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Notbeing bombarded with everyone’s innermost thoughts all the time ended up being awesome. She occasionally missed having telepathy, but only because it let her feel part of Mom’s crazy world. Now, she’d basically become the kid who always got stuck at home while the grown-ups did the cool stuff. She liked helping her mother and Allison and Kingsley… and even Anthony deal with the supernatural things. Like Bigfoot! Oh, that was great fun. Poor Anthony missed out, but she understood that her mom finally filled him in on all the details.
Anyway, yeah... back in the day, her role might have been staying in the background and acting like a brainwave switchboard operator, but hey… military intelligence won battles, even if they never pulled a trigger.
After all the paranormal crazy she’d lived through in her short eighteen years, school—especially homework—had come to feel beyond pointless. Nothing in any of these books would prepare her for angry vampires, raging werewolves, demons with a bug up their butts or any of the thousand different unknown problems that might appear in the future. She pretty much figured that every supposedly mythological monster probably did exist for real. At least… stuff from old stories.
Again, she sighed at her books, which she’d placed across the foot of her bed in the order of annoyance. It took her thirty minutes or so to decide if she wanted to do the homework in the order of least annoying to most annoying or the reverse. Part of her envied the group of students at her school who had taken all the heavy coursework last year, so their senior year was light. One girl she sat next to in physics hadtwostudy halls. She basically went to the school to hang out.
Meanwhile, Tammy still had gobs of work to do.
Gobs of work she didn’t think mattered.
She had no idea what to major in if she went to college. That train of thought led her over the past hour to the conclusion she probably didn’t want to bother with even more school. If high school felt interminable now, why subject herself to four more years of it? On the other hand, what could she do with herself if shedidn’tgo to college? Would she end up slinging coffee or waiting tables for the rest of her adult life? Might she one day turn into the maternal grandparents she could barely remember?
Mom’s parents existed in a small space in the back of her memory.
She vaguely recalled them living in a big (but run down) one-story house with a massive amount of land around it. She thought of them as ‘old hippies’. They didn’t work, didn’t appear to have any means of income, but lived there somehow. Mom once said something about grandpa playing baseball. Maybe they had lots of money in the bank and didn’t need to work? Grandma did something craftsy. Made dreamcatchers or vases or something to that effect on a big covered porch in the back.
Tammy had been three or four the last time she saw them. Sadly, her strongest memory of the visit was the overwhelming smell of—what she now knew to be—marijuana saturating everything in the house.
She flopped over on her back and stared at the ceiling. Being done with high school would be a big change. Eighteen. Legal adult already. Would it make her lame to keep living here with her mom? Did it mean something was wrong with her because she didn’t mind the idea? Most of the kids she knew at school constantly talked about how they couldn’t wait to get a place of their own. Renee had already been accepted at the University of Florida. She’d always been kinda weird about not having a mom actively involved in her life and her unrest manifested as a desire to get the heck away from California. Tammy figured Renee would go to the East Coast and stay there forever.
Thinking about losing one of her four friends to distance made her homework seem even less important. She’d rather call her friends and spend these last few months hanging out with them as much as possible before they never saw each other again.
Veronica the metalhead already enlisted in the Navy. For now, it didn’t change much… but a week after graduation, she’d disappear… and be almost entirely out of contact for at least four years.
Paige, who still embraced the goth lifestyle even more than Tammy ever had, didn’t bother even applying to any colleges. She planned to keep living at home and working whatever job she could find like the slacker she was. Occasional talk of going to a trade school to become a beautician or perhaps a tattoo artist never quite progressed to the ‘going for it’ stage.
Maybe two years of minimum wage work will change her mind.Tammy stretched and kept staring at the ceiling. Alas, no answers appeared there.
