So You Want to Be a Wizard, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page A

spell that made blows slide off. She read through it slowly in the Speech, sounding out the syllables, taking the time to look up the pronunciation of the ones she wasn’t sure of, even though she could hear Joanne’s nasty laugh getting closer.
    And then Nita sat down on the curb to wait for them.
    They let her have it when they found her, as they had been intending to all day. Nita was tense all over as she waited for the first blows to fall… but they didn’t. She could feel them skidding away from her, not even touching her skin, and the girls who were punching and kicking her as hard as they could didn’t even seem to be seeing that it wasn’t working.
    It was all Nita could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Instead she smothered her laughter and rolled around on the ground, falling back from the punches and making what she hoped were horrible groaning noises. And after a while Joanne and her four friends turned away to leave, satisfied that they had taught her a lesson.
    Then Nita stood up and brushed herself off, uncut, unbruised, just a little dirty. “Joanne!” she called.
    Amazed, Joanne turned around. And Nita laughed at her. “It won’t work anymore!” she said.
    Joanne stood dumb.
    “Never again,” Nita said. She was tempted to turn her back on them and walk off, but that just didn’t feel like enough, somehow. Instead she walked toward them, watching the confusion in their eyes.
    They started to back away from her, horrified. Nita kept coming. And then, as they backed up faster and faster, on a sudden urge Nita started to run: ran straight at them.
    They went pale as Nita charged them, waving her arms in the air and screaming like a maniac, just screaming at the top of her lungs like something from a bad horror movie. “BOOOOOOOO!”
    They broke and ran, all of them. Joanne was the first, and then the rest followed her in a ragged tail down Rose Avenue. Not a word, not a taunt. They just ran.
    Nita stopped short. The feeling of triumph that had been growing in her withered almost instantly. Some victory, she thought. It took so little, so little to scare them. Maybe I could have done that at any time, even without a shield. Maybe. And now I’ll never know for sure.
    Are you all right? Fred said quietly, bobbing again by her shoulder. They didn’t hurt you this time.
    “No,” Nita said. She was thinking of all the glorious plans she’d had to use her newfound wizardry on Joanne and her bunch, to shame them, confuse them, hurt them. And look what so small and inoffensive thing as a body shield had done to them. They were scared out of their minds. And they’d probably hate her worse than ever now.
    I’ve got to be careful with this, she thought. I thought it was going to be all fun.
    “C’mon, Fred,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Temporospatial Claudications: Use and Abuse
     
    The week went by quickly for Nita. Though Carl had made the business of opening a worldgate sound fairly simple, she began to suspect that he’d been doing it so long that it actually seemed that way to him. It wasn’t simple, as her manual made plain as soon as she opened to the pertinent chapter… which was forty pages long in small print.
    Grand Central worldgate had its own special requirements: specific supplies and objects that (for a wizard who didn’t routinely work with the gate) had to be present at an opening so that space would be properly bent, and spells that had to be learned just so. Nita’s cellphone, and she suspected Kit’s, were unusually busy for a couple of days, and there was a lot of texting and visiting back and forth as they divided up the work. Nita spent a lot of time keeping Fred from being noticed by her family, and also got to see a lot of Kit’s mother and father and sisters, all of whom were very friendly and kept forgetting that Nita couldn’t speak Spanish. She started to learn a little of it in self-defense. Kit’s dog told her the brand of dog biscuits it could