On the Verge (A Charmed Life Book 1) (24 page)

“What are you, fifteen?” Tracy play-scolded.

“You are such a girly-girl,” Tyra responded.

“Barbarian,” Tracy shot back, grinning.

“Stuck-up snob.”

“Uncultured gutter trash.”

Tyra burst out laughing, and Tracy followed suit.  She decided right then that she could be friends with Tyra.

“But seriously, none ah y'all ever seem t'have heard of it.  Here.”  Tyra tossed a second bottle of RC Cola at Tracy, and another single-serving packet of peanuts.  “Some folks use Coca Cola, but RC's th' only way t'go.  Barely anyplace has it 'round here.”

Tracy lifted her eyebrows, looking at the soda, then shrugged and cracked open the top herself.  Took a swig.  It was cola, sure, but didn't taste like Pepsi or Coca Cola.  Was good, though.  Then she dumped in the peanuts, swirled it around as she hesitated.  The peanuts all floated up near the top of the bottle, stuffing it full.

“G'wan.”

She shrugged, lifted the bottle, and took a swig and a mouthful of peanuts.  She chewed thoughtfully for a bit, then swallowed the whole mess.

“Well?” Tyra asked.

Tracy shrugged.  “I don't get it,” she admitted.  “It doesn't really mix flavors.  It's just peanuts and soda, that happen to be in your mouth at the same time.  It's like you're just looking to skip a step while snacking.”

“Well, it's a workin' class snack.  Wraps it all up in an easy, closable bottle while yer doin' stuff.  So yeah, kinda is.  Or, as yeh stuck up types like t'say,” Tyra's voice took on an exaggerated 'cultured' air.  “It's an acquired taste.”

Tracy smirked and took another long draw and a mouthful of peanuts, and crunched away for a bit.  The two ladies sat there in comfortable silence for several minutes.  Tracy could feel her bruises starting to set in, the aches throbbing in time with her heartbeat.  With the intensity of the sparring fading away, her adrenaline was starting to wear off.  She stayed silent, though, finding herself not wanting to complain in front of this tough woman, already valuing her good opinion.

“Next time,” Tracy finally said, breaking the silence, “I bring the snacks.”

“OK?  What'll that be?”

“Peanut butter and graham crackers, with orange juice.”

“What are we, twelve?  And with orange juice?”

“No, really, it's really good.  Peanut butter and orange juice just go amazingly well together.  Hey, I tried your peanuts-and-coke.”

Tyra shrugged.  “Hey, Ah'll try anything once.”

“Why do you call it peanuts and coke … if you don't drink it with coke?”

“Sure I do!  But it's a thing.”

“Wow, how terribly descriptive.”

“Ha ha,” Tyra said blandly.  “OK, you know how you ask fer a kleenex, even if it's not a Kleenex?”

“Sure.  'Facial tissue'” Tracy made quote gestures with her fingers “doesn't have the same sound.”

“Well, that's what coke is, where Ah'm from.  Ah'll have a coke please.  Sure thing, hon, what sort?  Ummm... Diet Pepsi, thanks.”

Tracy giggled softly, and Tyra grinned broadly.

When Tracy went for another drink, her bracelet glittered on her wrist, reminding her what this was.  It wasn't just a friendly workout or sparring match.  It was preparation.  She put the bottle back down and capped it, the happy mood suddenly dismissed.

“But I still don't know how I'm going to fight them.”

Tyra looked up to her, shook her head ruefully.  “Yeh won't.  Doesn't matter what plans y'all make, they never last.  Go in there, do what you do.  Do yer best.  That's all that yeh can.  And if it gets too hairy, then y'all kin jes go ahead and surrender.  Give up yer Earth stone instead of yer Keystone.  There's no shame.”

Tracy nodded a bit, her lips pressed together.  Losing.  That didn't taste right, but Tyra was right.  Better that than getting seriously hurt.  And no one had offered her that strategy yet.  “Of course,” she pointed out, “Without an Earth charm, you guys won't be interested in me anymore.”

Tyra's rude, dismissive noise surprised her.  “That's just for starters.  A theme, right?  We'll make sure you get another Earth stone, if yeh want t'be in.  Most of th' group's more particular 'bout that than Nick is.  He chose it partly 'cause he thinks it shows somethin' 'bout character, but mostly 'cause groups need somethin' t'rally 'bout.  Somethin' t'define 'em an' make 'em … not everyone else.”

