How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas Read Online Free Page B

kept looking around in the cupboard. “Juan,” she said, “are we out of spaghetti again?”
    “There’s fettucini…”
    “It’s not the same.” She got up, sighing, and opened an upper cupboard. “Okay, we’ll do it with fusilli. But you said you were getting spaghetti on the way back from work…”
    The paper rustled. “Sorry. My head was killing me and I just wanted to get home.”
    “Well, tomorrow then.”
    “I’ll make a note.”
    Kit’s mama rummaged around for a big pot and started filling it with water. “Well,” she said while the faucet was running. “He sounds like a good influence. One thing, though.”
    Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Yeah?”
    “Is your friend a needle-shedding type?”
    “Not that I’ve ever noticed,” Kit said.
    “The occasional berry,” Nita said. “But only when he’s in trans.”
    Kit’s mama put her eyebrows up. “Doesn’t sound like a problem,” she said. She put the pot on the stove and turned on the heat under it. “How many people are we talking?”
    “We’re still working that out,” Nita said. “Wanted to get the okay from you first.”
    “You did, at least,” Kit’s mama said, and flashed a grin at Nita.
    Nita did her best to produce a We-are-so-busted expression that would acknowledge the realities of the situation without assigning blame to any specific party. Kit simultaneously looked elsewhere and looked innocent.
    “And this is supposed to be a one-night sleepover? On the twentieth?”
    “That’s right,” Kit said. “We wouldn’t be up here all that much. Mostly in the puptents: there’ll be more room.”
    Nita heard another newspaper page turn, but purposely didn’t look that way, because Kit’s mama was doing so.
    A second passed. “The carol-singing thing’s the night after,” Kit’s mama said. “Don’t forget.”
    “We won’t,” Kit said.
    His mama headed out of the kitchen and through the living room again. ”Just try to keep the other collateral damage to a minimum, yeah?” she said to Carmela as she passed by the couch. “It wouldn’t be good to freak the neighbors.”
    “At least any more than they have been already,” muttered Kit’s pop from behind the paper.
    “Oh Mama thank you!” Carmela shrieked and bounded up off the couch to grab her and hug her as she passed through.
    “Don’t thank me,” said Kit’s mama. “Thank your Pop.”
    The logic of this might not have been instantly obvious to the casual bystander, but Nita had seen enough of these family discussions at Kit’s house to understand that with his folks, parental consensus was often reached by some mechanism she didn’t understand and probably wasn’t meant to. “Thanks, Mr. Rodriguez!” Nita immediately said over the noise of Carmela diving past the newspaper, seizing her Pop and covering his face with smooches.
    “You’re welcome,” Kit’s pop said as soon as Carmela let him loose and more or less went dancing out of the living room and up the stairs to get her tablet and start making notes and plans.
    Kit’s pop shook his head, shook the paper back out into something like a readable configuration, and went back to his reading. As he did, Kit turned to Nita and said silently, She just lay there with her sad face on and let us run interference for her, didn’t she!
    Yep, Nita said. She owes us one.
    Good, Kit said. And meanwhile… “Looks like we get to have a party!”
    A second later the sound system up in Carmela’s room fired up with a raucous British-accented voice more or less screaming over a noisy drum solo, “It’s CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAS!!”
    Nita snickered. “Ronan,” she said, “has a lot to answer for…”
     
    *** 
     
    An hour or so later, Nita was upstairs in Carmela’s bedroom, sprawled in her desk chair with her manual open in her lap, while Carmela was lying on her stomach on her bed and scribbling notes in her tablet at about a mile a minute. That thing must have some handwriting