Crystal Caves (4 page)

Which I took to be a no.

“You’re not supposed to have contact,” Megan says, “except on Saturdays.”

“Well,” I snap. “I don’t like that.”

“Why not?” Megan asks, like it’s a reasonable question. How would she like it if someone forbade her from contacting the only people in the world she ever spent time with? She’d hate it too.

She’s watching me with that intense look, and if I’m not careful, she’ll pull an answer from me.

“Crystal?” she asks. “Tell me why you don’t like it.”

And before I can squeeze my lips shut, they’ve already flapped. “Who the hell am I supposed to talk to? Nobody here even knows my name.”

“Now that’s probably an exaggeration,” Megan says.

“Wave your arm,” I say. “Use some real magic. Bring the three monsters in here or good ole EEEEE. See if they know what my name really is.”

She gives me that look again, and I can tell she’s probing me to see if I’m lying.

“Is it that bad?” she asks.

“It’s worse,” I say.

“What about school?” she asks.

“What about it?”

“Do you have any friends there?”

And I sigh. Friends. Yeah, actually, I have friends.

But I can’t talk to them either.

THREE

I DON’T TALK to Megan about my friends. I don’t talk to anyone about my friends. I feel like my friends are mine.

Megan stares at me from her big brown chair. The plants curl around her as if they like her better than me. Her hands rest on the chair’s arms, and she looks at me with those bright green eyes.

I can feel the pull, but I won’t tell her anything.

Or, at least, I’m going to try not to.

I’ve managed to keep quiet about my friends so far. I didn’t even tell Megan what school’s been like.

On the first day, I made a lot of friends. On the second day, I found out that most of them wanted to know me because my stepfather is Owen Wright, one of the richest men in Manhattan, which is, apparently, saying something.

By day three, I’d weeded out the dweebs and morons and hangers-on and kept the most useful of the so-called friends: Melanie, Veronica, and Agatha.

Melanie is the daughter of one of the richest women in the world—not just in Manhattan. Melanie has been to boarding schools all over Europe and finally begged to come home to New York to spend time with her family. Time there, apparently, is a lot like my time with mine. She doesn’t believe in being disappointed. She believes in getting even.

The nice thing about Melanie is that she doesn’t think my accent is weird. She has a bit of one herself. She’s tiny and black-haired and manages to make her school uniform look like a fashion statement. (I have no idea how she does that since we have to wear lovely plaid skirts that go to our knees, socks that rise to our knees, horrible black shoes that look like they belong on “staff,” and white shirts that never manage to stay white, but somehow, she always looks better than the rest of us.)

Veronica does think my accent is weird, but Veronica works hard at being perfect. She’s blonde—although not a natural blonde (learned that in gym; wouldn’t’ve noticed if she hadn’t asked one day in the shower if she should dye her pubes or shave them)—and she’s about ten pounds lighter than she should be. Only she doesn’t diet. Dieting, she says, is for idiots—you only regain the pounds. Instead, she exercises like a fiend. If she doesn’t get in three hours a day, she considers the day wasted.

Her uniform hangs on her, but it doesn’t matter because her hair is so spectacular it’s like its own art form. It’s long and she wears it differently every day—up or in ponytails or teased or curled. Now that I don’t have magic, I realize just how much work this is, and I am very, very impressed. She also manages to wear makeup even though we’re forbidden that too, and it’s so perfect it enhances her lovely skin and dark brown eyes instead of drawing attention to itself.

Oddly, Veronica’s family isn’t rich. She’s a scholarship student, but she pretends like she’s got money. She gets some extra money by selling things, which Agatha doesn’t approve of. Mostly, though, Melanie helps—Veronica was her project early on, until it became clear that Veronica doesn’t need help with anything, and they manage to run most everything around the school—or they would if they cared enough.

Mostly, they let Agatha do it. Agatha has dirty brown hair that curls all around her face, skin that’s a light tan, and soft blue eyes. Her father is one of the most influential politicians in the city, which is as far as I understand since this political system is beyond me. She doesn’t have much money either, but she has clout, and if she wants something done, it gets done, even with the teachers.

Agatha
cares,
and she thinks we should care too. Every now and then, Melanie and Veronica help her with some project, and she helps them with whatever they need around the school. She thinks I should get super-involved in school politics to “fill the void” left by my family, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around it.

I can barely wrap my head around the schedule, which seems needlessly complex—in one room during one hour; another room the next. It seems to me the teachers should rotate, not the students, but everyone laughed when I asked why that wasn’t happening.

And the subject matter, holy temple of doom! The subject matter makes the schedule look easy. I spent a month preparing to come here in private study with Athena back in Olympus, and nothing she taught me, I mean
nothing,
got me ready for this stuff. (Except math. Turns out I’m good at math. In fact, I’m better than everyone else my age at math. Who knew?)

Fortunately for me, Melanie, Veronica, and Agatha have taught me how to game the system. As Veronica says, “If you can’t do it, pretend.” So I do. Melanie showed me how to get the teachers to mark me present (half our grades) and Agatha has promised to help on mid-terms, whatever they are. All three introduced me to the good students who write papers for a fee, and since I have the world’s most unlimited credit card, buying papers isn’t hard.

Agatha did point out that I wouldn’t really be getting an education—someone else would be learning the stuff I’m supposed to learn—but I don’t care. Someone else has always learned the stuff I’m supposed to learn. First it was Tiff, now it’s these nameless girls who write for money.