Tracy nodded, eyebrows lifting at the insightful observation.  “You're full of surprises,” she said.  “Unless he tells everyone that.”

“Naw, figgered it out mahself.  It's not that hard.”  Tyra looked uncomfortable.

“All right.  So … just fight 'em.  Do my best.  And the wolf?”

“Worry about th' men.  Wolf's jes a critter, but th' men send him out to fight.  Scary, sure, but deal with th' men first. Yeh beat the man, th' wolf loses its bite.  Y'all waste time on th' wolf, an' the man will take yeh down.”

Tracy felt that brief sense of surreality.  “Don't worry about the wolf, he's not the dangerous one” sounded like something right out of one of her books.  But then, her whole life was pretty unreal right now.  Not for the first time, she wondered if it might be a good idea to head in and get herself checked out by a therapist.  And would it be any good if she chose a therapist that she thought had charms?  Could an insane person tell if they were really talking to a therapist, or to a hallucination?

She shook her head, a smirk touching over her lips.

“What's funny?” Tyra asked.

“Oh, just wondering if I was insane, and told myself I had to stop thinking about that before I drove myself mad.”

Tyra grinned broadly.  “Ah know a good shrink fer that.  If ya don't mind he's a pink elephant.”

Tracy laughed, then stood up.  “Well, I guess it's time to get back to practice.  Can't sit around making friends all day.”

The lights flickered, hummed, buzzed. Her head throbbed with the noise, with the light, and everything the customer on the phone said just seemed to make her headache worse. The workday had barely started - this boded ill.

“I assure you, Ma'am,” Tracy said placatingly, forcing a smile into her voice, “I know what I'm talking about. Waiting for another tech to be available would take quite a while, why don't we try together to see if we can-”

The angry voice from the phone made her close her eyes and take a deep breath. As she let it out slowly, trying to exhale her frustration with it, she looked at the post-it note from her predecessor. “To whomever may follow me - remember that this is just what you're doing to keep you going until you find yourself.” It brought to mind, unbidden, Lord Brin's words from Sunday. “If you can do the things we can do, if you had a world of opportunity before you, would you be satisfied doing that?”

“Of course, Ma'am. I'll accelerate your call as much as I'm allowed,” she replied. She put the woman on hold, then held her finger over the button that would transfer her back to the end of the help desk queue. She hesitated, so tempted to send the customer back to the beginning, but shifted her hand slightly to send her to the higher-priority queue instead. It wasn't worth it.

“Another one for the board?” asked John from the next cube, his voice sympathetic. Tracy replied with a sad affirmative sigh, lifting her hand to put another tick-mark on the board in her cube. Her hand trembled with anger as she made the mark, looking at the long list of a very specific type of idiot that always seemed to find her. For a moment, in her mind's eye, she was ripping the board from the wall, throwing it into the air, then shattering it with a hail of summoned icicles. She was pretty sure that, in her current mindset, she'd be able to pull off at least one good attack.

Sighing, releasing the daydream along with the long exhalation, she put the dry erase pen down slowly and carefully.

The marks piled on top of each other. So many tick marks, so many hash marks. How could there be so many sexist people still in the world, in today's world? Would human ignorance persist no matter how far civilization might advance? She did the rough math quickly in her head. With normal call volume, if all those people called her, one after another, it'd take her a weeks with overtime to get through them all.

Her thoughts caught on something.  When had she started keeping track? When had she done the first tick? It was over three years ago, she was pretty sure … there'd been some before that, but the first tick was over three years ago. Over three years in this dead-end job, where the average length of employment was only a few months. When had this become her career, instead of a quick stop-over?

Again, she heard it in the back of her mind. “If you can do the things we can do, if you had a world of opportunity before you, would you be satisfied doing that?”

What could she do? Go to a world of fighting? Some eternal, medieval clash, right out of a children's cartoon? Was that better than how ever many useless phone calls she'd done in the last three years?

Then it hit her. A few weeks of bad calls. Three years of normal or good calls where she could help people, and they were grateful. Sure, there were plenty of other sorts of bad calls – jerks and know-it-alls and storytellers and all.  But still, she was focusing solely on the negatives.

