don’t have a family like mine without developing some defenses. So why had my umbrella of sarcasm so utterly failed me just now? I really didn’t want to think it had anything to do with the blue eyes and the biceps.
Austin, where I’d grown up, was a pretty big city, but it could also be a bit of a small town if you lived there long enough. Everyone at my school knew about the Goodnights—possibly due to Phin’s blowing up the chemistry lab during her junior year, when trying to enchant the football team’s jerseys for indomitability. Something about batch lots and logarithmic synergism, she’d explained while Mom trimmed off the singed ends of her hair. As if I cared about anything other than having to pass the class now that my last name was mud.
Let’s get this straight. Magic is a fact. When other kids were chanting “Rain, rain, go away,” Phin and I were in the kitchen with Mom, cooking up spells to keep the tomatoes in the backyard from getting root rot. My cousin Daisy’s invisible friends were the children of a pioneer family who died of a cholera epidemic in 1849, and Violet’s crystal collection could cure a headache and pick up Mexican radio if she arranged them just right.
Maybe if these things were more flashy, or overt, the Goodnight reality would be everyone’s reality. But magic was more about tendencies and probabilities, and, like Uncle Burt, worked best where you couldn’t quite see it.
Being in on the secret might be a lot of fun when you’re a kid, but not so much once you realize how often life hinges on everyone agreeing—at least outwardly—on the same reality.
Especially if you’re the only one in a very eccentric family to realize that.
So now I was walking a tightrope between worlds, pretending I didn’t believe in ghosts and magic. And my family? Oh, they were just having fun. The Bell, Book and Candle was just a gift shop with eccentric merchandise. The Iris Teapot sold herbal teas that cheered you up only because they were so delicious. No, of course magic had nothing to do with my sister blowing up the chemistry lab.
I’d become very good at deflecting comments about my family without actually denying anything. Aunt Iris, the most sympathetic of my aunts, said I was too concerned with what other people thought. But it wasn’t that I wanted my family to be normal. I just wanted them to be safe. Magic might be as real as Copernican revolution, but I was sure Galileo had kin who didn’t want him excommunicated over that, either.
God, that made me sound like a coward. A coward and a hypocrite. No wonder my defenses failed me out in the yard. There was no sarcasm shield against the inner saboteur of my guilty conscience.
Oh hell. I froze midlather. That little piece of self-awareness was way too insightful to be random.
I rinsed my hair, squinting through the sluice of soap and water to aim a suspicious glare at the bottle on the shelf. Goodnight Farm’s Clear Your Head Shampoo.
Crap. I picked up the bottle, rubbed my eyes, and read, We can’t say this will sort out your troubles or unknot thorny questions, but it will smooth your hair and untangle your tresses. Instructions: Lather, rinse, repeat with an open mind. Vegan, not tested on animals.
That was the thing about the Goodnight world. No matter what the label said, you could never assume anything only worked like magic.
• • •
Once dressed, I turned my clear head to the next question: What the hell had Cowboy McCrankypants’s denim knickers in a twist? And why hadn’t Aunt Hyacinth warned me about it?
I chewed it over as I took my filthy clothes to the washer and carried a basket of clean towels to the living room. Even in the Goodnight world, laundry didn’t fold itself. Though I wouldn’t have minded a crystal ball to tell me what had Phin taking so long, and whether or not I should worry.
Dad once said that Phin didn’t have the sense God gave a duck, but this was not true. She had a remarkable homing instinct. I’d never known her to get lost. Not geographically, anyway. But when she got distracted by a project, or a stroke of genius, or a random thought … For all I knew, she might be building a DNA model out of bendy straws in the Sonic parking lot.