"Diane Duane - The Wizard's Dilemma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

later... There's no rush. Is Kit coming over?"

Nita carefully turned the notebook page she'd been working on. "Uh, no. I have to go out and see him in
a little while, though... Someone's meeting us to finish up a project. Probably it'll take us an hour or two,
so

don't wait for me. I'll heat something up when I get home."

"Okay." Her mother got up and went into the kitchen, where she started opening cupboards and peering
into them. Nita looked after her with mild concern when she heard her mom's tired sigh. For the past
month or so, her mom had been alternating between stripping and refinishing all the furniture in the
house and leading several different projects for the local PTA-^the biggest of them being the effort to
get a new playground built near the local primary school. It seemed to Nita that her mother was always
either elbow deep in steel wool and stain, or out of the house on errands, so often that she didn't have a
lot of spare time for anything else.

After a moment Nita heaved a sigh. TVb point in trying to weasel around it, though, she thought. I've
got problems of my own.

Kit...

But it's not his fault...

Is it?

Nita was still recovering from an overly eventful vacation in Ireland, one her parents had planned for
her, to give Nita a little time away from Kit, and from wizardry. Of course, this hadn't worked. A
wizard's work can happen anywhere, and just changing continents couldn't have stopped Nita from being
involved in it any more than changing planets could have. As for Kit, he'd found ways to be with Nita
regardlessтАФwhich turned out to have been a good thing. Nita had been

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Friday Afternoon

extremely relieved to get home, certain that everything would then get back to normal.

Trouble is, someone changed the location of normal" and didn't bother sending me a map, Nita thought.
Kit had been a little weird since she got home. Maybe some of it was just their difference in age, which
hadn't really been an issue until a month or so ago. But Nita had started ninth grade this year and, to her
surprise, was finding the work harder than she'd expected. She was used to coasting through her subjects
without too much strain, so this was an annoyance. Worse yet, Kit wasn't having any trouble at all,
which Nita also found annoying, for reasons she couldn't explain. And the two of them didn't see as
much of each other at school as they'd used to. Kit, now in an accelerated-study track with other kids
doing "better than their grade," was spending a lot of his time coaching some of the other kids in his
group in history and social studies. That was fine with her, but Nita disliked the way some of her
classmates, who knew she was best friends with Kit, would go out of their way to remind her, whenever