Chapter 8: Culinary Heaven

The witches were leaving, piling into their cars, saying goodbye in the long-winded way people often do. I hadn't realized, but apparently, someone had brought casseroles.

I was hungry. I had no idea how long I'd been hungry, but that was a normal part of being a teenager, I'm told. Always being hungry. Sometimes I wondered if it was just part of being a teenager, or if it was part of being a teenager in the foster system. But I wouldn't have been dumb enough to say that out loud.

And besides, it's not like I couldn't have all the cardboard pizza a body could eat. Just not good food, 'cause no one in the Kimber family but me had any interest in good food. I watched the green bean casserole as it was scraped into three Ziploc bags, hunger aching in my stomach, but not a word passed my lips.

Dang it. They'd already done enough. They'd already done more than enough for me. I didn't have any right to ask them for anything else.

My stomach gurgled.

"Well," came a voice from behind me. It was the larger lady whose name I'd never caught. "I think I found the perfect person to take home some of our leftovers! Ladies, did you hear that?"

"I remember when I had a teenager in the house," complained Mrs. Flores. "Couldn't keep milk in the fridge. Always drank all the milk first thing. Weirdest thing. You'd imagine someone might wake up and brush their teeth or something, but no, no. She'd wake up and drink all the milk in the fridge—a gigantic tumbler full, then a second, then a protein shake."

"Oh, my lactose intolerance would kill me," moaned Elsie.

A gallon-sized Ziploc bag full of what looked like potato salad was pressed firmly into my hands.

"Now, you go home and eat right, okay?" asked the lady whose name I didn't know.

"Thank you," I said. "I'm sorry, I don't think I caught your name."

"Yasmin," she said cheerfully, and patted me with surprising strength on the shoulder. "Run along now."

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It was Saturday lunchtime, so there were plenty of cars on the road. I decided to take the back way home.

Elsie was letting me leave my pig in her backyard. She said the resistance should apply from anywhere on the astral plane—apparently, distance is more conceptual than physical, which was a strange statement to try to understand. She told me she'd get me a book on it.

She told me she was going to get me a lot of books on a lot of things. I was her first student, and she was going to do right by me.

I wasn't complaining. I was going to live, and I had magic.

And potato salad.

And I couldn't help but think how lucky I was to have met a group of women who, if nothing else, I could appeal to in an emergency—just as I was heading toward aging out of the foster system.

Or maybe it had been a one-time thing. I wasn't going to push my luck.

The trees were pretty greens and yellows as I passed beneath their arching canopies—green like a crayon. A whole street billowing in the wind as I rode my bike down the middle, feet off the pedals, just drifting, coasting along. This had been a surprisingly good day.

My piggy loved me.

My stomach grumbled, and I felt a little bit—just a pang of hunger, the slightest shake in my limbs. I really didn't know when I'd eaten last.

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I'm not a starving orphan because there isn't food available, but I don't eat like I should sometimes, I think. I just forget what I'm doing, and I don't schedule ahead, and "three square meals a day" becomes "one square meal a day"—except on school days, when they pretty much don't allow me to forget lunch.

The thought of school soured my mood a little bit. I pushed it out of my mind.

I was enjoying the breeze.

The breeze, and a whole day and a half before I had to go back. What could I get done in a day and a half?

The thing was, I hadn't seen many jobs hiring this summer. And I needed a job, for an income, to trade for a roof by the time I turned 18 in July.

As cool as the magic was, I didn't think figments were very likely to land me a job. I could picture it now: I walk up to somebody, making finger gestures with my right hand (which, admittedly, was better than taking up my useful left hand). But if I walk up, making gestures, and grab them... now I can't see, but he sees something? Yeah, whatever. Then he hits me in the face.

Yeah. Daydream over.

Some power fantasy.

On the other hand, being able to focus and cast something on myself meant I could see whatever I wanted, which was going to be top-quality entertainment for getting me through history class. I could picture it now: Mrs. Scarlett Humphrey telling us all about Sherman's March to the Sea while wearing a Barney the dinosaur costume.

That was the lamest idea I've ever had.

I'd workshop it.

I wondered if she'd be able to tell, like Elsie had. She'd seemed to have to look pretty closely to tell what I was doing.

What if, I thought, I could use that to sneak in cheat sheets?

Math was going to be so doable.

I just had to find someone who knew math to work out a problem completely for me, then memorize exactly how they did it, visualize it, put it on a figment, and focus on it for the whole math test until I got to that problem so I could copy it down.

And do that for all 40 questions.

That sounded a whole lot like 'studying'.

Worst. Power fantasy. Ever.

And then I was back on my cul-de-sac, pulling into my foster home's driveway just about in time for lunch.

'Dad' hadn't moved from where I'd seen him this morning, still dead to the world.

I scavenged the fridge and pantry: Tuna, relish, and leftover fast-food salad.

That would do.

I'm not a high-maintenance girl, but I do need to eat. I always thought it was funny in old movies—the tiniest little mouse-bites would negotiate their way to the actress's mouth via a fork that was always bigger than the morsel. If there was finger food in a scene, it was a tiny little sandwich, a quarter of a sandwich—anything to make sure it didn't look like women actually ate food.

And then, on the other side of the spectrum, there was me: a teenager walking with an armful of ingredients over to the microwave, where I dumped out two cans of tuna onto a paper plate, drowned them in relish, and then microwaved them while eating the leftover Wendy's salad. It may have had traces of animal proteins in it, but sometimes it’s starve-or-cope. It was gone long before the microwave beeped.

Women get hungry too, okay, guys?

Maybe it's fitting that my familiar is a pig.

You're worried I forgot about the potato salad, aren't you? No, no, no. Potato salad is supposed to be eaten cold.

I took out one of the old plastic plates from behind the "good china." It's got the sort of white spots on it where the plastic melted a little in the microwave and got all hairy.

It was perfect. I slathered it with an inch-deep layer of potato salad. The rest of the Ziploc bag—which was mine and I had no urge to share—I hid in the back of the fridge behind the zucchinis nobody was ever going to eat. There were another three servings there, and they were MINE.

I mentally added "clean the fridge" to my to-do list.

One of the good things about cleaning up the fridge was that 'Dad' always realized, "Hey, this means we don't have ingredient X"—whether that be coffee creamer, which would be a tragedy, or something nobody has ever used in this house, like the organic almond butter jar he has stubbornly taking up half of the butter compartment.

And he’d realize that since we don't have the ingredients, he can't possibly have... I don't know, whatever food he'd had in mind at the time that he bought it. So he’d send me to the store, and—you guessed it—I’d get to spend whatever is left over after buying what he wanted. Usually, that would total to 8 or 10 dollars. Prices fluctuated so badly these days, after all, and he didn’t want me to have to come back home without something he wanted.

That would be the only reason that I'd been able to develop a crippling energy drink addiction to supplement my crippling coffee addiction.

The microwave beeped.

I sat down with my spread of fishy goodness and warm relish (don't you judge me) and delicious potato salad.

Culinary heaven, baby.