Me, I’m eating roast beef with baby potatoes and some grilled asparagus. It’s not bad. The younger three have shoved their potatoes and asparagus aside and are focusing on the beef like it’s the only real food in the world.
They look up when E asks the question.
Here’s the thing about the younger three. They’re “stair-stepped”—the oldest being ten, the next nine, and the youngest eight—and they look like miniature Owens, which means they have dark hair, blue eyes, and skin that’s almost gray. (I think, in a place with real sunlight, it might be some kind of mid-level white—but here, gray. I kid you not.) The only way I can tell these three apart is by height.
The oldest—Danny—puts his elbows on the table, like he’s actually interested. So the middle one—Fabian (called Fabe, which rhymes with babe)—does the same. And the youngest, Gordon, scowls at both of them, as if they’re betraying him by paying attention to me. Which they are.
I stare them down, and they look away. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they don’t call me anything because they’re scared of me, not because they think I’m leaving soon. Or maybe they do think I’m leaving soon
and
they’re scared of me.
I don’t know.
E says, “Aren’t you going to tell us? I mean, your father is a mystery man.”
Mystery man. My father isn’t a mystery man. There’s been more written about my father than any other man alive. Well, that’s probably not true—but there’s certainly been more written about him than about their fathers. Combined.
“What did Mother tell you?” I ask, trying to dodge the question. One of the big rules I got before coming here is that I can’t tell anyone the truth about my father. Not because my mother is ashamed of him (although I think she is—or maybe she just doesn’t believe the magic stuff) but because the mages—the magical people I come from—don’t want the mortals (that would be E and the three siblings, as well as Owen and the staff and anyone else I come into contact with) to know about the magical universe.
I got this instruction so many times before I landed in New York that my stomach twists just thinking about it.
But E doesn’t seem to notice how twisty I am. Instead, he shrugs his shoulders. “Mother says that he’s some major Greek tycoon, like Aristotle Onassis or something.”
“I Googled that Onassis guy,” Fabe says. “He was ugly.”
“But rich,” Gordon says, like that’s a good thing.
“He’s been dead forever,” Danny says.
“He’s not my dad,” I say.
“Mother says he’s
like
your dad,” E says.
“Sure,” I say.
But something in my tone—maybe the dripping sarcasm—makes E set down his fork.
“Is Mother lying?” he asks. And I can’t tell from
his
tone whether he thinks Mother lying is a good thing, a bad thing, or something I’m supposed to deny.
“Mother has her own version of reality,” I say.
“What’s yours?” Danny asks—and there’s no mistaking his tone. Completely hostile.
“My version of reality?” I ask. “It’s a little different.”
“Spill,” Fabe says, and at first I think he means I’ve spilled my water, which I did the first night at this table, and you’d think I nearly ruined it. Legions of staff (we’re not allowed to call them servants) scurried in from the kitchen as if they’d been watching (and later, I learn they have—on closed circuit television or something like that, supposedly without sound) and wiped and polished and cleaned while one guy held my plate and asked me if I wanted to continue eating while he held it (creepy, I think) and another guy refilled my water glass.
But then I realize that Fabe wants me to talk, and yet again, I’ve encountered slang I don’t know. Before we all came to the mortal plane, Tiffany made us watch a ton of movies and TV shows so we could get the English dialects and slang just right, but I’ve found that those things are worse than useless. What slang I learned is out of date, and my accent is hopelessly tinged with an odd mixture of ancient Greek and upper-crust British, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get rid of it.
“How does your version differ from Mother’s?” Gordon asks, his mean little eyes bugging at me.
“Mine just has a little more magic than hers,” I say.
“Huh?” E asks.
I pull my plate closer and stab some asparagus. “I’m not supposed to talk about my father.”
Which, of course, makes matters worse. Now they want to know everything, and they pressure me through the dessert course, which I’m not allowed to have because I’m “large.”
So finally, I give up and say, “Yes, my father looks like Aristotle Onassis. Only, if you want the truth, Onassis looked like my dad because my dad has been around a long, long time.”
“Onassis was really old when he died,” Gordon says in his snobby way. (I have no idea how eight-year-olds can be snobby, but this one sure is.)
“He was married to that Kennedy lady, and she was old when she died,” Danny says.
“Which is before you were born,” E says, and for all I know (and I don’t know a lot about this) it might’ve been before E was born too. I think it might have been before
Mother
was born, which is just weird all around.
“So how old is your dad?” Fabe asks.
I shrug. I don’t know this kind of math.
“C’mon,” E says. “You have to know how old your dad is.”
“Why?” I ask. “He doesn’t even know.”
“How can he not know?” Danny says, like I’m the one lying about it.
“Because,” I say, “he was born sometime after the world was created, but before people started measuring time.”
They all look at me like I’ve just ripped off all my clothes and thrown them out the window.
“You could just say you don’t know,” Fabe says.
“I did say that,” I say.
“Then you elaborated,” says Gordon the Snot. “You didn’t have to elaborate.”
“You asked,” I say.
“No,” Gordon says. “E asked.”
Like it’s E’s fault for being curious. His gaze meets mine and he just shakes his head.
“Some people don’t know how old they are,” he says to the other three. “Some places don’t have birth certificates, or didn’t, even in the middle of the
twentieth century.”
I decide to leave it at that, but Gordon doesn’t.
“Is that true?” he asks. “Is Greece so primitive that it doesn’t have birth certificates?”
“Greece has been around a lot longer than this place, buddy,” I snap.
“So?”
“So?” I say. “So most of your culture comes from us.”
