Prologue
Part of the problem, Nita thought to herself as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can't keep my mouth shut.
She had been running for five minutes now, hopping fences, sliding side-ways through hedges, but she was losing her wind. Some ways behind her she could hear Joanne and Glenda and the rest of them pounding along in pursuit, threatening to replace her latest, now- fading black eye. Well, Joanne would come up to her with that new bike, all chrome and silver and gearshift levers and speedometer/odometer and toeclips and waterbottle, and ask what she thought of it. So Nita had told her. Actually, she had told Joanne what she thought of her. The bike was all right. In fact, it had been almost exactly the one that Nita had wanted so much for her last birthday — the birthday when she got nothing but clothes. Life can be really rotten sometimes, Nita thought. She wasn't really so irritated about that at the moment, however. Running away from a beating was taking up most of her attention. "Callahan, " came a yell from behind her, "I'm gonna pound you up and mail you home in bottles!"
I wonder how many bottles it'll take, Nita thought, without much humor. She couldn't afford to laugh. With their bikes, they'd catch up to her pretty quickly. And then… She tried not to think of the scene there would be later at home — her father raising hands and eyes to the ceiling, wondering loudly enough for the whole house to hear, "Why didn't you hit them back?"; her sister making belligerent noises over her new battlescars; her mother shaking her head, looking away silently, because she understood. It was her sad look that would Nita more than the bruises and scrapes and swollen face would. Her mom would shake her head, and clean the hurts up, and sigh….
Crud! Nita thought. The breath was coming hard to her now. She was going to have to try to hide, to wait them out. But where? Most of the people around here didn't want kids running through their yards. There was Old Crazy Swale's house with its big landscaped yard, but the rumors among the neighborhood kids said that weird things happened in there. Nita herself had noticed that the guy didn't go to work like normal people. Better to get beat up again than go in there. But where can I hide?
She kept on running down Rose Avenue, and the answer presented itself to her: a little brown- brick building with windows warmly alight — refuge, safety, sanctuary. The library. It's open, it's open, I forgot it was open late on Saturday! Oh, thank Heaven! The sight of it gave Nita a new burst of energy. She cut across its tidy lawn, loped up the walk, took the five stairs to the porch in two jumps, bumped open the front door and closed it behind her, a little too loudly. The library had been a private home once, and it hadn't lost the look of one despite the crowding of all its rooms with bookshelves. The walls were paneled in mahogany and oak, and the place smelled warm and brown and booky. At the thump of the door Mrs. Lesser, the weekend librarian, glanced up from her desk, about to say something sharp. Then she saw who was standing there and how hard she was breathing. Mrs. Lesser frowned at Nita and then grinned. She didn't miss much. "There's no one downstairs, " she said, nodding at the door that led to the children's library in the single big basement room. "Keep quiet and I'll get rid of them. "
"Thanks, " Nita said, and went thumping down the cement stairs. As she reached the bottom, she heard the bump and squeak of the front door opening again.
Nita paused to try to hear voices and found that she couldn't. Doubting that her pursuers could hear her either, she walked on into the children's library, smiling slightly at the books and the bright posters.
She still loved the place. She loved any library, big or little; there was something about all that knowledge, all those facts waiting patiently to be found that never failed to give her a shiver. When friends couldn't be found, the books were always waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the picture in a book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rainforest, a fuzzy photo of Uranus with its up- and-down rings, or a prismed picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee. And though she would rather have died than admit it — no respectable thirteen-year-old ever set foot down there — she still loved the children's library too. Nita had gone through every book in the place when she was younger, reading everything in sight — fiction and nonfiction alike, fairy tales, science books, horse stories, dog stories, music books, art books, even the encyclopedias. (Bookworm,) she heard the old jeering voices go in her head, (foureyes, smartass, hide-in-the-house-and-read. Walking encyclopedia. Think you're so hot.) "No," she remembered herself answering once, "I just like to find things out!" And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she had found out about being punched in the stomach.
She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends, books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smoky London day-light of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one an-other I used to think the world would be like that when I got older. Wonderful all the time, exciting, happy. Instead of the way it is—
Something stopped Nita's hand as it ran along the bookshelf. She looked and found that one of the books, a little library-bound volume in shiny red buckram, had a loose thread at the top of its spine, on which her finger had caught. She pulled the finger free, glanced at the title. It was one of those "So You Want to Be a… "books, a series on careers. So You Want to Be a Pilot there had been, and So You Want to Be a Scientist… a Nurse… a Writer… But this one said So You Want to Be a Wizard. A what?
Nita pulled the book off the shelf, surprised not so much by the title as by the fact that she'd never seen it before. She thought she knew the whole stock of the children's library. Yet this wasn't a new book. It had plainly been there for some time — the pages had that yellow look about their edges, the color of aging, and the top of the book was dusty, so you want to be a wizard. hearnssen, the spine said: that was the author's name. Phoenix Press, the publisher. And then in white ink, in Mrs. Lesser's tidy handwriting, 793. 4: the Dewey Decimal number. This has to be a joke, Nita said to herself. But the book looked exactly like all the others in the series. She opened it carefully, so as not to crack the binding, and turned the first few pages to the table of contents. Normally Nita was a fast reader and would quickly have finished a page with only a few lines on it; but what she found on that contents page slowed her down a great deal. "Preliminary Determinations: A Question of Aptitude. " "Wizardly Preoccupations and Predilections. " "Basic Equipment and Milieus. " "Introduction to Spells, Bindings and Geasa. " "Familiars and Helpmeets: Advice to the Initiate. " "Psychotropic Spelling.
Psychowhat? Nita turned to the page on which that chapter began, looking at the boldface paragraph beneath its title.
WARNING
Spells of power sufficient to make temporary changes in the human mind are always subject to sudden and unpredictable backlash on the user. The practitioner is cautioned to make sure that his/her motives are benevolent before attempting spelling aimed at… I don't believe this, Nita thought. She shut the book and stood there holding it in her hand, confused, amazed, suspicious — and delighted. If it was a joke, it was a great one. If it wasn't— No, don't be silly.