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Gram went silent. We’d had this argument too many times. The truth was that my relationship with my mother was intensely complicated, and my grandmother didn’t know the half of it. I hadn’t even known I’d had a grandmother until I turned eighteen and Grandma Betty found me herself. Hiding family from me was the least of my mother’s offenses.
“Honey, please,” Gram said, her voice softer. “I worry about you.”
“I’ve no interest in dealing with The Circle. Or my magic.”
“Everything’s interconnected,” Gram said. “If you ignore it, you’ll suffer, darling, and I can’t lose you too. You’re all I have left.”
“I’ll think about it,” I hedged. “I love you, Gram. Why are you awake?”
“I could feel your summons tingling my toes in bed. That, plus I had a hankering for an ice cream sandwich. Sometimes they just call to me.”
I said goodbye then disconnected, and when I looked up, I realized the apartment was quiet. Too quiet considering the zooming and bubbling and chatter that’d been going on seconds before.
“Emmy?” I glanced at my roommate. She looked a shade beyond guilty. I studied the room. “Where’s the summons?”
“I didn’t want you to die,” Emmy blurted. “So I sent it back.”
“You did what?”
“I RSVP’d you as a yes, and then I added me as a plus one,” she said. “It’s only fair after you devastated me with your unfair comments earlier. You owed me one.”
“I didn’t devastate you,” I said. “You’re just trying to guilt me into not getting mad at you for replying to my mail.”
Emmy winced. “Is it working?”
“Well...crap.”
“So that’s a yes?”
I took another sip of wine.
“Great!” Emmy clapped her hands. “Now, I need your help for a minute. Then I swear we can watch Gilmore Girls and drink our wine uninterrupted.”
“What do you need help with?”
“Can you stir while I add the nose hairs from a pig to my potion?”
I gagged. “You’re joking.”
“Sure?” Emmy shrugged. “If that will make you feel better. You can pretend you don’t know what’s in my vials.”
“Your research is disgusting.”
Still, I followed Emmy into the dining room. The table was littered with glass vials and beakers. Some were lofted into the air while others hovered over different colored flames. No less than three colors of smoke puffed into the air.
A slight odor of bacon—I did not want to think too hard about that ingredient—wafted over us. I wasn’t actually sure what Emmy was researching. She kept her cards close to her chest, not wanting to let anybody in on her secrets until she was closer to a solution. At least, that’s what she told me.
While I stirred, I glanced over my shoulder at the apartment, thoughts of my mother filtering into my head. This place had been ours; it’d been the one place where it’d felt like I’d had a real family. The one safe haven in my life, a beacon of stability in a sea of stormy childhood years.
This apartment, its ties to the only good memories I had of my mother, was the single reason I’d never moved out of The Hollow despite my aversion to magic. Maybe, if things had been different, I could’ve disappeared to palm trees in San Diego or the mountains of Denver and left all traces of witchiness behind. It sounded so simple, so pleasant, to fully relinquish the bloodline.
But I couldn’t do that. Not to me, not to Gram. She’d lost a daughter when I’d lost a mother, and this apartment felt like it rooted me to her. I couldn’t bear the thought of giving it up. At least not yet.
Even some of the plants in the windowsills had once belonged to my mother. The miniature rosebush I kept in my bedroom. The hibiscus that bloomed every time I missed her. The tough-as-nails cactus that was nearly three feet tall and very fat in the corner of the library.
When I looked at the bookshelves, I could see her, the long, golden hair swishing down her back as she’d reach for one of the fairytales she loved on the rare occasion that she was home with me...and happy. We’d escape to different worlds together, tucked under a soft old quilt. We’d sip hot cocoa by candlelight, not because it was romantic, but because we needed to save every penny we could on the electric bill.
Like me, my mother hadn’t had a lot of extra money laying around. I’d inherited that little problem from her too.