Her last friend, Arielle—who everyone called Ari—had somewhat wealthy parents. She would be going to Berkeley and not by her choice. Of course, she didn’t really object to the idea either. Ari was super obliging and tended to do whatever the people around her wanted her to do. Tammy, back in her mind-reading days, knew this came from how her parents bossed her around so constantly she’d gotten used to having zero control over anything. The idea Ari would probably end up marrying some guy who treated her like a servant made Tammy angry. At least Ari would still be in the area. She could keep an eye on her. If Ari started dating a jerk, Tammy would do what she needed to do in order to protect her friend from a miserable life.
This thinking, of course, brought her back to Kai. It seemed so crazy to imagine she’d been dating an elf. The relationship did feel more like a dream than anything to have happened for real, but she knew the quasi-memory loss came from something he did. That she remembered him at all had to mean something. She couldn’t quite say if it had been Kai or his parents who ultimately decided it foolish for them to be together. The way she felt now, it did make sense. Like a young girl who ran into David Bowie and thought she’d fallen immediately in love… chances are it had just been a crush or enthrallment. He’d been so…pretty. So amazing and unusual.
But he’d also been like 170 years old. So what if it made him seventeen in elf years. Tammy would be a little old grandmother and Kai would still look like a teenager. Yeah, better off not getting serious. Still, she missed that beautiful face and sweet smile.
Another lousy part of becoming an adult: her friends all had lives of their own and days of just hanging out with each other for hours became few and far between. Except for Ari, her friends all worked jobs right after school. Ari’s parents refused to tolerate the indignity of their daughter working retail or serving food. They didn’t even really want her ‘working’ at all, but they would begrudgingly tolerate her someday interning at a huge company or maybe at a law firm. Thus far, Ari hadn’t managed to land any offers prestigious enough for her parents to permit. Somehow, Ari didn’t act like an arrogant, wealthy socialite. Except for her expensive clothing (which her parents selected for her), she behaved just like everyone else at the school.
Kinda odd the parents sent her to normal school rather than some elite academy but whatever.
Tammy smiled to herself at the idea she’d end up working with her mother for a career. She didn’t care if it made her ‘lame’ to work for her mom. Lots of people worked with their parents, especially in the case of a family business. Some of the richest people in the country inherited companies started by their parents or grandparents. Not that she expected a little private investigation service to ever make either one of them rich… but working for a parent had precedent in history.
She couldn’t even say there’d be no future in it. It’s not like her mother would get old and close the business down while Tammy still had thirty to forty years left of ‘needing to work.’ Things would get a bit weird in a few decades, though. People might buy Mom being fifty but looking like a fit athlete of twenty-six-years. But they wouldn’t believe it in twenty more years.
Would they end up moving? Maybe Mom would quietly disappear from public view. That brought the same sort of complications as if she’d died of old age. Would Moon Investigations continue past the point her mother needed to disappear from society? Could Tammy ‘inherit’ the business and become the boss, or at least the boss on paper?
Did she want to?
Tammy frowned at nothing in particular. She didn’t really love being a private investigator’s assistant. She loved working with her mom. Didn’t matter what the work actually was. Without Mom in the equation, she couldn’t claim any particular attraction to the job itself. Trying to think about what sort of work she wanted to do led nowhere.
Maybe grandma had the right idea. Just sit at home doing art while smoking weed.
An unexpected laugh burst out of her.
It had been a while since she smoked weed. Last time she indulged, Dad was still around. She suspected he knew she had a stash. Maybe he’d even found it, but said nothing. Unlike the version of Dad she met in that bizarre alternate world, real Danny didn’t care. Or, maybe he did but lacked the nerve to confront her? Maybe he found it and thought ‘it’s only weed, no big deal.’
As far as Tammy thought, weed was, in fact, ‘no big deal.’ Alcohol happened to be legal and caused far more damage than weed. She had no interest in anything worse like cocaine or heroin or ecstasy. Especially meth. One had to be crazy to touch that stuff. All the problems of addictionplusit made you look like a damn zombie.
Mom most likely wouldn’t mind a little weed. Heck, she used to drink blood. Blech. Of course, Tammy would have to get up and go find some… which required effort. Effort she didn’t feel like spending at the moment. She set the desire aside as only a fleeting thought and not a real want.
