Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates (2 page)

I look at Mom, surprised that Mom would tell Principal Meyers about my past, but Mom shakes her head just enough that I realize she hasn’t said a word except the lies and half-truths that I’m supposed to remember, and I blush, which is embarrassing in and of itself.

“Yeah,” I say in my best slouchy American manner (even though I know I don’t have the accent exactly right), “I guess.”

“It’ll probably be hard for you to adjust to the regulated lifestyle we have here at Central High,” Principal Meyers says, as if my slouchy attitude is something she expected. “If you have any troubles, just let one of your teachers know that you’d like to get in touch with me.”

I don’t see how come I can’t get in touch with her directly if I want to be in touch with her, and I open my mouth to say that when Mom kicks me in the shin.

“Okay,” I say, and Principal Meyers thinks I’m talking to her when I’m really talking to Mom. I’m beginning to wonder how I’m going to get through the day without Mom hanging on my every word, when Principal Meyers slides a sheet of paper in front of us.

“Here’s your schedule,” she says to me. “We’ve done the best we could with what’s open and the fact that you’ve been home-schooled overseas. We’ve learned that our overseas students are often ahead of our local students in areas like math and science, so we put you in advanced classes there—”

I look at Mom, terrified. I had arithmetic, thanks to Athena, but real math—like, hello!, who needs math when they can conjure anything they want?

“—and we’re putting you in three remedial social studies classes, figuring your American history is probably a bit behind, and—”

“Actually,” Mom says, “I think we’ll have to redo this. Tiffany will be excellent in things like Greek Mythology.”

I glare at her again. Doesn’t she know that “myth” word pisses off the Powers That Be? And then I remember that the Powers That Be aren’t monitoring my every move any more. I’ve been demoted from head of all magic (actually, that was me, as Interim Fate) and my powers taken away until I’m menopausal (like, y’know, a thousand lifetimes from now) and no one cares if I say or do something bad because it won’t have magical consequences.

And while I was censoring all that, Mom was going on about my schedule and the fact that I need remedial algebra (whatever that is) and basic science and she and Principal Meyers are staring at the various openings on the computer and finally, Principal Meyers turns to me and says,

“Good heavens. What did you study at your father’s house?”

I shrug and say, “You know. Basics. Like History of the Magical Universe, and Spellcasting 101-200 and—”

Mom kicks me again, and my blush gets worse. “Her father is very New Agey. You can see why I was finally able to get custody.”

The principal looks at her in sympathy. “I should say. Well, we’ll just redo this, and let Tiffany find her way.”

Then she looks at me and says, “You know, there’s a large fundamentalist contingent in this community. While we try to be open-minded, you might want to keep some of your magical history to yourself.”

I swallow real hard, then the principal goes back to her computer and I glare at Mom. I mouth,
You said she’d have trouble with this
, and Mom glares back (probably because she can’t understand me) and I have a hunch we’ll talk about this later. That’s Mom’s answer to everything. Talk. Which is better than Dad’s, which is to pat me on the head and tell me it’ll all work out. If he listens at all.

So they hand me this schedule, tell me I’ve already missed P.E. (Principal Meyers proudly says they’re one of the few schools in Oregon that can still afford regular P.E., whatever that is), and send me off to American History (Overview) which is one of those remedial social studies courses that somehow stayed on my schedule. The principal also gave me a map (!) and a few directions, and Mom waved at me, saying she’s going to stay to wrap up a few things—probably clean up some of the dumb things I said—and off I go, into the sea of people I’ve never met.

All mortals. Of which, apparently, I am now one.

TWO

OKAY, HERE’S THE
thing, and I know it’s going to be hard, not just because Mom and I spent most of last night talking about it, but because I can already feel it.

My dad broke the rules. He’s always broken the rules, which is beside the point, but usually he breaks them for him. Only he also figures his kids are part of him, so they don’t get any rules either.

What you need to know, and what you probably don’t know (not that I know who you are, but I like to pretend that you’re there), is that there are two classes of people: the magical and the mortals. We’re all mortal, but the magical live longer (like hundreds of years longer), so we call the short-lived, non-magical creatures mortals. Confusing, I know, but it gets worse.

The magical don’t come into their powers until after menopause for women and around twenty-one for men. Unfair, and lots of people are fighting that rule right now because it is arbitrary (and has something else to do with my dad, who is a conniver of the first order), but that’s neither here nor there. What is here and there is that Dad let all us kids have our powers right from the very start, which is how he got custody of us.

He was really careful. Except for a few Greek women waaaaay back at the dawn of time, he never slept with mortal women. All the women he’s been involved with (and seriously, that’s like a thousand) have been mages-to-be. They haven’t come into their powers, but they will.

He’s been married to my stepmom Hera forever. But he has affairs. In fact, he’s famous in literature for his affairs, and he always has kids from them, and the kids are magical, and my mom knew about the affairs when she got involved with him in her senior year abroad or whatever graduate program she was doing in Greece before I was born.

He treated my mom like he treats all the women: he has his fun, sends them home (usually pregnant), and waits. They’ve all had these magical babies who, because they’re Zeus’s kids, have fully formed powers. So the baby can create fire just because it sees a fire, and the mom can’t do anything about it, and so the mom calls my dad, who appears and makes a deal.

The moms are tired, they’re angry, they’re feeling alone and overwhelmed. They agree to whatever my dad wants if he’ll only control the baby’s magic. And the deal is always this: Dad’ll raise us (he doesn’t, though. He usually sends us off to Naiads or someone else for the bulk of the time) and he’ll take care of everything: education, food, clothing. The mom has to agree to spend the summer at Mount Olympus with all the other moms and all the other kids, which is great for us, but, I never realized until this year, lousy for them.