She stared at the board full of tick-marks, which had come to represent everything bad about her job. She knew how white boards worked - some of those tick marks were probably permanent by now. How permanent were they in her? Was she dwelling on the bad? Look at that burst of anger she had just had. What kind of control did that show? How productive was that?

“All power can be used to heal,” she murmured to herself. Jacob had said that, but so had Grandmaster Lee. She could do nothing about the bad customers. They'd be sadly sexist, demanding, self-righteous, indignant, and obnoxious no matter what she could say to them … but she could do something for herself.

She had the pen. She had the transfer button. These might seem weak compared to the ability to summon fire to your will or freeze an enemy's blood in his veins - but every type of power had its own specialty in healing. The pen was, after all, mightier than the sword.

With a sense of surreal awe, she picked up the eraser and, for the first time, moved to erase all those tick marks. The earliest were barely affected by the passing, but she could get some window cleaner and work at those old marks … the most recent were gone, and that was the first step.

She sat down at her phone, picked up the receiver, and keyed for the next call.

Control. That was the key word. She mused on that through the day, as she half-listened to customers rant, question, and plead with her. What did a person have control over? What power did even someone like her have? The customers had to deal with the fact that no matter what, she had power over them - they needed her help. The customers were CEOs, businessmen, politicians, and doctors as well as blue-collar workers and burger flippers. And yet, they were subject to the power of a call-center phone jockey like her.

It wasn't a good reason, perhaps, but it was more of a reason than she'd thought of before. And it suggested she needed to be more conscious of the power she wielded every day. As a customer, she had power. As a service representative, she had power. No matter what she did, she had some sort of power that she could wield to heal or to hurt.

That thought sustained her through the day, and the bus ride home, lost in the consideration of what might be power that she took for granted. She went through the standard rituals of her evening by rote, hardly noticing the things happening around her. The only thing that distracted her from time to time was the pressure of another nearby wielder on her mind, a pressure that passed by quickly as the bus drove along, but she was starting to get used to even that - it had been happening all week. Considering how people's lives tended to run the same on a day to day basis, she imagined some office worker or waitress who would look up as she went past and go, “Yup, that's the new 4:12 one. Must be on a bus, I could set my watch by that one.”

The obstinate, rusty old lock on the front door brought her back to reality as it stubbornly refused to submit to her key. She sighed and wriggled her key back and forth, paying more attention to the act of opening a door than she should really have to, until finally it gave way and she was through.

She walked up to her apartment, smelling the scents of various dinners and apartments.  Many people were having tacos tonight. It was nice to have a day like things used to be. Take the bus, get home, smell the hallway, get to the apartment, prepare to have dinner with friends. The last several days, Jacob had picked her up directly from work and they rode his motorbike to the arena for practice. She'd been eating fast food for the past week, and was getting sick of it already. As soon as she got home from practice, she'd shower and fall into bed, getting nothing else done.

Tonight, though, she was taking a break from practice and going out with her friends. Jacob hadn't been happy about the idea, but she'd put her foot down.  She needed to rest her mind, think about something else - something normal.  It wouldn't do her any good to burn out, and needed time to rest and absorb her lessons before she went back to practice.

Reaching her apartment and locking the door behind her, Tracy went first to the kitchen to whip up some dinner.  It was as she was staring into the freezer for inspiration that she remembered - Sing wanted to buy her dinner, today. It was going to be a little bit odd, four days in a row she hadn't eaten her own dinner.  And she wasn't going to do so the next few days, either.  She was going to be really queasy about fast food by the time this was done.

It wasn't something the storybooks had ever mentioned - become a wizard, eat lots more fast food. Well, at least Jacob had been amenable to sub sandwiches. If she'd had to endure a straight week of McDonald's, she'd be positively ill.

She opened the freezer again, looking into it for inspiration for dinner. She closed it again, after a few seconds, laughing at herself for how much she was caught up in her habits. In this case, she didn't need magic to break out of that pattern. Instead, she just tossed a slice of bread into the toaster oven so she'd be able to enjoy some more of the preserves Sing had brought.

While the toast was browning, she sat down at the dining room table and booted up her laptop to check her personal email. It'd been several days since she'd checked it, and was falling behind.  Nameless jumped up on the table to peer at the laptop as it started to whirr, his tail flicking idly.

Tracy shook her finger at the smoky cat. “You're not supposed to be up there,” she said. “Down.” Nameless, of course, ignored her. With a sigh, Tracy picked him up and put him down on the floor. “Stay down,” she said. “No going on the table. That's hardwood.”

