,” Maj said. “I’ll just have to fill in the blanks. It’ll be suppertime soon, and you’ll need to wash up. But I’d love to sit here and listen to you finish this first.”
It took about another twenty minutes for the Muffin to plow through to the end of that chapter of Rewards and Fairies. Maj and Laurent kept quite still through this — the fierceness of the Muffin’s concentration was impressive, and none of the dinosaurs dared to move. Finally, when she was done and closed the book, Laurent applauded a little. The Muffin beamed at him.
“You are very young to be reading that,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”
“I’m not that young,” said the Muffin, with the air of a grand dame explaining that she wasn’t that old. “Daddy started reading when he was three. So, what else do you want me to read you?”
“Nothing right now, Muffaletta,” Maj said. “Mom is going to want to give you supper, and then Daddy will be home.”
“Oh, good,” the Muffin said. “I’ll come back later, then.” She put down the book and vanished.
Maj and Laurent looked at each other with amusement. “She really is reading above her age level,” Maj said, “but it’s traditional in the family. Have you read that one before?”