There was nothing she could put her finger on to explain her violent feeling about Mr. Duncan. He had never been anything but pleasant to her, or to any of them. She only knew that every time she saw him her stomach knotted up with fear and apprehension. There was something he was offering that she would not accept, and there was something for which he was reaching that she would not, could not, give.
Besides that, he was the one who had started that embarrassing testing business with Dr. Russo. The doctor had called several days after the card test to talk with Elizabeth.
“Nancy was right,” he said. “She didn’t score well on the test. But that doesn’t mean anything. It could’ve been the atmosphere—having her family around her—being in everyday surroundings. I would very much like to repeat the test with the real ESP cards in the privacy of my office.”
“Would you be willing to try it, dear?” Elizabeth asked, and Nancy shook her head firmly.
“It would be a waste of time,” she said. “Besides, I’m too busy.”
So Elizabeth said in her polite way, “Perhaps another time, doctor, and thank you for your interest in my daughter.”
“Don’t feel bad, dear,” she said later to Nancy. “It was a silly test, anyway. I can’t imagine anybody doing well at it.”
“I don’t feel bad at all,” Nancy told her.
The next day she had gone to the library and taken out a book on extrasensory perception.
She started reading it before dinner and could hardly tear herself away from it to go set the table. After the meal, she went straight back to her room and continued reading.
By the time Kirby came up, she was three-quarters finished.
“Thanks for leaving me with the dishes,” Kirby said, starting her evening exercises.
“I’ll do them tomorrow,” Nancy said, not lifting her eyes from the page.
“And the next day, too. You’re two behind me. Mom told Brendon to help me, and he broke a bowl. Deliberately, of course. So she won’t ask again.”
“Sorry,” Nancy said. “It’s just that I’m caught up in this book.”
Kirby glanced over with interest.
“What are you reading? Oh—hey—where did you get that? It’s about ESP, isn’t it? Did Mr. Duncan give it to you?”
“No!” Nancy said shortly. “I got it at the library.” She turned a page.
“Well, don’t just sit there.” Kirby went over and closed the door, then came back to sit down on the end of her sister’s bed. “What does it say? Do you think you’ve got it?”
Nancy sighed and laid down the book. “You won’t tell anybody?”
“Of course not. I never tell things.”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “I’ve definitely got it.”
“Wow!” Kirby’s eyes grew wide. “Nance, how exciting!”
“I don’t think it’s exciting,” Nancy said. “I think it’s terrible. It’s scary. Do you realize that I’m a weirdo? A freak? If people knew—like Dr. Russo—if they had any idea—I’d be shut away in a laboratory somewhere like one of those white rats.”
“You’re kidding!” Kirby exclaimed. “They couldn’t do that to you, could they? It would be kidnapping!”
“They’ve done it with other people,” Nancy told her. “You should read the case histories in this book. There’s a million kinds of tests they give. The card test is just for starters. They work them all out by mathematical statistics, and some people have to take them for years and years.”
“What do they do that for?” Kirby asked. “What is it they want to find out?”
“Everything. What it is, why it is, the whole works. It seems like at first only a handful of scientists believed that ESP existed at all. Then a bunch of universities started to get involved, but now it’s mostly independent research centers. They keep trying to prove it does exist, and a bunch of skeptics keep trying to prove they’re fakes, and the poor people who actually have it get caught in between.”
“Well, what is it exactly?” Kirby asked. “Is there more than one kind?”
“Apparently, there are a few different types of ESP.” Nancy referred to the book. “There’s one kind called telepathy. That means being aware of what another person is thinking. Then there’s clairvoyance; that means knowing when something’s happened. There are other kinds, too—precognition means knowing about the future, and being able to tell when something is going to happen. Retrocognition is knowing about the past.”
“Which kind do you have?” Kirby regarded her sister with fascination. Then she answered herself. “Telepathy, I guess. That’s how you knew the questions on that geography test. I was thinking about them at lunch, and you got them out of my mind.”
“I’m clairvoyant, too,” Nancy said. “I can see things happening. Brendon’s building a boat, for instance. In the afternoons, if I reach out and look for Brendon with my mind, I see him banging away on it. And precognition—”
“You have that, too!” Kirby’s eyes were wide. “The way you know when a phone is going to ring! Nance, you’re a triple threat! They could give you tests for the rest of your life and never be done with you!”
“Well, they’re not going to do that,” Nancy said firmly. “I’m not going to let them. I’m not going to spend my life being somebody’s experiment.”
Kirby was silent. When she spoke at last, it was thoughtfully. “Just how are you going to spend it, Nancy?”
Nancy was surprised at the question. “What do you mean?”
“It’s your gift, isn’t it? This ESP thing? Like my gift is dancing? I feel sometimes—” She paused.
“How do you feel?” Nancy prodded.
“This is going to sound silly. Do you remember the fairy tale Mom used to read to us when we were little about a girl with magic shoes? Somebody put them on her feet and they became part of her and she couldn’t take them off again. They made her dance.”
“You think something like that happened to you?” Nancy glanced down at her sister’s long, straight feet.
