A Wizard Alone

From inside Dairine’s bedroom came a loud thump, the sound of a body hitting the floor — or, more accurately, parts of a body hitting the floor, and parts of it coming down hard on some of the many and varied things that Dairine routinely shoved underneath her bed. One-handed, Nita snapped her manual shut with a feeling of profound satisfaction.

“Where’s my bed?!” Dairine shrieked.

“It’s on Pluto,” Nita said. “On the winter side, somewhere nice and dark and quiet, where you won’t find it if you look all day — which you’re not going to have time to do, because you’ll be in school.”

“Hah! I’ll sleep in your bed!”

“You hate my bed,” Nita said. “My mattress is too hard for you. And what’s more, my bed and every other piece of furniture in this house have been instructed that after I leave, they’re to teleport any living creature they touch right into the part of school where you’re scheduled to be at that particular moment in time. How you explain your appearance there is going to be your problem.”

“I’ll take the wizardry apart.”

“I’ve password-locked it. If you want, you can spend all day trying to unlock it from outside the house… and then still have to explain to Dad why you weren’t in school again. After he’s just spent an hour discussing the same subject with your principal. Meanwhile, if you want to sleep anywhere, you can do it on Pluto, if you like — but you’re not doing it in this house till after you get back from school.“

The bedroom door was flung open, and Dairine stormed through it, past Nita and toward the bathroom, head down, in a fury, refusing to give her sister so much as a glance. The severity of the effect was somewhat lessened by the dust bunnies that parted company with Dairine’s pajamas along the way, floating gendy in the air behind her.

“I wish I knew what alien force has kidnapped my sister and left this vindictive thug of a pod person in her place,” Dairine said to the air, slamming the bathroom door shut. “Because when I find out, I’m going to hunt it down and kick however many rear ends it has from here to Alphecca!”

Nita stood there for a moment, watching a final dust bunny float toward the floor. “Enjoy your day,” she said sweetly, and went to get her book bag.

Her meetings with Mr. Millman were always about an hour before homeroom, so that they were finished ten or fifteen minutes before other students started to arrive for the day. The covert quality of the meetings was enhanced by the fact that Mr. Millman didn’t even have his own office, because he traveled from school to school in the district every day. Neither he nor anyone else in school knew where he was going to be from one session to the next. Nita most often found him in a spare office down in the administrative wing of the school, a room furnished with a metal desk and a few wooden chairs and not much else. Today he was there, sitting behind the old beat-up desk with the office door open, and working intently on one of those metal-ring puzzles in which the five constituent rings have to be interlaced.

This kind of behavior was typical of Mr. Millman, and was one of the redeeming features of having to deal with him. Whatever you might imagine a school shrink as being like, or looking like, he wasn’t that. He was young. He had a large, itizzy black beard that made him look more like an off-duty pirate or an escaped Renaissance artist than a psychologist, and his long lanky build and loose-limbed walk made him look like a refugee from a Cheech and Chong movie. Though he wore a suit, he did so as if it had an invisible sign on the back of it saying, THEY MADE ME WEAR THIS: DON’T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. He looked Up at Nita from the ring-puzzle with a resigned expression. “Morning, Nita. You any good at these?”

“Morning, Mr. M.” She sat down in front of the desk and took the rings he offered her.

Fortunately Nita knew how the puzzle worked, and she handed the rings back to him, braided together, in about fifteen seconds.

He looked at the puzzle with helpless amusement. “Halfway to a doctorate,” he said, “and I still have no grasp of spatial relationships. Remind me not to go into rocket science. How’ve your last couple of days been?”

“Not the best,” Nita said. “I had to throw my sister out of bed this morning. She didn’t want to go to school again.”

“That seems to be turning into a routine,” Mr. Millman said. “And from your expression, I get the feeling she didn’t appreciate it. She try the line about your mother again?”

Nita nodded.

“And you didn’t punch her out?”

Nita allowed herself a slight smile. “The temptation was there…”

They talked for maybe twenty minutes. Millman’s style wasn’t so much that of a shrink as that of a coach, Nita had decided: no long silences, no mmm-hmms that transparently tried to draw you out and get you to talk about things. You talked or not, as you pleased, and Mr. Millman did the same. You asked questions or answered them, or didn’t answer them, also as you pleased. It was all very leisurely and casual, and Nita was sure that Mr. Millman was getting a lot more out of what she said than she suspected. But, possibly because of the way he handled their sessions, she found that this wasn’t bothering her. “Any more of those nightmares?” Mr. Millman said at one point.

“Some weird dreams,” Nita said.

“Scary?”

“Not the one this morning. I felt more useless than anything else.” Nita wasn’t going to go too far into the specifics.

“Goes along with the rest of the symptoms at this point,” Mr. Millman said. “The loss of appetite, the sleep troubles, and the mood swings—”

“Depression,” Nita said.

Mr. Millman nodded. “That feeling of weight,” he said. “Or of being weighted down…of feeling like your face’ll crack if you smile.”

“I wish I could make it go away,” Nita said.

“Fighting it probably won’t make it go away faster. May prolong it, in fact. Let it be there, and do your best to work around it, or through it, and do what you usually do. Work on things you would normally enjoy.” Mr. Millman leaned back in the chair and stretched. “I would say play, but no one wants to hear that word at a time like this: It makes them feel guilty, even if it’s what they need. If you have projects you work on, hobbies, keep them alive. You’ll be glad you did, later — the work you do at a time like this is likely to be worth keeping. You do have hobbies?”

“Astronomy,” Nita said. “Gardening — I help my dad.” And then she added, “Magic.”

And instantly panicked. Now why did I say that?

Millman raised his eyebrows.

Oh, god, no. What have I done

?! Nita thought. I'm gonna have to wash his brains now! And that’s a bad thing to do to your shrink—

“Ah, legerdemain,” Millman said. “An interesting field. Not enough women in it. Some kind of gender bar there; don’t ask me why all the famous magicians have been men. Anyway, it has to be good for your hand-eye coordination. Show me some card tricks, someday.” He looked at his watch.

“Not now, though— someone else will be here shortly.”

“Thanks, Mr. M.,” Nita said, and escaped from his office as quickly as she could, wondering if, despite all Mr. Millman’s casual reassurances, she was actually going crazy.

Kit had spent most of the previous day recovering from the exertions of following Ponch into the other-world where they’d found Darryl. It wasn’t as if he’d actually done so much wizardry himself, but it seemed to Kit that Ponch drew on his own power somewhat. And then there’s the leash, Kit thought, as he headed into the kitchen to snatch a hurried breakfast. He’d overslept, partly in reaction to maintaining the leash- wizardry and the shield-spell, partly just because of physical tiredness from toiling up and down all those dunes. His calf muscles certainly ached badly enough.

But just as wearying, in their own way, were the events he’d seen taking place.

And also tiring, in a different way, was the amount of time he’d had to spend comforting Ponch afterward. The dog had seemed all right when they first got back, and had gone through the promised dog biscuits as if he