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

you-know-straining-your-eyes-gives-you-headaches element to this situation. Things were bad enough.
    “What started it?” her dad asked from the dining room.
    “Joanne Virella,” Nita said. “She has a new bike, and I didn’t get as excited about it as she thought I should.”
    Nita’s father looked up from the paper again, and this time there was discomfort in his face, and regret: he could clearly hear what she hadn’t said. “Nita,” he said, “I couldn’t afford it, really. Earlier on I was so sure I could get that one you wanted, but you know how things’ve been at the shop lately… I just couldn’t. I wish I could have. Next time for sure.”
    Nita nodded. “It’s okay,” she said… though it wasn’t. She’d wanted that bike, wanted it so badly. But Joanne’s father managed the big chain hardware store on Nassau Road, and could afford three-hundred-dollar bikes for his children at the drop of a birthday. Nita’s dad’s business was a lot smaller and prone to what he called (in front of most people) “cash-flow problems” or (at home with the family) “being broke most of the time.”
    But what does Joanne care about cash flow, or any of the rest of it? I wanted that bike!
    “Here, dreamer,” her mother said, tapping her on the shoulder and breaking her thought. She handed Nita an icepack inside a Zip-Loc bag and turned back toward the stove. “Go lie down or you’ll swell worse. I’ll bring you something in a while.”
    “Shouldn’t she stay sitting up?” Nita’s father said. “Seems like the fluid would drain better or something.”
    “You didn’t get beat up enough when you were younger, Harry,” her mother said. “If she doesn’t lie down and lose some of the tension, she’ll blow up like a balloon. Scoot, Nita.”
    She scooted, around the corner into the dining room, around the second corner into the living room, and straight into her little sister, bumping loose the topmost textbook in the small pile she was carrying, and scattering half her armload of pink plastic curlers. Nita bent to help pick things up again. Her sister, bent down beside her, gave Nita just one look and then said under her breath, “Virella again?”
    Nita sighed and just nodded. Dairine was eleven years old, redheaded like their mom, gray-eyed like Nita, and precocious; she was taking tenth-grade English courses and breezing through them, and Nita was teaching her some algebra on the side. Dairine had her father’s square-boned build and her mother’s grace, and a perpetual, cocky grin. As far as Nita was concerned Dairine was a great sister, even if she was a little too smart for her own good.
    “Yeah,” Nita said. “Look out, I’ve gotta go lie down.”
    “Want me to beat up Virella for you?”
    “Be my guest,” Nita said. She went on through the house, back to her room. Bumping the door open, she fumbled for the light switch and flipped it on. The familiar maps and pictures looked down at her—the National Geographic map of the Moon and some enlarged Voyager photos of Jupiter and Saturn and their moons.
    Nita eased herself down onto the bottom bunk bed, groaning softly—the deep bruises were starting to bother her now. Oh jeez, she thought, what made me say that? If Dari does beat Joanne up, I’ll never hear the end of it. Dairine had once been small and fragile and even more subject to being beaten up than Nita—mostly because she’d never learned to curb her mouth either—so Nita’s parents had sent her to jujitsu lessons at the same time they sent Nita. On Dari, though, the lessons took. About a month and a half after Dairine’s lessons started, one or two overconfident kids had gone after her and had been thoroughly and painfully surprised. These days Dairine was more than confident enough—and protective enough—to willingly take on Joanne and throw her clear over the horizon. Nita covered her eyes at the thought, wincing. The news would be all over school in seconds. Nita