“What did she do! Kit said.
Nita finished with the sticky note, then put the pen down and told him. Kit’s eyes slowly went wide.
“Wow,” Kit said. “Halfway across the galaxy, he said?”
“Yeah,” said Nita.
“That’d really be something. You don’t get to do a transit like that every day, and this would be a sponsored one! Think of being able to go that far and not have to pay for the energy.”
Nita had been thinking of it, in an idle way. “Halfway across the galaxy” was forty-five thousand light-years or so. If you independently constructed a spell to do that kind of distance, it would really take it out of you. And doing such a transit using a previously set-up worldgate had its costs, too—you needed a good reason to do it, such as being formally “on errantry.”
“It’s a shame you couldn’t go, anyway,” Kit said.
“Oh, come on,” Nita said. “I couldn’t go now.”
“Why not? It’s spring break. We’ve got two whole weeks off!”
Nita frowned, shook her head. “It wouldn’t be right somehow. My dad—”
“Your dad wouldn’t mind,” Kit said. And then his expression went very amused. “Come to think of it, my dad wouldn’t mind.”
Nita looked at Kit in confusion. “What?”
“You haven’t been over in the past couple of days,” Kit said. “Between Carmela and Ponch—”
“Oh no,” Nita said. “What’s Ponch doing now?”
“Wait till you come over,” Kit said, looking rather resigned. “It’ll be easier for you to see than for me to explain. But when I told my pop that we were going to have to go to Mars, he said, ‘Don’t let me keep you.’”
Nita stared at Kit in surprise. “I bet your mama didn’t say that, though.”
Kit’s grin had a slight edge to it. “No. My mama suggested I go take a look at Neptune while I was at it, and not hurry home.”
Nita snickered. “Seriously,” Kit said. “This would be really neat. If we went to see Tom…”
They heard the door to Nita’s dad’s bedroom open. “Look,” Nita said, “let’s talk about it later. But I don’t think—”
Nita’s dad came in from the living room. “You ready?” he said to her.
“Yeah,” Nita said, getting up. “Daddy, can I have dinner at Kit’s?”
“Sure,” her dad said. “Kit, she’ll see you later. Neets, let’s get this shopping done.”
Fifteen minutes later, Nita and her dad walked in the sliding doors of the grocery store. The way things had gone in the old days, on occasions when the whole family went to the store together, it had been Nita’s dad’s job to push the cart and make helpful suggestions: Her mom had done the choosing. Nita now sighed a little as her dad went for the cart, and she consciously took on the choosing role for the first time. When shopping before, she had been rather halfhearted about it, which possibly had been the cause of some of the trouble. I guess I owe the fridge a little apology, she thought, and got out the sticky-pad page on which she’d made her list.
They went down the vegetable aisle and got potatoes, celery, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce, which Nita very pointedly handed to her dad. “The crisper this time,” she said. “He’s counting on you.”
“‘He’?” Nita’s dad said, turning the lettuce over several times in his hands and looking at it closely. “How can you tell?”
“If you’re a wizard, you can look at the gender equivalent of the word lettuce in the Speech,” Nita said. “Or, on the other hand, you can just ask him.”
“I’d probably prefer to pass on that second option,” Nita’s dad said as they came to the cold cuts and prepackaged meats. “I don’t know if I’d want to talk to something I might eat.”
“Daddy, this might sound weird to you,” Nita said, looking for her preferred brand of bologna, “but some things are less upset about being eaten than they are about being wasted.”
“Ouch.”
Nita looked at her dad in sudden shock. “Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”
Her dad smiled slightly as they turned into the next aisle. “I didn’t think you did. But sometimes ‘ouch’ is a healthy reaction. Or so I hear.”
“You’ve been talking to Tom again,” Nita said.
“No, Millman. Never mind. We need some pizzas.” Her father paused in front of a freezer case.
“Yeah.” Nita picked a pizza from the freezer compartment. The front of it was full of images of ancient stone ovens. Nita turned it over and started reading the ingredients. “This is disgusting,” Nita said. “Look at all the junk they put in this!”
“That’s probably why they call it junk food.”
“Used to be that just meant the empty calories,” Nita said. “These days…” Not even this year’s unit on organic chemistry had prepared her to cope with some of the ingredient names on that label. Nita made a face and put the package back. “I’m not sure I want to be eating so many things I can’t pronounce.”
“Home cooking means a lot more work…”
“I know,” Nita said. “I’m beginning to see why Mom was so intense about it. I guess I’m just going to have to learn.”
They turned into the paper-towels-and-toilet-paper aisle, and Nita’s dad put a couple of the giant economy-size bundles of toilet paper in the cart. “It has been tough, hasn’t it?” her dad said.
Nita sighed and nodded. “It hurts sometimes,” she said after a moment. “Hurts pretty bad.” Then, having a sudden thought, she added, “But not so much that I need to leave the planet for extended periods.”
Her father looked thoughtful. “You sure about that?” he said.
Nita looked at him, uncertain what was going through his mind.
“What are other kids at school doing over spring break?” he said.
Nita shrugged. “Some of them are going away,” she said. Among a few of her friends there had been excited talk of family vacations, trips to Florida or even, in one or two cases, to Europe. These by themselves had left Nita unimpressed, for travel by itself was no problem for a wizard. You could be planets or star-systems away from home in a matter of minutes or hours, depending on whether you used private or public transport. But the idea of being able to get away with the family, even for just a few days, had an entirely different attraction. Unfortunately, this was the busy time of year for Nita’s dad. Even though the craziness of Valentine’s Day was over, it would be Easter soon, and no florist in his right mind took a vacation right now.
“It doesn’t matter, Daddy,” Nita said. “Kit and I have a lot of stuff we’ve been planning to do. We might need to travel, but not far. No farther than Mars, anyway. It’ll be nice to just kind of take it easy for a while. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worrying,” said her dad. But there was a strangely neutral sound to his voice, and Nita didn’t know quite what to make of it.
“Daddy,” Nita said, “are you okay?”
“Sure, honey,” he said.
Nita wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t say anything. She and her dad went to the checkout, paid for the groceries, bagged them up, and carted everything out to the
car. Then they headed for home.
They were only a few minutes away from the supermarket when Nita’s dad said, “There were going to be aliens in the house?”
Nita’s thoughts had been occupied with the weather on Mars this time of year, and the question took her by surprise. “Uh, yeah,” she said. “It is an exchange program.”
“Not incredibly strange aliens, I take it.”
“Well, they’d have to be able to handle the basic environment,” Nita said. “Our atmosphere, our gravity. That doesn’t mean they’d be humanoid; there’s a lot of variation in body structures among the kinds of carbon-based life that breathe oxygen. Anyway, whoever these guys were supposed to be, they might look pretty weird. But that wouldn’t matter. If they’re wizards, we’d have the most important stuff in common.”