“Meaning?”
“Meaning maybe it’s time for you to get a little more interested in Annabella.”
“Ah,” Mary said, doing the chin-stroking thing again. “Intriguing idea.”
“You know practically everything about her: where she likes to nest, what her favorite color is—”
“It’s lilac, duh, that’s why Liesel only wears purple.”
“See how much you have to offer Harrison? Now you just have to show him that.”
I could tell she was thinking about it.
“Are youactuallya dating expert?” she asked after a fewseconds. “Oh, maybe that’s your thing, Georgie! Maybe your”—she looked around and lowered her voice for dramatic effect—“magical poweris being a dating expert!”
“Being a dating expert is not my thing,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Maybe rolling your eyes is your thing.”
“I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to talk about this anymore.”
“If you don’t get yours, I’m going to renounce mine. I’ve already decided,” Mary said, suddenly serious, ditching her comic and pulling herself up to a sitting position.
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’ve already looked up the spell; it’s in Mom’s book. It’s not hard, I can do it.”
“Mom would kill you. And that’s not even what I want.”
“It’s not fair. I can’t do that to you. Mine is useless anyway; I’ve never even gotten more than ten feet off the ground.”
“It will grow over time, and you’renotrenouncing it. Absolutely not.”
“The night of our birthday. If you don’t have yours by then, that’s it for me. No more. Renounced. A return to normalcy. You can’t stop me.”
“You can’treturnto normalcy if you’ve neverbeennormal.”
When Mary was finally born, five hours after I was, the doctor had a hard time holding on to her. She keptfloating out of his grasp, slippery and wet. Luckily the doctor was already eighty-four at that point and chalked the whole thing up to his budding case of dementia. My mom, overjoyed at Mary’s immediate displays of power, became increasingly underjoyed when she realized I was just sitting there like a lump of baby fat. But whatever, she eventually decided that one floating baby was enough. She was already dragging stepladders around the house to pry Mary off ceiling fans and light fixtures; it was nice that I generally stayed where she plopped me.
“You can’t renounce yours,” I said firmly. “And there are still two months left. Anything can happen.”
Mary shrugged. She didn’t like being told what to do, and I didn’t like the determination I saw in her eyes. It was a little scary.
I didn’t have time to dwell on it, though—we both heard our mother’s footsteps on the attic stairs at the same time. Our attempt to dive under the bed didn’t work; there wasn’t room for both of us.
“Mary, put some pants on. Georgina, stop encouraging her. I need you both downstairs,” Mom snapped.
“Figure out how to turn invisible,” Mary said as soon as Mom had gone. “That would actually be something useful.”
Prue found me around eight, as I was dusting and winding countless grandfather clocks in the foyer of the inn.
“Cute apron,” she said before I saw her, and I whirledaround so quickly I lost my balance and fell sideways into a Howard Miller. It chimed loudly in defiance, and I picked myself up again, red-faced and unbelievably happy.
“Prue!”
“Fancy meeting you here,” she said.
“Is it nice outside?” I asked.