She knew it was futile, but Tracy felt some small, minor need to assert her dominance over the newcomer to her territory. After all, she was the human; she wanted to at least pretend she was the dominant race in this apartment. She might know better, but she wanted to pretend.

Nameless jumped up on one of the chairs and stared at her, delivering a quiet, plaintive mew. Tracy couldn't help but smile affectionately, slipping off the chair to sit on her heels so that she could be about eye-level with the cat. Lightly, she played her fingers over his velvety ears. “There you go,” she said softly, “I'm paying attention to you. Does that make you happy?”

Nameless ignored her question, just sitting there nobly for as long as he could until finally he broke down and got that goofy look on his face as he started to purr, pressing into Tracy's light touch.

Tracy smiled in amusement, then took off her charm bracelet and fastened it around Nameless' neck like a collar. “There we go,” she said cheerfully. “Now you're the all-powerful weather wizard for the evening, and I'm just your pet human!”

Nameless twisted his head this way and that, as if trying to catch a glimpse at what was around his neck, then gave her thumb a small lick as if acknowledging her fealty. Tracy laughed and went to the kitchen to get the toast and raspberry preserves.

By the time Sing arrived, she wasn't only ready, she actually had free time on her hands, which was a nice change from the norm. She had briefly toyed with the idea of doing something productive, but decided she just wasn't up to it, and instead settled down in the pile of pillows to read the book she'd started the past weekend.

The fantasy novel read differently than normal, after the training of the last several days. Every magical effect she read about, she wondered if it was possible. She wondered what mindset she'd need to bring it about. It was so surreal: this was fantasy, a fictional novel, but she was looking at it for very real-life inspiration.  It made the last several days seem unreal all over again, as if she'd just imagined them, had just been really hooked on a good book and had found it hard to pull her mind out of it.

At some level, she wondered if she should find fantasy books as enjoyable anymore. If she'd lose her taste for them as her own life turned more fantastical - but she'd always enjoyed books for the characters more than the world, anyway. She'd always wished she could do the things in the books - and now she could - but she wanted to emulate the personalities more than the powers. Determined people, strong people, who never seemed to give up no matter the odds arrayed against them. It gave her strength, these stories, and she was almost disappointed when the buzzer sounded to pull her away from them.

More so than her own apartment, being stuffed into the back of the car, wedged into a too-small area among the chatter and talk, was like coming home. She wondered how cold it was - just last week she was shivering and freezing in this position. Now it was just a little bit brisk, but still comfortable. She leaned up and gave Sing a lil' kiss, then, shivering as if she were colder than she actually was.  She ducked her head under Sing's arm and pulled it around her, curling up into his side. She kept her eyes closed and the movement casual, but she peeked out through cracked lids past her lashes to see Jill's reaction.

Jill's eyes had gone wide as an excited expression sprung into life on her face, but then she paused and looked reserved, as if she was trying to determine whether or not Jill and Sing were putting her on.

“Are you two serious?” Jill finally asked, her voice straining with contained excitement, “Or are you just teasing me?”

“Oohhhh,” Tracy purred, enjoying Jill's reaction, “I mmmight have asked Sing out on a date last weekend …”

Most of the car winced at Jill's excited squee. “How did it happen?” she demanded. “What did you do?”

“Well,” Tracy said, “First we went to a nice little restaurant-”

“First I came over,” Sing interrupted, grinning, “With several bags worth of … ” his voice dropped dramatically, “Mystery items.” He chuckled softly. “It was driving her nuts that I wouldn't let her see what was in them.”

Tracy felt a brief twinge of annoyance at the interruption, but knew that it was just because Sing was as excited as she was about the date, so she just settled into his chest and let him tell the story with his usual flair for the dramatic.

Each week someone different was responsible for picking a restaurant to go to. Today Ted has picked the “local” steak house, which was farther away than most of the places they went to.  Sing talked most of the drive, and everyone ooooed softly over his description of Schrödinger's, vowing that some week soon, they'd go as a group to check the place out.  They also harassed Tracy for not having told them of it before. Tracy felt a little uneasy about that - Schrödinger's had always been her little hole-in-the-wall place, and while she did want to bring more business to Hans, it had been nice having her own secret little magical diner - even before she had realized the magic wasn't just figurative.