Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates (4 page)

A book made me look too nerdy.

But if I just sat there, watching everyone else, I looked needy.

I realized that I had never, ever eaten a meal by myself before. Not once in my whole life. It was either me and Mom (on our trips together) or me and Brittany and Crystal (most of the time) or me and the whole dysfunctional family at some heroic banquet or something.

Never just me.

I didn’t know what to do.

I ate the cake first. It was too sweet and kinda gooey, and I set it aside.

No one noticed. No one even looked.

Then I ate the banana kinda slow. It was a little green, but I didn’t care. I was really hungry.

The kids one table over were playing cards with real cards. The boys two tables over were passing around some pictures on their phones and giggling—I mean
giggling
. I’d never heard boys giggle before.

A couple of girls were sharing earbuds, with a phone between them, like they were listening to the same music or something. Some guys leaned against the wall, phones in one hand, messing with the screens with their thumbs. For some reason, that made me really nervous.

Three girls sat at separate tables all by themselves. They read their schoolbooks. Another girl sat alone and read a novel. They were all either overweight or wore ugly glasses or had awful clothes.

A boy sat alone too, but he was tapping stuff on a tablet computer thingie, and seemed like he didn’t care about what was happening around him.

Kids came from the cafeteria, talking and laughing and gossiping and texting all at the same time, and they didn’t notice me either. It was like, by sitting alone, I’d done an invisible spell or something. I almost—almost—wanted to go to some table and start a scene, but I didn’t.

I didn’t have the stomach for it.

I was still pretty afraid.

I ate the apple. The crunches seemed like they echoed, even though they didn’t. They just sounded louder than normal apple crunches because I felt like everybody was listening, even though I had a hunch no one was.

Then I drank my water, threw out my banana peel and apple core, and left.

I was shaking by the time I got to my next class (English, home of the Shakespeare poems, if you’re wondering). I almost walked out the front door and just went home. I’d never been invisible before, not even when I had magic. I never saw the point.

Twice I checked to make sure my hands were still visible. They were. To me, anyway.

I thought about asking someone if they could see me, but then I decided that was too dorky.

They probably could see me, and they’d think I was weird, and that was all I needed.

But at least they’d think about me. No one had talked to me—except teachers—since Jenna had after my first class. I went through the rest of my day all silent, like the invisibility spell carried.

When I got home, I wanted to tell Mom, but I couldn’t. I still can’t. She’s making a special dinner—a celebration of me surviving my first day of high school—and she seems pretty cheerful. She’s happy I seem so calm.

And here’s the sad thing: My mom doesn’t know me well enough to realize that I’m always calm when I’m upset. It’s Brittany who cries and wails and makes a scene.

I usually don’t say much of anything, just hunker down and do whatever I need to do. Megan, my therapist, says Brittany does the crying for all of us.

That’s something else I’m supposed to learn. How to emote for myself.

Like that’ll do anything.

I’m in my room, which is pretty nice, with my books and my ripped-up history text scattered on the heavy wood desk that Mom says belonged to her father, and papers alongside it, and my bed, looking really pretty and girlish with its white spread and its overflowing pillows and the pile of stuffed animals that Mom put there to make me feel at home.

(I don’t have stuffed animals at home, but I’m not going to tell her that.)

I don’t have a TV or a computer in here. No phone either. My cell has to stay in the living room where Mom can see it.

The room smells like oregano and something tomatoy—whatever Mom’s cooking—and I suppose I should feel comforted.

But I just feel invisible.

Still.

Like I could do nothing for the rest of my life and no one would notice. No one would care.

I put my head down on my desk.

I’m not sure I’m going to survive this.

I’m not sure anyone can.

FOUR

SATURDAY DIDN’T COME
soon enough. I actually started marking the days off on my calendar. P.E. turned out to be easy stuff like running and climbing ropes and throwing balls. I can do that, so there’s one class I understand. Mom had to help me with the Greek government thing for Comparative World Studies because she saw my first paper (she’s reading all my stuff just to make sure I don’t slip) and she says there is no such thing as Powers That Be in the real world—or the Muses or the Fates, who rule over everything, especially true love.

That’s one of those things that makes my head spin. Because I know the Muses personally, and I was an acting Fate when my dad tried to get rid of true love. (Long story. The short version, according to Megan, is that he wanted to get rid of true love to live the way he wanted to; Mom thinks it was so that he could get a divorce from Hera [who believes in true love for some reason I can’t fathom]; and my sisters think my dad just likes to be in control of everything. I’m with my sisters.)

Anyway, Mom told me about Greece’s parliamentary system (and she explained what that was) and she showed me how to research stuff on the internet (even though she prefers books—she has a lot of them in the room across from mine, which she calls an office, but she says should probably now be called the library).

No one’s been talking to me except Jenna, and she always apologizes because she thinks she’s a big loser and I’m not, and I have no idea how she comes to that conclusion, but I figure maybe I still have some glimmer of magic or something.

I eat lunch alone, I walk to class alone, I sit in the back of every room, and now that the teachers have autographed my schedule (which I had to hand in at the office), I don’t talk to anyone (except Jenna for five minutes before and after American History [and yeah, she was right: I didn’t have to read that stuff, which just frosts Mom because she thinks I need an education]).

So, Saturday.

I get to have my conference call. Then, on Sunday, I get my appointment with Megan. We sisters all have different times to see her. She’s supposed to hold us together through the week, help us adjust and stuff.

I don’t know how she can in just an hour, but Megan’s the only person besides my stepmom Hera who can control my dad, so she’s some kind of miracle worker. Maybe she can get us through this.

Maybe she can take me to someone with overt magic so that they can undo this invisibility spell I seem to be suffering from.

