“3.4.”
“That’s not bad.”
“No. But it’s not good enough for what I want to do. It needs to be stellar.”
“Why?” Tia asked.
The two of them were looking at me. Well, I started it.
“I have two sisters,” I explained. “My oldest sister, Nevada, took over the family business when she was seventeen. She kept us fed, and got a degree, and she is a truthseeker Prime. She is super competent. At everything.”
I just kept talking. It felt like a good idea for some reason.
“My second sister is like a super-computer. She can do math in her head. Not like baby math, like the complicated, people’s-eyes-go-big kind of math. She is now the Head of House. She thinks in multiple directions. Like I honestly think that she isn’t human. Our evil grandmother is Victoria Tremaine.”
“Oh shit.” Tia set up straighter.
I wasn’t surprised she knew who Grandma Victoria was. She was a terrifying legend. People used her to scare their kids at night.
“Catalina managed to contain Victoria Tremaine. She outmaneuvered her.”
“I thought we were bad. Your family is fucking scary,” Tia said.
“Exactly. Those are my sisters. My cousins also live with us. And, if you ever meet them, and you hear Leon call me sister-cousin, it’s because they were officially adopted. He says shit like that because he thinks it’s funny. Anyway, Bern, my oldest cousin, can hack any computer and writes programs that make elite coding people weep with envy. Leon shoots around the corners and never misses.”
Tia stopped eating. “That’s a lot.”
“Yeah. And here I am. I get big and smash shit.”
Tia put her fork down, reached out, and took my hand. “Hey. I feel that.”
“Thanks.” I squeezed her hand.
It hit me like a train. I needed a friend. I didn’t have one. I had my family, and I had Runa, but she was older and she was dating Bern, which made things slightly complicated.
“I want to accomplish something. Something that has nothing to do with my magic. I want to do it without my family’s help. I want to be competent and scary, and I want to take care of my mom and everybody else. I’m not good at a lot of things, but I’m good at business. And I’m good at people and politics. When we have a difficult client who won’t pay their bills, I go and talk to them, and I get that payment. Nobody in my family can do that as well as I can. Nevada did okay with it, but she is married now, and honestly, I’m better at it. That’s my thing.”
I was just having verbal diarrhea now.
“You get the money,” Tia said.
“Yes. I realized at some point that unless I could control my temper, I wouldn’t ever be able to leave the house because I kept crashing out and getting into fights. So I studied people. I watched them, and I figured out what drives them, so I could manipulate them instead of bashing their faces in. When I came to talk to you today, everything I did—the hair, the makeup, the clothes—was calculated. I could tell you were angry, and I knewthat pissing you off even more was the only way to get you to tell me where Phillip was.”
I waited for Tia to throw her drink in my face.
She stuck her thumb up. “It worked!”
What?
“Like, it was kind of awesome. Because if they sent anybody else, I wouldn’t have told them shit.”
Um. “Thank you?”
“You’re welcome. Please continue with the rant.”
“I’m almost done. I want to get a degree from Rice. I want to double major in Applied Magic Theory and Business Admin. It’s not just about academics, though. It’s about meeting the right people and getting to know how they think, because down the road they would be our clients and our enemies. I need Augustine for this. First, I need him to write me a letter of recommendation for Rice, because I know that’s the only way I can get in. But it’s more than that. That dude is a fucking shark. He knows everything about everyone. He’s like a surgeon when it comes to House politics. He isin. I want him to teach me how to be like him. And right now, he thinks I’m a nuisance. I told him I found Phillip, and he was like, cool, next. And I don’t know what else I can do. I guess I will pick up the next case tomorrow and try to impress him again. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.”
Matilda was watching my face.
