Among Others

tried hard to like it. I’m not sure it would be worth the effort. After all, it’s not as if it’s good for you.
    “So what are you going to do about her?” Wim asked.
    “I don’t think I need to do anything. We stopped her. Her last chance was Halloween.”
    “Not if your sister didn’t go under the hill like she was supposed to. Not if she’s still there. She could use that again. You have to do something to really stop her. You have to kill her.”
    “I think that would be wrong,” I said. The other girls from school were all getting up, and I knew it must be time for the bus.
    “I know she’s your mother—”
    “That has nothing to do with it. Nobody could hate her more than I do. But I think killing her would be the wrong thing to do. It feels wrong. I could talk to the fairies about it, but if it would have helped, I think they would have told me to do it already. You’re thinking about it in the wrong sort of way, as if it was a story.”
    “This is just so damn weird,” he said.
    “I’m going to have to go. I’ll miss the bus.” I stood up, leaving the rest of my coffee.
    He gulped his own coffee. “When will I see you?”
    “Tuesday, like always. For Zelazny.” I smiled. I was looking forward to that.
    “Sure, but on our own?”
    “Next Saturday.” I shrugged my coat on. “It’s the only time there is.”
    We started walking out of the cafe. “They don’t let you out of there at all?”
    “No. They pretty much don’t.”
    “It’s like prison.”
    “It is in a way.” We walked down to the bus stop. “Well, Tuesday then,” I said, as we reached it. The bus was there, and the girls were pouring onto it. And then—no, this needs to be on a line of its own.
    And then he kissed me.
    T UESDAY 5 TH F EBRUARY 1980
    It took me until today to finish writing up what happened on Saturday.
    I’m not sure I really like The Number of the Beast . There’s a lot to like about it, but it’s all over the place as far as plot goes, and as far as location goes as well. I’ve never read Oz or the Lensmen, and I’m not quite sure what they were doing there.
    Apart from that, the main excitement has been that all the girls who were on the bus have been asking me nonstop about “my boyfriend,” where I met him, what he’s like, what he does, and so on and on and on. Some of them who were in the cafe know about his reputation and have warned me about him—what, seventeen-year-old boy had sex with girlfriend, shock horror! It’s such a weird mixture of puritanical and prurient. The girls who have local boyfriends say they’re not serious about them, and some of them have what they call serious boyfriends at home. What they mean by serious is just what Jane Austen would have called an eligible parti, a boy of the same class who they might marry. They’re slumming with the local boys, and the local boys mostly know that. It’s vile, they’re vile, the whole thing is vile and I don’t want to think about Wim in the same breath as that.
    The real difference is that we’re not of different classes. Wim and I are both of a class that expects to go to university. I don’t know what his father does, but that his mother works in the hospital kitchens while I go to school here is irrelevant. Well, maybe not irrelevant, but not the point. Anyway, I’m not sure if Wim is my boyfriend, and even if he is it isn’t at all the thing they’re talking about with their serious and not serious. I’m only fifteen. I’m not sure I ever want to get married. I’m neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some “real thing.” What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn’t we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I’m not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?
    But that’s also almost irrelevant, because there’s also the ethical thing of the magic. I should probably tell him, and then he’d hate me, anybody would.
    I’ve asked Nurse to make me a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t ask what for.
    W EDNESDAY 6 TH F EBRUARY 1980
    Zelazny meeting last night. Wim thinks Zelazny’s the greatest stylist of all time. Brian thinks style is unimportant compared to ideas, and he thinks Zelazny’s ideas are ordinary, except for Shadow. It’s funny how people divided on that one. I think if we’d voted for whether