Mom doesn’t think it’s a spell.

“You’re so pretty, honey, and you dress so beautifully. I’m sure you intimidate everyone.”

Yeah, me, right. I intimidate people. I would intimidate them if I had magic. Sometimes I imagine myself commanding these teachers to shut up and watching them struggle to open their mouths, unable to, of course. And sometimes I imagine everyone bowing in front of me, not that I’m a megalomaniac like my dad, but just because it’s the opposite of ignoring me. And sometimes I just wish someone—anyone—would look at me, anyone at all.

Mom says once they get used to me, they’ll talk to me.

I don’t know what there is to get used to, since I’m not talking to anyone, and they can’t see me.

The phone call’s at three in the afternoon. That’s six for Crystal in New York, and five for Brittany in the Midwest. The moms set up this conference calling thing from Crystal’s mom’s office and it’s way cool. Crystal’s mom wanted to do some internet video thing, and we wanted it too, but Brittany’s mom couldn’t afford the bandwidth (whatever that is)—and she wouldn’t let Crystal’s mom pay for it either—so we’re just doing a standard phone call on a landline, which Mom says is ridiculously old-fashioned.

Mom lets me sit in her big plush chair, the one with all kinds of levers and pulleys and stuff to make it perfect for her. I’ve learned not to say that, once upon a time, I could have made a perfect chair for her with the wave of hand. First, she knows that, and second, she really doesn’t care.

She’s pretty entrenched in this mortal world, and that’s what I’m supposed to become. The difference is that she’ll get magical powers someday. She doesn’t know what having them is like. I do. I had them once and had to give them up.

Waiting to get them again—waiting
decades
—is awful. I can tell you that right now. It’s awful.

I press my fists against my forehead. I have to stop thinking about that. I have to stop thinking about a lot of things. I made the choice to give up life with my dad.
I
gave it up because it had a lot of bad elements, and even when I go through the menopause thing and get my magic back, it won’t be the same. I’ll be older and fuddier like Mom is, or maybe worse than her.

Maybe I’ll even be wedded to this world, where you have to do everything—like adjust chairs—all by yourself.

I sink into the seat and wait for the phone to ring. My stomach is jumping. Mom stands by the door.

She has her arms crossed. I’ve been looking forward to this; she hasn’t. She thinks we shouldn’t have any contact at all—the better to adjust to the new life, I guess. Megan says we need to remember who loves us, and when Mom heard that she softened a little.

I’m not sure she’s sure that Brit and Crystal love me. She has these weird notions of love, which I think come from living so very alone. I mean, this big house in this mundane town with no family at all around her. How normal is that?

(Actually, I can’t answer that question, since I really don’t know. It’s not normal for me. I’m used to having half brothers and half sisters everywhere and real aunts and uncles and fake aunts and uncles and all their spouses and former spouses and lovers and ex-lovers all over the place. I know that’s not normal for the kids at Central High here in Eugene, but it’s normal for me.)

The phone rings and I grab it so fast that I almost feel magic again.

“Hi!” I say breathlessly.

“Tiffany VanDerHoven?” says an unfamiliar male voice.

I feel myself wilt into the chair. Mom is frowning. She doesn’t know what’s going on. Me either.

“Yes,” I say cautiously.

“Hold for your sisters.”

“Okay.” I learned
hold
from the movies.
Hold
I understand. Kinda. I had no idea it was this hard to just listen to some really bad music when all you want to do is talk to your sisters.

“Tiff?” Brittany’s on the line.

“Brit?” I say. “It’s me.”

She sounds a little funny. Her voice is thinner than I remember, but that’s got to be the phone.

Mom smiles and mouths,
I’ll be downstairs
.

I nod. I really don’t care where she’ll be.

“It’s good to hear you,” Brittany says.

“Brit?” That’s Crystal. She sounds even more breathless than usual.

“And me, too,” I say, not wanting to be forgotten.

“Tiff!”

We squeal and yell and if we were together, we’d be hugging and stuff, but we’re not, so we just do some laughing and joking and kidding around.

“Gosh, it’s good to hear you,” Brittany says again.

“Gosh?” Crystal asks.

“Here you can’t say bad words without people looking at you weird,” Brittany says.

“Bad words?” I have a hunch I know, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything anymore.

Bad words, Brittany explains, includes tons of stuff we used to say, stuff not included in the swear words list I got from the movies. Brittany is talking a lot. I guess she hasn’t said much since she moved.

She doesn’t like it there. All the kids in her school have been friends since they were little kids. Her mom has a husband and an ex-husband (who was divorcing her when she met our dad) and Brit has two half brothers she’d always heard about but never met.

“It’s really, really isolated here,” she says, “and they tell me winter’s coming and that’s even worse.”

We make soothing noises, but I can tell Crystal’s heart isn’t in it. Mine kinda isn’t either. I’m waiting for my turn, only I don’t know how to explain what’s going on here. On the surface, it seems pretty okay.

Mom and I aren’t fighting, like Crystal and her mom are, and people aren’t actively being mean to me like they are to Brittany. How can I complain about being ignored when these guys probably want to be ignored?

Crystal tells us about her school where all the kids are rich except for one or two, and her stepfather who is never home, and her mom who isn’t home either. She has a housekeeper who never heard of her until she showed up, and an
au pair
(for the younger kids—she has mortal siblings too) and she lives in two floors of this really ritzy apartment building—like the one in the remake of
Dial M. For Murder
—and there are rooms where she’s not allowed to touch anything. She can buy whatever she wants with her own credit card but she has to be careful because her mom goes over the bill at the end of the month to make sure there’s nothing illegal.