I am learning that money in this New York world works pretty much the same as magic. You can get whatever you want if you pay for it. The only difference is that you don’t get it as quickly in New York and you can’t actually make people disappear. As in vanish. Not as in buried in concrete boots in the Hudson.

Melanie, Veronica, and Agatha came up with the iPhone idea after I explained about my sisters. M, V, & A all think that not being allowed to talk to my sisters is wrong, and I should do whatever I can to game the system. iPhones, as Melanie pointed out, do ninety percent of it.

The fact that this little game didn’t work because of the other two mothers posed a problem none of us expected. But when I told M, V, & A about it at school, they shrugged as if it was no big deal and Melanie said, “So you failed once. Try again.”

“You just have to be smarter than the average bear,” Veronica said, which I know is slang, but not slang I understand (entirely, anyway. I get it; just don’t know why bears are relevant).

“The key to winning,” Agatha said, “is dusting yourself off and finding a better way.”

They promised me they’d help me find a better way to communicate with my sisters. We’re supposed to work on it all week.

Of course, I say nothing about Melanie, Veronica, or Agatha to Megan. I haven’t moved on her couch because I’m trying to mimic her expression. We both have green eyes, and I wonder whether, if I concentrate hard enough, mine can pull information out of her head like she pulls information out of mine.

She’s staring at me like she’s heard my entire mental digression—and no matter how it seems, I know that empaths are not psychics. She can’t hear my thoughts, just feel my emotions.

“I assume your friends know who you are,” Megan says, bringing me back to the conversation at hand.

She’s the one who brought up friends, and I’ve been taking my time answering. Because I don’t want to talk to her at all.

“Of course my friends don’t know who I am,” I say. “Do you really think I should tell them I’m a daughter of Zeus, forced to give up her magic because her favorite sister is pissed at the world?”

“Is that why you gave up your magic?” Megan asks. God, I hate it when she does that. I’m saying one thing, and she twists it into something else.

That’s how I get off balance, and I can’t be off balance if I want to keep things private.

“Did anyone consult me about giving up magic?” I ask in return.

“Yes.” Megan doesn’t even sound flapped. I wanted to make her sound flapped, and I can’t seem to do it. I try every single stupid session.

“We did ask you,” she says. “We asked you and Brittany what you wanted. And you were the one who first said that none of you wanted to be Interim Fates anymore.”

“That didn’t mean I wanted to give up my magic,” I say.

“But that was a condition, and you three girls agreed to it.”

“What was I supposed to do?” I ask. “Be different? Make it harder for them?”

Megan leans back in her chair as if she hasn’t contemplated this. Or maybe she just doesn’t know how I feel. Maybe I give her too much credit.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s the point of this exercise.”

She discusses my life like it’s an exercise. It’s a life, and it’s hard, and I’m not getting any credit for that.

She says, “You’re supposed to develop your own identity.”

“I had an identity,” I say. “I was an Interim Fate.”

“That’s not an identity,” Megan says. “That was a job.”

And she doesn’t add, because she’s nice, that I sucked at that job. But I miss it. I even miss the damn library filled with all the magic books (and the faint scent of dog pee, because a familiar got scared one day, and we had no idea how to clean properly [or even magically]).

“Do you remember what you and I discussed in our very first session?” Megan asks. “Remember how we said you would have a choice between becoming a crazy powerful mage—”

“With emphasis on the word
crazy
,” I say mockingly. “I know.”

She nods toward me. “Or,” she adds, clearly not willing to let it go, “you could learn how to be a good person who also has magic.”

“I have no idea how keeping my magic now will make me crazy,” I say. “Living
here
is making me crazy. And it
wasn’t my decision
.”

Megan frowns. “How come you didn’t stand up for yourself when we first brought this up?”

“Against you and Tiff?” I say. “Like I can do that.”

“You don’t know unless you try,” Megan says.

I cross my arms and look down.

“You’re mad at me,” Megan says.

That’s one of the most annoying parts of being around an empath. She has to communicate your emotions to you, but the effect is that she’s stating the obvious, and when I’m mad, all it does is piss me off more.

“So yell at me,” she says.

I shake my head.

“Why won’t you?” she asks.

“Because what’s the point?” I snap. “My magic’s gone, I’m here, I’m making the best of it.”

“Is that what you’ve always done?” Megan asks. “Make the best of it?”

There she goes, stating the obvious again. I have gone along my entire life, and when I can’t go along, I pretend. When Veronica told me to pretend I was learning in school, she jumped right into my wheelhouse.

I’m great at pretend.

“What do you think?” I say to Megan. I’m not succumbing to her verbal tricks anymore. It doesn’t get us anywhere.

It doesn’t get
me
anywhere.

“I think you have a right to be angry,” Megan says and I feel my heart leap. Maybe she does understand. Maybe she gets what I’m trying to tell her…

And then she goes and wrecks it by adding, “If, of course, what you’re saying isn’t revisionism. I mean, it can’t be pleasant at your mother’s apartment if no one there talks to you.”

And I sink deeper into the anger. Revisionism. Yeah, I make all of this up. All the damn time. Because it makes me feel better.

“You
can
yell at me, you know,” Megan says.

“What good’ll it do me?” I ask. “Will you send me home?”

“Where’s home?” she asks, and I feel my mouth open in surprise. What the hell does that mean, where’s home? Home is Mount Olympus, where she took me from. Where I got banished from.

“That’s the stupidest question you’ve ever asked,” I say.

“I need you to answer,” she says calmly, as if I haven’t just challenged her.

“You know where home is,” I say. “You took me away from there.”

“You still haven’t answered me,” she says. By the Powers, she’s stubborn.