The Bronze King by Suzy McKee Charnas Page A

beautiful job. I’m really impressed.”
    The room did look as if it had been burgled by a troop of rhinoceroses. “I’m looking for something,” I said.
    â€œOh?” she said. “What? China?” She waited for me to admire that and then she really let loose: “I’m looking for something, too. I’m looking for my kitchen linoleum, and I’m looking for some galley proofs that have gone walkabout all on their own, and I’m looking for the phone call I should have had by now from my nice but very, very busy lawyer. Most of all, I’m looking for a little quiet in that madhouse I call my office, not nagging phone calls from school telling me that my daughter is turning into a cretinous delinquent. I’m looking for a house I can step into without wondering how I got into a pigpen by mistake. You know Mrs. Sanchez comes tomorrow. You know she isn’t going to clean up any of this incredible decor you’ve designed for yourself—”
    â€œI wasn’t going to ask her—”
    â€œWhat will happen will be a phone call to me from Mrs. Sanchez, complaining about the state of your room and how she can’t clean in here when it’s like this. She’ll take up my time with a detailed list of grievances going back three and a half years and wind up by threatening to quit.”
    â€œI’ll fix it,” I mumbled.
    It was amazing to me, how my soft, sweet, flirtatious mother, who had often told me to try to soften my own attitude and to hide my brains so as not to scare away the boys that she was also so worried about, had this other side to her that I don’t think she realized existed.
    This was the tough side, the smart, ambitious woman who held down the job that kept us both in spaghetti. What she always said was how she wanted to find some nice guy to look after both of us. What she did was run her life and mine, when I let her, with a hand of steel. Sometimes a very heavy hand of steel. I really hated her at this particular moment, the way you can only hate your mother.
    â€œYes, you certainly will fix it,” she said. “But first you are going to bring your schoolbooks into the kitchen, and you and I are going to sit down and waste more of my time—my most precious time, the kind I use to try to repair myself and stay sane through something I think they call relaxation. We are going to spend some of that time going over your situation in school and setting up a schedule, Tina, according to which you will get everything that’s owing done. Late, but done. You understand?”
    â€œI said I’ll fix it!” I screamed. “I’ll fix it, the room and the work and the whole damn thing if you’ll just leave me alone and let me do it my own way!”
    â€œSchoolbooks,” she said. “Now, Tina. In the kitchen. This shambles can wait.”
    â€œShambles means slaughterhouse,” I said. “I haven’t killed anything in here.” Yet. “And don’t call me Tina, it’s babyish and stupid. I never asked to be called Tina. I hate my name.”
    Which was news to me. I didn’t know it until I said it.
    â€œReally?” my mother said sweetly. “That was your own name for yourself before you could pronounce ‘Valentine,’ so don’t blame me. I’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen.”
    You can’t win.
    I needed a piece of paper and something to weight it with so I could drop a note down to Joel from the window. I emptied my bookbag out onto the bed.
    But what was I going to write? Sorry, no key, can’t come down, grounded by mother for messiness and stupidity which is really just not having enough time to manage Sorcery Hall and the kraken and my schoolwork all at once.
    Groping around in the heap of books and papers and notebooks and school junk from my bookbag, I found something small and heavy to wrap my note around.
    It was a key.

 
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