could do what I do—turn on a light.”
I finished my cookie (chocolate chip, still warm and chewy) and held out my hands. “Tree lights, free lights,” I said, and suddenly there was a swarm of little green lights above me. I closed my hands right away to stop the power flow. These lights didn’t disappear. They started out in a globular cluster, then peeled off, darting everywhere. Some flew into the living room, some headed for the dining room, three flew into Gyp’s bowl of cookie dough, and one landed on her forehead.
“Hey!” she yelped, reaching up to touch it.
“Is it hot?” I asked, going to her.
“No. Is it still there?”
“Yes.” It looked like a glowing green penny, pressed into her skin just above her nose.
“I can’t even feel it.”
“It looks funny.”
“Thanks a lot! Free lights! What kind of powers do they have?
“I don’t know,” I said.
“How long are they going to last? How do I get it off?”
“It looks kind of neat, actually,” I said. She frowned at me and looked at the lights in the cookie dough. At first I thought they were just perching on the mountain of tan-and-chocolate chip dough, but then I noticed—
“They’re eating it,” said Gypsum. The three lights in the dough were sinking into pits of their own creation. She lifted a wooden spoon. “Shoo!” she said, swatting at them. They giggled and tunneled deeper into the dough. “Damn!” she said. “This is no way to make light,” she told me.
“But it worked. Better than the last thing I tried.”
“Get specific,” she said, leaning her elbows on the counter and staring at me. The light on her forehead looked like a third eye, greener than her other two, staring harder. “Map out exactly what you want, then put it into rhyme on paper, then try it out loud, okay?” Like the rest of us, she had sat through a lot of lessons with Great-Uncle Tobias, though, since she had no gift, she couldn’t use any of what she’d learned. She remembered her lessons better than I did.
“That’s too worky,” I said.
“A little work won’t hurt you. It doesn’t hurt me.”
“Sure it does,” I said. I grabbed three more cookies and headed for the door. “You should see your face.” Conjured cookies never tasted as good as ones somebody actually made from scratch.
In my room, three cookies later, I sat on the bed. I held up my hands. “Uh—lights on house, lights on tree, lights on ceiling, lights on—” I had been about to say me, but that would never do. Tomorrow was a school day, and effects I had conjured before sometimes lasted two weeks.
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
