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

landscaping around the house in his spare time, and around several neighbors’ houses too, refusing to take anything in return but the satisfaction of being up to his elbows in a flowerbed. Whatever he touched grew. “I have an understanding with the plants,” he would say, and it certainly seemed that way. It was people he sometimes had trouble understanding, and particularly his eldest daughter.
    “My Lord, Nita!” her father exclaimed, putting the paper down flat on the table. His voice was shocked. “What happened?”
    As if you don’t know! Nita thought. She could clearly see the expressions going across her father’s face. My God, they said, not again! Why doesn’t she fight back? What’s wrong with her? He would get around to asking that question at one point or another, and Nita would try to explain it again, and as usual her father would try to understand and would fail. Nita turned away and opened the refrigerator door, peering at nothing in particular, so that her father wouldn’t see the grimace of impatience and irritation on her face. She was tired of the whole ritual, but she had to put up with it. It was as inevitable as being beaten up.
    “I was in a fight,” she said, the second verse of the ritual, the second line of the scene. Tiredly she closed the refrigerator door, put the book down on the counter beside the stove, and peeled off her jacket, examining it for rips and ground-in dirt and blood.
    “So how many of them did you take out?” her father said, turning his eyes back to the newspaper. His face still showed exasperation and puzzlement, and Nita sighed. He looks about as tired of this as I am. But really, he knows the answers. “I’m not sure,” Nita said. “There were six of them.”
    “Six!” Nita’s mother came around the corner from the living room and into the bright kitchen—danced in, actually. Just watching her made Nita smile sometimes, and it did now, though changing expressions hurt. She had been a dancer before she married Dad, and the grace with which she moved made her every action around the house seem polished, endlessly rehearsed, lovely to look at. She glided with the laundry, floated while she cooked. “Loading the odds a bit, weren’t they?”
    “Yeah.” Nita was hurting almost too much to feel like responding to the gentle humor. Her mother caught the pain in her voice and stopped to touch Nita’s face as she passed, assessing the damage and conveying how she felt about it in one brief gesture, without saying anything that anyone else but the two of them might hear.
    “No sitting up for you tonight, kidlet,” her mother said. “Bed, and ice on that, before you swell up like a balloon. Look at these marks around your eye, what on earth made those?”
    Nita pulled the busted glasses out of her pocket and put them sadly on the counter. Her mother looked at them with dismay.
    “Oh, now this is just wrong,” she said softly. “Nita. What is it with these kids…”
    “I couldn’t stop them, mom,” she said. “They think it’s fun to smash my stuff. Remember my MP3 player?”
    Her mother sighed and pulled a paper towel off the roll, wrapped the bent frames in them, and slipped them quietly into a drawer. “We’re not going to be able to afford new ones this week,” she said. “Or maybe even next…”
    “I can get by,” Nita said. “I’m not blind. Reading’s harder, that’s all…”
    “Well, reading won’t be high on your agenda today, I don’t think,” her mom said, putting up a hand to stroke Nita’s hair a little away from her face, and picking a muddy leaf out of it.
    Oh please, Nita thought, reading’s what I need more than anything just now! Even without the strangeness of the book she’d brought home, the thought of just being able to retreat from this world into some scenario more ordered and sane, just for a little while, was irresistible. But she wasn’t going to put up a fight and add the