Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 by Diane Duane Page A

out there all day?”
    “Oh, Mom! Nothing!”
    Her mother looked at her and put up one eyebrow in an excellent imitation of Mr. Spock.
    Nita blushed a bit. It was one of those family jokes that you wish would go away, but never does; when Nita had been little and had said “Nothing!” she had usually been getting into incredible trouble. “Mom,” Nita said, “sometimes when I say ‘nothing,’ it’s really just nothing. We hang out, that’s all-We... do stuff.”
    “What kind of stuff?”
    “Mom, what does it matter? Just stuff!”
    “It matters,” her mother said, “if it’s adult kinds of stuff ... instead of kid stuff.”
    Nita didn’t say a word. There was no question that what she and Kit were doing were adult sorts of things.
    Her mother took in Nita’s silence, waiting for her daughter to break it. “I won’t beat around the bush with you, Neets,” she said at last. “Are you and Kit getting ... physically involved?”
    Nita looked at her mother in complete shock. “Mom!” she said in a despairing groan. “You mean sex? No!”
    “Well,” her mother said slowly, “that takes a bit of a load off my mind.” There was a silence after the words. Nita was almost sure she could hear her mother thinking, If it’s true...
    The silence unnerved Nita more than the prospect of a talk on the facts of life ever could have. “Mom,” she said, “if I were gonna do something like that, I’d talk to you about it first.” She blushed as she said it. She was embarrassed even to be talking about this to anybody, and she would have been embarrassed to talk to her mom about it too. Nevertheless, what she’d said was the truth. “Look, Mom, you know me, I’m chicken. I always run and ask for advice before I do anything.”
    “Even about this?”
    “Especially about this!”
    “Then what are you doing?” her mother said, sounding just plain curious now. And there was another sound in her voice—wistfulness. She was feeling left out of something. “Sometimes you say to me ‘playing,’ but I don’t know what kids mean any more when they say that. When I was little, it was hopscotch, or Chinese jumprope, or games in the dirt with plastic animals. Now when I ask Dairine what she’s doing, and she says ‘playing,’ I go in and find she’s doing quadratic equations ... or using my hot-curlers on the neighbor’s red setter. I don’t know what to expect.”
    Nita shrugged. “Kit and I swim a lot,” she said.
    “Where you won’t get in trouble, I hope,” her mother said.
    “Yeah,” Nita said, grateful that her mother hadn’t said anything about lifeguards or public beaches. This is a real pain, she thought. I have to talk to Tom and Carl about this. What do they do with their families? ... But her mother was waiting for more explanation. She struggled to find some. “We talk, we look at stuff. We explore...”
    Nita shook her head, then, for it was hopeless. There was no explaining even the parts of her relationship with Kit that her mother could understand. “He’s just my friend,” Nita said finally. It was a horrible understatement, but she was getting hot with embarrassment at even having to think about this kind of thing. “Mom, we’re okay, really.”
    “I suppose you are,” her mom said. “Though I can’t shake the feeling that there are things going on you’re not telling me about. Nita, I trust you ... but I still worry.”
    Nita just nodded. “Can I go out now, Mom?”
    “Sure. Just be back by the time it gets dark,” she said, and Nita sighed and headed for the door. But there was no feeling of release, no sense of anything having been really settled, as there usually was when a family problem had been hashed out to everyone’s satisfaction. Nita knew her mother was going to be watching her. It griped her.
    There’s no reason for it! she thought guiltily as she went down to the beach, running so she wouldn’t be late for meeting Kit. But there was reason for it, she