Because my mom is so tough, she got Dad to agree to give her time alone with me in the place of her choice once my magic got a little under control. So I know my mom as a mom, unlike Crystal, whose mom got tired of the whole thing, gave up the Olympus trips, and remarried. I think about Crystal a lot, and I worry, but we can only talk on the weekends now—we have a conference call and it’s not long enough—and we’re not allowed e-mail until after the winter holidays for the sake of adjustment.

At least, that’s what our therapist says. Mom says it’s so we have time to bond with our mothers. Yeah, right.

Anyway, the tough part of all of this is that until a few months ago, I thought of the world as mages and mortals. I figured I was a mage and then there were these little mortal creatures wandering around. I had no idea that all mages have a few decades as mortals (except for Zeus’s kids), so they have more
empathy
for mortals and some of them even have
sympathy
for them.

But here I am, mortal now in that I don’t have magical powers anymore, and I am, in Mom’s words, worse than a baby in my approach to what she calls the real world, and I’m supposed to interact with all these people that I used to think of as nothing, and I’ve seen the high school movies.

These people are going to be mean to me. And I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m scared.

I’m walking down this hall, looking for a room called 201A, when this kid—he’s tall and gangly and he wears clothing two sizes too big—sidles up to me, and he says, “So what’s an Interim Fate?”

I can’t give the real answer. Mom said the shirt would be a problem, but me and Brittany and Crystal all promised each other we’d wear these shirts on our first day of school, so I am.

“Well?” he asks. He’s got great brown eyes and a strong chin. He’s kinda cute in a Zac Ephron sort of way. Which makes him a little too nice-guy for me.

“It’s a rock band.” I had a bunch of other prepared answers, but they seem too lame for a guy like him.

“You’re in a rock band?”

I shrug and keep walking, pretending to be cool, because as everybody knows, pretending is halfway to being cool.

“Seriously, you’re in a rock band?”

“I was,” I say, clutching my little pink purse against my side. “We broke up.”

And for some reason that makes me tear up. I don’t want him to see it (besides, it would mess up my mascara), so I blink really hard.

“I’m Josh,” he says.

“Tiff.” And then because he looks like the kind of guy who’ll ask too many questions, I beat him to it. “You know where 201A is?”

“Down the hall to the left. You got Mr. McGuillicuty, huh? I thought he was only for losers.”

I glare at this Josh, wishing I could turn him into a toad, like I would have done (even if it would’ve made Athena mad), but he doesn’t seem to mind. He laughs, and says, “Good luck,” and then points around the corner, and adds, “You go thataway.”

So I go thataway, down this narrower corridor that has only five rooms in it, like someone forgot to finish off this part of the school. Room 201A is at the very end. It’s big, with those desks like you see in all the movies, with the chair and the desk built together, and I slide into one toward the back. Who knew these things would be so uncomfortable? There’s no cushions, and the wood is splintery, and the desk is sticky.

The other kids are already there and they have these big thick books called, of all things,
American History
(like they’d say Greek History in an American History class), and the books are open. Some kids are sleeping on top of their open books, others are actually drawing in them, and a few are reading.

A couple of kids look at me sideways, but no one says anything. The guy up front, who has to be the teacher, is short and kinda paunchy. He’s wearing one of those thin summer sweaters that only look good on guys like Brad Pitt, and his hair is falling out. I’ve never seen guys with hair falling out. Mages only use that as a disguise, since they can repair their hair, so this guy looks even more pathetic than usual to me.

“Do you have something for me?” he asks, staring at me. No
hello
, no
you must be the new girl
, no
what are you doing here
. Just
do you have something for me
, which is kinda rude and a little suggestive and I’m blushing again.

“He means,” the girl next to me whispers, “do you have paperwork for him.”

“I can tell her what I mean, Ms. Foster,” the guy says. And then he doesn’t. “Well?”

I hold up the schedule. “All the principal gave me is this.”

“Um-hum,” he says. “I’m supposed to initial it for you. And I need your name and information for roll.”

Roll. I blink. I don’t understand that either, but I figure if I pretend I do, I’ll look a little normal. I get out of the chair/desk thing—and that’s harder than it looks—and I head up to the big oak teacher’s desk, which has an even larger version of
American History
on it, along with a couple of red, white, and blue pamphlets marked
Study Aids for American History
. Next to it are some hand-scrawled notes and computer printouts, with names and markings on them.

He takes the schedule from me and initials it. Then he studies it. “Not a rocket scientist, are we, Ms. VanDerHoven?”

I blink again. Kids are chuckling behind me, and I have a sense that he means something other than what he’s saying, but I have no clue. So I say, “Nope. Just a student, sir.”

A student who, last month, could have turned you into the weasel you are. I glare, but my glare no longer has power. It’s just a teen-girl-glare, which, the movies have convinced me, is a common thing.

“You’re here from Greece?” he says that really loud, like he’s trying to embarrass me in front of everyone.

“There and a bunch of other places,” I say. “My dad travels a lot.”

“And now he’s here?”

I square my shoulders. “My mom has custody now.”

He doesn’t even have the grace to be embarrassed. I’m beginning to think weasel’s too good for him. My fingers are twitching. They want to snap, have magic slide from them and sparkle through the air, and turn him into something awful, but they can’t. I mean, they can snap, but nothing else’ll happen.

“Well, your fancy European education won’t get you very far in my class,” he says.

“Nothing does,” someone says behind me, and everybody laughs. Mr. McGuillicuty looks at them, his beady eyes narrowing.