Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates (13 page)

“Her mom has a staff of employees who work in their apartment. Apparently she leaves it to them to keep track of what Crystal is doing.”

“So?” I say.

“So, that’s no way to raise a child,” Mom says.

“You let Dad keep track of us and he had other people raise us,” I say.

Mom looks away, but not before I see something in her eyes. Sadness? Regret? Anger? I can’t tell.

“I didn’t know,” Mom says.

“Well, now you do.”

Mom sighs. “I’m trying to make up for that.”

“Now that I’m manageable,” I say.

She turns toward me. There’s no expression on her face at all, like she’s hidden who she is or something. “What do you mean?”

“Without my magic,” I say, thinking of that smoke stain in my bedroom and how she never really told me what happened. “You can handle me when I’m dumb and powerless and clueless.”

Mom lets out a half laugh. “Handle you? Honey, I can barely figure any of this out.”

“So let me have my iPhone.”

She shakes her head. “We made an agreement. We’re going to stick to it.”

“Even if Crystal and Brittany don’t?”

“Even if,” Mom says. “That’s what agreements are. They’re something you honor.”

She stands up, and holds out her hands.

“Let me have the iPhone,” she says. “I’ll send it back.”

“It’s mine,” I say.

She shakes her head. “I told Monique that we’d send it back.”

“Like she cares.”

“I care,” Mom says. “Give it to me.”

She has that look, the one that scares me.

I hand her the iPhone. My hands are shaking. I’m torn between anger and something else, something really sad. If I say something, I’ll either scream or cry. I’m not sure which.

So I don’t say anything.

As she takes the iPhone, Mom pats my hand.

“Thanks, Tiff,” she says. “You’ve done the right thing.”

It doesn’t feel like I’ve done the right thing. It feels like I’ve betrayed who I am again. Like I’ve betrayed Crystal and Brittany. What if Crystal did this because she needs me as much as I need her? Maybe more, if her mom isn’t paying attention.

We’re all by ourselves here, and for some reason, the adults think that’s a really good idea.

I walk back to my room, even though Mom’s calling after me. She must’ve seen something on my face. I can hear her getting closer, but I just keep going, and when I get to my room, I go inside and close the door.

Mom says closed doors are necessary for privacy. We have to respect each other’s closed doors. Well, she gets to test that now, because I’m not opening the door for days.

She was wrong. That package is a bomb. It’s a bomb that she tossed in the middle of our relationship, and I’m not ever going to forgive her.

TWELVE

EVENTUALLY, I DID
have to come out of my room (unlike both Crystal and Brittany, I don’t have a private bathroom—and I got hungry too), so I figured I wouldn’t talk to Mom except the necessities. Y’know, yes, no, whatever. That kind of stuff.

I managed to keep it up through breakfast, but I was pretty relieved to get to school. Not talking to the one person who actually talks to me is getting old. Still, I had something to look forward to when I arrived at school—lunch with Olivia.

English is after lunch, so I don’t see her until I get to the lunchroom. I almost don’t go—I’m so nervous about this I feel like a baby. I mean, really, why should I care if some Goth chick meets me or not? Some
mortal
Goth chick, whom I’m probably going to outlive by centuries.

Why should I care?

But I do. I care so much I almost don’t go because if I go, I’ll know if she forgot or blew me off or invited her little Goth friends to laugh at me like people do in movies.

Although Mom says I can’t believe movies.

How am I supposed to live my life then? Nothing makes any sense anymore.

In the end, I decide to go, mostly because I can’t stand the suspense. I mean, is she there? Isn’t she there? I have to know.

So I wait in the girl’s bathroom about as far from the lunch area as you can get. I sit on the can (now that
is
slang, but I’ve heard girls here use it, so I feel okay about it) and look at the second hand on my watch, giving it two full sweeps before I even let myself out of the stall.

A couple of girls whose parents disapprove of makeup (which to me is like disapproving of breathing) are reapplying their mascara. They have these claw-like things that they clamp onto their eyelashes to make them curl upwards. Until I came here, I’d never seen anything like it, and I’m told (by Mom and Google, among other things) that these “eyelash curlers” aren’t really in style.

Can’t tell it from good old Central High (Home of the Cougars!). Here, eyelash curlers, blue eye shadow, and cheek glitter will be in style forever.

The girls don’t even acknowledge me, not that they can, with their mouths open and their eyes half closed, their eyelashes fluttering like butterflies about to be trapped in a net. I wonder if their boyfriends know how ridiculous they look.

Probably. And they probably don’t care. One of the books Megan gave me (she gave me a pile on practical stuff) says boys and girls in their teen years are victims of their hormones (and yes, it explains hormones), so some understanding should be applied in interactions with them. Meaning, one of the books says, if a guy looks at your chest before looking at your face, it’s only because his hormones make him check you out. It’s your job to correct him—tell him to look at you like a person and stuff like that.

Apparently girls have mood swings, but how can you tell when everyone here is so moody anyway?

I gave up on that book almost as soon as I opened it, but some stuff sticks with you. Like the stuff about boys being interested in anything in skirts that’s interested back. Not that anyone but the cheerleaders here wear skirts, but you know what I mean.

So I head through the empty halls (everyone’s in class except one or two dweebs trying to get there before second bell) about three minutes late. I decided on three minutes last hour, figuring it’s not so late that I’m impolite, nor is it late enough to miss the actual buying of the food, but it’s not so early that I seem eager, and it’s not on time, which seems to be a crime here (unless you miss class, and too many tardies mean you lose grade points—and yes, someone has explained grade points to me. I plan to get straight As, or at least I did, until I realized that everyone else has all these cultural assumptions ahead of me—like having had arithmetic [it’s assumed they did!] and the same cultural history [no myths until last year] and a basic understanding of U.S. geography, which still has me bamboozled).