“Well, not with magic shoes, obviously. It’s the thing about having been given something. I can imagine it sometimes—somebody actually having a present for me, all wrapped up, and it’s the ability to dance. ‘Here, Kirby,’ the person says. ‘Here is a special thing just for you. Work hard at it, and use it.’ ”
“Like a fairy godmother?” Nancy asked.
Kirby flushed. “See, I told you it would sound silly. It is a funny coincidence though, isn’t it, with both of us having special things?”
“Then what about Brendon?”
“Oh—Bren.” Kirby shrugged. “You can’t count him.”
“It’s a nice way to think about it,” Nancy said. “But I could believe it more if Brendon had something, too. A fairy godmother wouldn’t be that unfair, to give the two of us gifts and not give one to him. Besides, who believes in magic?”
“Who believes in ESP?” Kirby countered. She laughed, and the laughter was good, for it broke the tension.
Nancy laid the book aside and went over to the dresser to get out the T-shirt she slept in. Then she went into the bathroom to change so Kirby could have the whole room for pirouettes.
As she undressed, she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She was still straight and skinny, but suddenly, to her surprise, she saw that she wasn’t quite as flat as she had been. She turned sideways and looked at herself again. Yes, it was true. She might never look exactly like Kirby, but she was finally, at long last, beginning to look like something other than a boy.
She put on her T-shirt and went back to the bedroom.
“Kirby,” she said, “when did you first get a bra?”
Kirby was doing her pirouettes en pointe.
“Oh,” she said, “years ago. I think I was eleven. I needed it. I was starting to flop around.”
“It’ll probably be years before I need one,” Nancy said. “Lucky you.”
Nancy sat down on the bed to watch her sister. It seemed to her that
Kirby was thinner than she used to be. The muscles stood out in long cords down her legs, but her knees were pointed and her arms were no longer so rounded. Her face looked thinner, too.
“Kirby,” Nancy said, “do you ever think about boys?”
“Nope,” Kirby said. “No time. Do you?”
“Boys like you,” Nancy commented. “I can tell they do. They look at you in the cafeteria and smile and act silly to get your attention. Jessie tells me—you know, Jessie in my social studies class—she has a brother who’s a senior. He thinks you’re hot.”
“Does he?” Kirby said without interest. She was practicing on demi-pointes now. Her face was red with exertion, and she was breathing too hard to continue the conversation. Watching her, Nancy had a sudden picture of Kirby years from now, still stretching and bending and pointing, all the roundness and softness gone, and just the muscle left.
I almost wish, Nancy thought, that she didn’t have her gift. I wish she were just herself, pretty and fun and nice, without this drive in her making her go all the time. I wish she had time to like more things—clothes and boys and parties and reading books and being a sister.
She did not say it out loud, because Kirby would think she was crazy. Kirby thought having a gift was wonderful.
Well, maybe it was. Maybe she could get used to it. Maybe she would get to love being a person with ESP just as much as Kirby loved being a dancer.
Christmas began in November. Long before Thanksgiving had appeared on the horizon, the stores were filled with Christmas decorations, and counters overflowed with brightly colored wrapping papers and greeting cards.
Brendon went around whistling Christmas carols, and their mother kept saying, “I don’t understand it. The holidays never used to start until the beginning of December. But it’s been so long since we spent Christmas here in the States that maybe I’m not remembering it correctly.”
Kirby did all her shopping in one afternoon the first week of December. She wasn’t the shopping type that Nancy was. Nancy could shop happily every day for a month or more without actually buying anything, just looking at things and wandering about and enjoying the knowledge that eventually she would decide on the perfect thing to buy.
To Kirby, such shopping was a waste of time. She made her list out beforehand. When she was ready to shop, she went straight to the right department of whatever store she had decided on and made her purchase, then went quickly on to the next one. In one Saturday between noon and two o’clock she made all her gift purchases for the entire family, including a tie for her father, although they weren’t sure just now where he was and couldn’t mail anything until they heard from him.
She was just getting ready to leave the store when something on the china counter caught her eye. There, half-hidden by the bulging side of a huge flower vase, was a swan made of smoked glass.
Kirby crossed the aisle and stood before the counter, looking down at the small, gray figurine. It was an odd thing, delicate and yet strongly posed, the long thin neck arched back as though in anger, the wings spread wide.
A salesclerk appeared from around the corner of the counter.
“May I show you something?” she asked.
“I’m looking at that swan,” Kirby said. “What’s it for? It’s not a mini-vase or something, is it?”
“No,” the girl said. “It’s just a figurine. It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
“But it doesn’t have any purpose?” asked Kirby.
“No. It’s just for decoration.”
Kirby reached over and lifted the figure so she could see the price marked on the bottom.
“That’s an awful lot for something that can’t be used for anything,” she said.
She put the swan down again and looked at it a moment longer.
“Okay,” she said.
“You’ve decided to buy it?”
“Yes,” Kirby said. “I guess I have.” She wasn’t sure why. She had never in her life made a single purchase that had not been useful and well thought out ahead of time. There was something so fierce and yet so graceful about the swan that she couldn’t go away and leave it, lost behind that hideous vase.