“Us?” Fabe says. He caught the personal tone in my reply.
“Yeah, us,” I say.
“I thought you’re American,” Fabe says. “Mother says so.”
“Because Crystal’s an American citizen, dummy,” Danny says. “Anyone born to an American citizen is an American.”
“Even if they don’t know where the Empire State Building is?” Gordon asks, keeping his gaze on me.
They’re never going to forget that incident. I was standing at the edge of Central Park, looking directly at the Empire State Building, and that’s when I asked where it was. How was I supposed to know it was in my line of sight? How was I supposed to know what it looked like? I was lucky just to know it existed.
“What do you care about culture?” Danny says. “You didn’t even know what Lincoln Center is.”
“Leave her alone,” E says, and I look at him gratefully. He smiles, just a little. “So your dad is really old.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Then why was Mother interested?” E asks.
“He doesn’t look old,” I say and then bite my lip. That gets into the magic. Mages don’t age the same way as mortals. We do age, but only with extreme magic use, and like usual, Daddy found a way to exempt himself from that.
“How come?” Danny asks. “Plastic surgery?”
“He’s not like Mother,” I say, and there’s a collective gasp around the table. I guess we’re not supposed to talk about Mother’s too-smooth face, either.
“So how does he look young?” Gordon asks in that tone that just tells me he’s going to criticize whatever answer I give.
So I smile at him. It’s my breezy, I-don’t-care smile. “He’s magic.”
All four of them stare at me like I’ve smashed each plate on the dinner table.
“Magic?” Danny asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“You believe that?” Fabe asks.
“I know it,” I say.
“Prove it,” Gordon says.
“Look it up,” I say. Tiff used to say that to me, and I’ve been wanting to use that one on someone else for years.
“How can I look it up?” Gordon asks. “I don’t even know what your dad’s name is.”
I answer so fast that I don’t even give myself time to think about it. “It’s Zeus.”
“Zeus what?” E asks.
“Zeus,” I say, beginning to get annoyed.
“One name?” Danny asks. “Like a dog?”
“Like a god,” I say. “He’s
the
Zeus.”
They stare at me again, and this time, I can feel the malevolence.
“Jeez,” E finally says. “If you didn’t want to tell us about him, you could’ve just said so.”
“Yeah,” Gordon says. “It’s not nice to lie to people.”
“Or to make fun of them,” Fabe says.
I, of course, never tell them that they’ve been making fun of me. I’m outnumbered.
That was Day Four. They tried again on Day Seven, and one more time on Day Ten (and no, I don’t know if they waited three days on purpose or because that’s how long their attention span extends). I kept telling them the truth, and they kept accusing me of lying, and then they stopped talking to me altogether—except on those rare occasions when Mother or Owen came to dinner.
Then we’d discuss our days or the books we were supposed to be reading or the shopping I still needed to do to make myself presentable.
And that’s my home life. I have a life outside of the home. I’m supposed to go to school, and I do sometimes. But mostly, I shop. Because I can.
So far, it seems, that credit card doesn’t have a limit—at least that I can find.
Supposedly, that credit card is a perk of my new lifestyle. That’s what my real sisters, Brit and Tiff, say. They’re envious of the unlimited money because, they say, it’s hard to learn how to use the stuff properly.
I haven’t really learned. I just use the credit card.
I used it to get them each an iPhone, so we could talk and text whenever we wanted to. I sent the phones to them, and their mothers Freaked Out, like major big time.
Their mothers called my mother, and it got ugly. My mother hates dealing with me, and she had to after that.
So I was in trouble for being nice.
Everything gets me in trouble. Just breathing gets me in trouble. And without the iPhones or my sisters, I can’t tell anyone how I feel.
Because no one seems to care.
TWO
HERE’S THE THING that pissed off the mothers so badly (I think):
Brittany, Tiffany, and I aren’t supposed to talk to each other except on Saturday afternoons. Brittany lives in some place called the Midwest and Tiffany lives in Oregon, which I can actually find on a map. We’re supposed to stay separate, at least until the winter holidays, so that we can develop our own identities.
It’s our shrink’s idea to keep us apart. Megan—that’s our shrink—believes that we’ve spent too much time together. All three of us were born in the same week to different mothers, but of course we have the same father, and he raised us (well, he hired out the raising, but that’s a different story). We hadn’t been separated at all until this summer, and before that, we were so intertwined that we could almost hear each other’s thoughts.
Our magic—which we weren’t supposed to have at our young ages, but Daddy had broken that rule too, like he breaks so many others—had intertwined too, and when Tiff decided she wanted to follow the normal mage’s path—no magic for female mages until after menopause (!)—we had to either go along or force her to keep her magic.
If you’ve ever met Tiff, you know why forcing her was out of the question.
So Brit and I went along because that’s what we always do. If Tiff wants something, we go along. If Tiff doesn’t want it, we don’t want it either.
At the time, it didn’t seem so bad. But I’m rethinking it now.
If I’m going to be honest—and I decided I was in writing this all down—then I have to say that we were all pretty miserable in Mount Olympus. We three girls only had each other for family (and our numerous other siblings, some of whom are so old that they can’t remember when they were born either) and Daddy had actually given us a job.
The problem with the job was that it was more than full-time, and we weren’t qualified to do it. Maybe Tiff was. She’s the brains. Me and Brit, we’re just hangers-on. We kinda sorta got our revenge on Tiff by having her do all the brain work, but when I look back on it, I think we’re not quite that petty. It was just easier to let Tiff do the thinking for us, just like it was easier to let Brit do the crying for us.