"Crystal ball. Would you please just call her and find out if I'm right? I mean, I hope I'm not, but I've had the most
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awful feeling about it since early this morning. I couldn't sleep. I even did a Deirdre."
"You threw up?"
"Yeah. Please call?"
"Okay, okay. I'll let you know."
I hung up, but before I had a chance to call Granna's number, Mom shouted my name from downstairs. She had that barely-in-control sound to her voice that meant someone was going to fry.
Oh. What if she knew about last night? She would torture me, kill me, and then perform a black rite to resurrect me to kill me again if she found out. Mom had never bothered to have the sex talk with me--that might have actually required finding out how I felt about something--but she'd made it quite clear what she thought of girls that did more than hold hands with their boyfriends.
I still remembered the time she dropped me off at Dave's Ice when I first started, and Sara was kissing her boyfriend in the parking lot. I remembered wondering why I would want someone's tongue in my ear, and then Mom saying, "Girls like that have no self-respect. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?"
I kinda wondered what Luke's tongue would feel like in my ear.
"Deirdre!" Mom shouted again. I stalled, scrubbing off the bottoms of my feet so it didn't look so much like I'd been wandering around the neighborhood all night. "Don't make me come up there!"
I steeled myself and headed down to the kitchen. Mom,
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Delia, and Dad were posted at various points in the room, all holding coffee cups, all looking tired and strained in the strong late-morning light coming in the windows. So it was to be three on one. Hardly seemed fair.
"Good morning," I said. Admit nothing, that was my plan.
Mom barely looked at me; she gulped her coffee before speaking. "You're supposed to be at work this afternoon, right?"
The question was so far from what I'd expected that my voice was a bit incredulous. "Yeah, at one."
"Dad can drop you off, but James will have to pick you up, or if he can't, you'll have to call in and take time off. I can't get you." She drained her coffee cup and set it in the sink. Dad looked hangdog, and I bet a fight had preceded my arrival.
Mom continued. "Delia and I have to go to the hospital."
With a faint prickle of dread, I echoed her. "The hospital?"
Delia withdrew an enormous set of keys from her purse and took my mother's arm firmly.
"Granna fell down or something. The EMTs aren't sure. It's probably nothing serious."
"Fell down?" I repeated again. Other people's grandmothers fell down. Granna wasn't the frail, falling-down type. She was the hauling-and-painting-furniture type. She was the beating-herbs-into-green-pulp-to-drive-off-the-faeries type. For some reason, I thought of Eleanor's fearsome smile right before she'd left.
"Or something," Delia said loudly, louder, if possible, 163
than her usual voice. "We're just going to see if she's all right. I'm sure she'll be released shortly.
It's just precautions."
Mom glared at Delia, and I wondered what that argument had been.
Impervious to the slings and arrows of her sister, Delia looked regally down at me. "You saw her yesterday, Deirdre. Did anything seem unusual to you?"
I had probably been too self-absorbed yesterday to notice anything out of place. The only unusual thing there yesterday had been me. I shook my head. "She seemed fine."
Mom shot a triumphant look at Delia. "Let's go."
The two of them pushed through the door, leaving Dad and me alone. As usual, he was quiet, all the words he might have said already used up by Delia and Mom. Finally, he scratched his chin and looked at me. "You're seeing that flute player from the competition?"
Talking with Mom was difficult: you had to follow rules and play her games. Dad was easy. I nodded.
"Do you like him?"
I didn't embarrassed, but my cheeks reddened anyway as I admitted the truth. "A lot." "He like you?" "A lot."
Dad nodded and got his car keys from the hook by the door. "I'm glad. I'm going to go get the AC running in the car. Meet me out there when you're ready to go, okay?" He let himself softly out the back door, as quiet as Mom and
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Delia were loud, and I went back upstairs to get changed into something that didn't smell quite so strongly of wet grass and staying out all night.
Upstairs, as I was transferring my phone to the back pocket of a nice pair of jeans for work, it rang. I looked at the number, but didn't recognize it.
"Hello?"
"Hi."
I recognized Luke's voice at once, and despite everything, I shivered. In a good way. "You have a phone?"
"I do now. I never had anybody I wanted to talk to before." He paused. "Do you want to talk to me?"
"I shouldn't." I remembered Dad waiting in the car and began to hunt for a clean pair of socks.
"But I do. I just keep thinking you're going to bust out an explanation for what I saw in your head last night."
There was silence.
"Is this the phone version of that sad face you do where you say you can't tell me anything?"
"Yeah, I guess it is. I guess I was hoping that you'd see something that would counteract all those--the--that stuff--when you read my mind."
"Is there something that would counteract all that?"
Luke sighed. "Better count this as another phone version of the sad face."
I had more important things to ask him, but curiosity pushed me forward. "What happens when you can't tell me something? Does your tongue freeze, or what?"
He paused. "It's painful. My throat seizes up, sort of.
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I never know exactly what's going to set it off, so I try to avoid it."
"What about writing it