“I’ll take it,” she said again, “and please wrap it as a gift.”
At that moment she knew that the swan was made to belong to Madame Vilar.
Kirby was dancing, Christmas week, in the Nutcracker ballet, which was being presented by the students of the Vilar Dance Studio. She had hoped for the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy until she had realized that during the solo a male dancer lifted the Fairy, and that the only boy at the studio who was good enough to do the lift was Jamie Wright.
Jamie was a thin, blond boy about the same age as she was who had been studying dance since the age of five. He had nice, muscular legs and the scrawniest arms Kirby had ever seen.
“You realize, of course, that you are too heavy to be lifted by Jamie,” Madame Vilar had said in a cool, impersonal voice, and had paused, regarding her sharply, as she waited for her reaction.
Kirby nodded grimly.
“At the next recital,” she said, “I won’t be.”
She had lost five pounds in the past six weeks and was determined to lose at least ten more by the time of the Cecchetti examinations in the spring. The part of the Fairy went to Arlene Wright, Jamie’s cousin. She was little and thin, like Nancy, and her steps were perfect, although her dancing always seemed to have a mechanical sameness about it.
The day after the parts were announced, Arlene happened to run into Kirby in the dressing room.
“Oh, Kirby,” she gushed. “I saw that you’re going to be the Snow Queen! That’s so awesome! You can dance all alone without having to worry about somebody lifting you!”
“It is nice,” Kirby said sweetly. “And you and Jamie will be just perfect together. I do hope there isn’t a breeze that night to blow the two of you off the stage.”
The other girls in the dressing room burst out laughing, and Arlene’s eyes got narrow and squinty with anger.
“You don’t need to be nasty about it,” she said coldly. “I was just trying to be gracious. A new girl like you can’t expect to get the best part. I don’t know how you got in here in the first place. Madame never takes anyone over the age of nine.”
“You were being gracious?” Kirby said. “Oh, I misunderstood, then. In that case, I take it back. I hope there will be a breeze that night.” She smiled her wide, sweet smile right at Arlene and picked up her toe shoes and walked out past the laughing girls and went to the practice room for her private lesson with Madame Vilar.
Actually, being in recital was fun no matter what role you were dancing. The rehearsals and the costume fittings were as exciting for a Snow Queen as for a Fairy, and after the initial disappointment was over, Kirby began to be sorry she had been so mean. She watched Arlene dancing and knew that it was not good dancing; she also knew, and this was the sad part, that there was very little Arlene could do to make it better. The steps were right, and the timing, and all the movements, and yet Arlene Wright dancing was simply that—Arlene Wright, not the Sugar Plum Fairy. The magical thing that happened to Kirby when she danced, that turned her into whatever it was that the music was saying, did not happen to Arlene.
Poor thing, Kirby thought when she realized this. Poor, scrawny Arlene. No wonder she doesn’t like me. If I were her, I wouldn’t like me, either.
She decided to be nice to Arlene from then on, whether she cared for her or not, and to applaud her dance as hard as she could, even standing in the wings.
From the first of December on, the little beach house was overflowing with Christmas. Every day Elizabeth found something new to do to make it even more festive. She decorated with greens and Florida holly and had Mr. Duncan climb a ladder and string lights outside in the flame vine.
She seemed like a child herself as she rushed about hanging ribbons and wreaths and moving furniture to make room for the Christmas tree.
“An old-fashioned
Christmas!” she kept saying. “In our own home! Not just some old hotel room! We’ll have a tree-trimming party and go caroling and make holiday cookies and everything! Now you kids will have a chance to have the same kind of holiday I had when I was growing up!”
Nancy was sitting on the sofa examining the greeting cards the Garretts would mail out.
They showed a scene of a Southern Christmas with a decorated tree framing a picture window that looked out at snowy Florida beaches and waving palms.
Nancy opened the top card and read the inscription.
“You don’t have Dad’s name here,” she said.
Her mother looked up from the centerpiece she was making.
“No, dear,” she said. “Dad will be sending his own cards.”
“Will our names be on his card, too?”
“Probably not,” Elizabeth said. “I think the children’s names usually go on the card of the parent they’re living with; the one who has custody.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. It was the first time any of them had heard that word spoken.
Kirby looked at Nancy and saw that her face had gone pale.
“You mean it’s final?” Nancy asked in a flat voice. “You’re really divorced?”
Elizabeth nodded. “You know that, dear. I told you when I filed the settlement agreement.”
“But I thought it took ages! You always read about people who are waiting for their divorces! I thought it would be years!” Nancy exclaimed in horror.
“Not in Florida,” Elizabeth told them. “It differs from state to state. I thought you realized.” Her gentle face filled with pain. “Please, dear, don’t look so shocked. I thought you were beginning to accept the idea. I thought you were becoming adjusted.”
“I’m adjusted,” Brendon said. “I like living here. Dad couldn’t be dragging us around with him, anyway, if he’s taking war pictures.”