Anyway
, I get to the cafeteria and there she is, standing just outside the door, looking as nervous as I feel. Only because I’m approaching, I get to check her out before she sees me.

When she sees me, she gives me this goofy, black-lipped grin (I don’t get the black makeup thing either) and says we can go to McDonald’s—she’s buying.

“I’m not big on McDonald’s,” I say, looking into the cafeteria, almost with longing. It’s not that I want to eat in there. I just want the people who’ve ignored me to notice that I’m eating in there with someone else. “That whole
Supersize Me
thing.”

Which reminds me that I’m getting all my information from movies, and maybe I should see for myself.

So before she can say anything, I add, “But who cares? Once isn’t going to hurt me, right?”

“Naw,” she says, shoving her books into an oversized bag with fringe at the bottom. “Besides, they got salads now.”

I didn’t know they didn’t have salads before. Maybe I should try stuff before I let someone else’s judgment get in the way of mine.

We push open the double glass doors that lead to the parking lot. Those are the only doors open during the school day, and they’re monitored, not just by bored-looking teachers on monitor duty, but also by cameras, in case someone comes in with a rifle or something like
Bowling For Columbine
. And that I know is the case, because Mom told me there was some real bad tragedy here (not Eugene, but its sister city, Springfield [just across the bridge]), and even though it happened, like, years ago, everyone’s still “justifiably” paranoid.

I’m not sure exactly what that means except that the doors are locked and kids actually have to go through these metal detector things before we go into the school proper and we don’t get to have lockers except in gym class, but we can’t store anything in them except our smelly gym suits, so what’s the point?

Outside smells of cigarette smoke. A bunch of students huddle near the building, and a couple of teachers lounge there too, even though they’re careful to stay outside of camera range (like no one knows what they’re doing. Hello!). Once we get past the smoke zone, the air is pretty fresh. Not as fresh as on the Mediterranean, but I’m beginning to realize that some parts of home (and not even the people parts) can’t be replicated just anywhere.

Me and Olivia cross the parking lot in silence. A bunch of other kids, including some of the Helen Minions, are several yards ahead of us, all heading to McDonald’s. Maybe that
Supersize Me
movie isn’t true, because all the Helen Minions go to McDonald’s and none of them are even approaching fat.

I say that to Olivia, and she grins at me.

“That’s because they yack,” she says.

I can feel a blush starting, but I will it away. If I can’t magic it away, I’m going to stop it by sheer force of personality. And to my own surprise, I do.

“I’m still pretty new to this country,” I say, “and one thing I don’t exactly get is the slang.”

“You don’t know yack?” Olivia says.

I shake my head. “Except like that song my mom likes about yackety-yack.”

“Your mom is
old
,” Olivia says.

“My mom isn’t old,” I say. “My dad is.”

Olivia looks at me sideways. Her black eyes glitter, like mention of my dad is the dish she’s been waiting for.

“He’s the one who had to give you up?” she asks.

“He didn’t give me up,” I say. “I’m still his daughter.”

“I mean, he lost custody of you, right?”

I shake my head. “No one has custody of me. I’m my own person.”

Who lives with her mom and doesn’t have money and no longer has magic and seems totally out of control. But hey, besides that.

“But you can’t live with him anymore,” Olivia says. I’m not sure I like how bright her eyes are.

“I chose to live with my mom,” I say, which is basically true. “It wasn’t working with my dad.”

“He beat you, huh?” Olivia opens the doors leading into that little anteroom that all American businesses seem to have. It’s like a
Star Trek
airlock between the indoors and the outdoors, but unlike in
Star Trek,
doesn’t seem to have any real purpose.

The air here smells greasy, and the smell gets worse when we get inside the McDonald’s proper. I didn’t expect the place to be so big. And off to one side are parents, peering through windows at something called Playland, where a bunch of little kids jump on balls and go through tunnels and scream a lot.

The noise level in here is outrageous. In addition to the screaming, everyone’s talking at once, and there’s some kind of syrupy music on the overhead speakers that gets interrupted now and then with some name or number. Students are sitting at all the tables. The guys are eating these huge burgers and the girls are picking at salads but steal the guys’ French fries.

“You were going to tell me what yack is,” I say as I watch some girl inhale a big box of someone else’s fries.

Olivia grins at me. Then she sticks her tongue out and her finger down her throat in the universal gesture for barfing.

I make a face. I’ve heard of this forced barfing stuff, but I didn’t believe it. I guess that is one of the things from the movies that is true.

She leads me up to the counter. I let her get in line ahead of me so I can check my purse. I do have enough money to order something, but not a lot. (I hadn’t asked Mom for lunch money today because—y’know—we’re not talking.)

I get some kind of chicken sandwich without the fries (it’s not that I don’t want to try them; I just can’t afford them) and the guy at the counter—who is obviously too old to be in high school—laughs when I ask for free bottled water. He gives me a tiny cup and tells me to fill up from the pop machine.

“Just get soda,” Olivia says, but I don’t. I decide I’m going to suffer with the little water cup. I’ve had soda and it makes me loopy. Mom says it’s all the sugar. I’m not used to all the sugar this society eats, not at all.

Olivia shows me how to get water out of the soda machine, which seems like an unnecessarily complicated procedure, and then the guy from the counter says Olivia’s name. On a tray is her salad and hot apple pie and my chicken sandwich, which is deep fat fried and doesn’t look half as bad as the movies made these things out to be.