So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition Read Free Page B

sucker her into a fight. Or if that failed, they’d simply ambush her for fun. All right, she’d purposely baited Joanne today, but there’d been a fight coming anyway, and she’d chosen to start it rather than wait, getting angrier and angrier, while they baited her. But this would keep happening, again and again, and there was nothing she could do about it. Oh, I wish we could move. I wish Dad would say something to Joanne’s father—no, that would just make it worse. If only something could just happen to make it stop!
    But there was no chance of that, and the knowledge made her feel stupid for lying here crying. Finally she ran out of tears and pushed herself up on her forearms a little to squint painfully around and see where her glasses had gone after Joanne punched her in the eye. They were just a foot or two away, but they looked wrong somehow. Nita reached a hand out to them and picked them up by one earpiece. Her glasses immediately fell apart in two pieces, broken at the nose, and the shattered lenses rained down onto the wet grass in many small sharp pieces.
    Nita moaned under her breath. Though her eyesight wasn’t incredibly bad, there was something weird about her eyes that meant she couldn’t have contacts, laser surgery was out of the question till she was older – not that the family could have afforded it – and her complicated prescription made the glasses expensive. Mom’s gonna kill me so dead, she thought, and dropped her forehead to her arms again in complete despair, simply not being willing to look at the world right now.
    But as she did, underneath her, where it had fallen, the book from the library dug into Nita’s sore ribs. The memory of what she’d been reading suddenly flooded back through her pain and was followed by a wash of wild surmise. If there are spells to keep things from dying, then I bet there are spells to keep people from hurting you….
    Then Nita scowled at herself in contempt for actually believing for a moment what couldn’t possibly be more than an elaborate joke. She put aside thoughts of the book and slowly got up, brushing herself off and discovering some new bruises. She also discovered something else. Her favorite pen was gone. Her space pen, a present from her Uncle Joel, the pen that could write on butter or glass or upside down, her pen with which she had never failed a test, even in math. She patted herself all over, checked the ground, searched in pockets where she knew the pen couldn’t be. No use; it was gone. Or taken, rather—for it had been securely clipped to her front jacket pocket when Joanne and her group jumped her. It must have fallen out, and one of them picked it up.
    “Ohh…!” Nita moaned, feeling bitter enough to start crying again. But she was all cried out, and she ached too much, and it was a waste. She stepped around the hedge and limped the little distance home.
    Her house was pretty much like any other on the block, a white frame house with fake shutters; but where other houses had their lawns, Nita’s had a beautifully landscaped garden. Ivy carpeted the ground, and the flowerbeds against the house had something blooming in every season except the dead of winter. Nita trudged up the driveway without bothering to smell any of the spring flowers, went up the stairs to the back door, pushed it open, and walked into the kitchen as nonchalantly as she could.
    Her mother was elsewhere, but the delicious smells of her cooking filled the place; veal cutlets tonight. Nita peered into the oven, saw potatoes baking, lifted a pot lid and found corn on the cob in the steamer.
    Her father looked up from the newspaper he was reading at the dining-room table. He was a big, blunt, good-looking man, with startling silver hair and large capable hands—”an artist’s hands!” he would chuckle as he pieced together a flower arrangement. He owned the smaller of the town’s two flower shops, and he loved his work dearly. He had done all the