Despite my breaking off the rhyme before the end, I felt a prickling that started under the skin of my palms and spread up my arms, washing over my shoulders and down my chest and back. Oh, no. A major effect. At this point there was nothing I could do but wait and see what my gifts brought me, and try to pretend I had done it on purpose.
Heat flushed along my skin. I felt the power rising, flowing out of me, felt it take the form of needles that rushed everywhere, poking holes in things, tiny punctures that let light through from some other place. A moment, and my ceiling was speckled with constellations; through my connection with my power, I knew that all the ceilings in the house were, and the front of the house was, and off on some road, needles dived into the open window of the van and poked light holes through the air around Beryl’s tree.
I tensed my muscles to cut off the power flow, and waited a moment, exhaustion pressing down on me like a lead blanket. Yes, I had managed to stop the flow. And yes. There were still lights on the ceiling. After that, I fell asleep.
I woke up some time later, and there was no light on the ceiling. Great-Uncle Tobias was sitting in a chair by my bed, watching my face. His thick white hair looked more peaky than usual, and his eyes looked tired, and they danced.
“What you did, Flint,” he said.
“Yes?”
“It was fascinating. And very dangerous. It took your mother and Hermetta and me to undo it.”
I sighed. “What was wrong with it?”
“Well, the place the light was coming from is closer to a source than we like to be. More than light was coming through. Hard radiation, too. Not good for people and other living things.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle.”
“Well,” he said, and patted my knee. “You’ll do it differently next time, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
He left.
I sat up, still tired in my bones, like I’d been skateboarding down the biggest hill ever, tense the whole way because I needed to pick a direction at the bottom, which was coming faster and faster, and I couldn’t see far enough ahead. “Light,” I said, staring at my hands. “Light.”
I got up and went to my desk, opened the top right-hand drawer, and fished my cash stash out from behind a stack of graph paper, old math assignments, and some chewed pencils. I sat on the floor and counted it. Twenty-four dollars, sixty-three cents. It ought to be enough to buy some normal Christmas lights.
Maybe next year I’ll get it right.
GYPSUM’S COOKIES
Nobody can do anything without ingredients. That’s what I tell myself, because in one sense it’s true, and so it makes what I do as important as what the rest of my family does, even if what I do is less impressive. So what if one of their main ingredients is magic? So what if that’s still a secret ingredient to me? So, I can still bake a good batch of cookies, and none of my siblings bothers to read recipes and learn methods, so that’s beyond them. So there.
Before I came up with the Gypsum Theory of Ingredients, the kitchen in our house was just a big place I went several times a day in hopes that somebody had powered up some raw stuff into something edible, which they usually had. Everybody in the household was supposed to do some work, and I usually chose dishes, because I knew how to do dishes; my brothers and sisters and I had learned how in the years before they went through transition sickness. Grownups did all the cooking back then.
I woke up one morning when I was about twenty-one and thought about that. In the novels I’d been reading, I’d noticed that normal people cooked their own food instead of waiting for somebody with magic to do it for them, and it occurred to me that I wasn’t just ungifted and incompetent and pitiful. I was normal. So why not try doing things like cooking? So it took longer, who cared? If it didn’t work, that would be what everybody expected of me, and if it did work, I could surprise them all.
Now the kitchen is the heart of the house for me. I write things on the shopping list. I know what the more obscure tools are for. I’ve left my fingerprints here: I’ve scored the breadboard while chopping vegetables, and I melted a hole in the plastic spoondrip once when I left it too near the burner. A lot of what I’ve learned strikes my relatives as arcane and beyond them, so one of the secret things I cook up in the kitchen is my own smile.
This is the second year I tackled the Christmas cookies. This year I actually bought a book of cookie recipes, and I tried things that didn’t even seem like they’d taste good. I didn’t have to eat them. I just wanted to make mountains of cookies that would sit around the house testifying to my worthiness, and if I made cookies nobody wanted to eat, that meant my monuments would last longer.
Everybody wanted Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, though, so first I made millions of those. Then I started frenzying my way through a bunch of recipes with foreign names like Berlinerkranzer, Krumkake, Pfeffernusse, and Sandkager. It was weird how big a difference the way you treat butter, sugar, flour, and eggs made. I loved that.
It was like a spell, the ingredients the magic, the expression a result of how I shaped them.
I was rolling pieces of Berlinerkranzer dough to form wreaths when Jasper came in from outside, taking off his motorcycle helmet and running a hand through his light hair.
“You have something green on your forehead,” he said.
“One of Flint’s lights. He decorated me by mistake—I think.”
Jasper picked up a piece of dough and bit it. “Yum,” he said. Then he frowned. “Orange?”
“Orange rind. I think baking will make it taste better.”
“It’s pretty good now, just weird.”
I watched him sample the dough again and thought, I wish we were children. Jasper and I were close before he went through transition. We got into so much trouble together Mama seriously considered sending one of us off to live with cousins, but Daddy talked her out of it. I worked the dough again, rolling it into pencil-thin lengths, then joining the ends. Jasper watched me load a baking sheet with cookies. I brushed their tops with meringue and added green and red candied fruit accents, then put the cookies in the oven, and he still stood there, a slight frown drawing a line between his brows, his hazel eyes shadowed.
“What?” I said as I went to the fridge for more dough.
“This stuff you’re doing is so picky. You’ve already made the dough. I could spell it into those little rings in half a minute.”
“Don’t you dare,” I said, then clapped a hand over my mouth. I hadn’t said “no” to Jasper in a long time. It wasn’t safe.
But he didn’t look mad. “Why not?”
“Because, this is what I’m doing for our celebration,” I said. “You do your part, and I do mine.” It had been years since my heart was in the prayers we offered up on Christmas, because I thought the gods we honored had abandoned me; I was tired of petitioning them to take me back. I was normal, and I would make do with a normal lack of faith. Still, I said the prayers. And now, I discovered, I wanted to make my offering, too, whether there were gods to receive it or not. The people were here. They would receive.
“This is a part of the job I like,” I said.
“Cutting little leaves out of green fake fruit?”
“It’s citron.”
“Whatever it is, it’s taking you longer to make these things than it will take us to eat them. They’ll disappear, Gyp.”
“That’s the way cooking always works.”
“I could snap them out, and you could have the rest of the afternoon off, do something more important or interesting.”
“I