Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 57143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
“I work for Augustine investigating cases to get experience.”
“Why are you doing an internship?”
“Better question: why am I not doing an internship?” Tia muttered.
If she wanted to do an internship with MII, it wouldn’t be a bad place. Augustine was super safe to crush on even for high school girls. Not only he was god-tier handsome, but he was also too old and therefore off-limits, and he was 100% above board. He would never creep or lech. And if any of his employees tried something, they would be instantly fired.
Matilda was waiting for my response.
I sighed. “I want to go to a special college. My grades aren’t good enough, so I have to work extra to get accepted.”
Matilda thought this over. “Why didn’t you tell anybody about the internship?”
“You think I didn’t tell anybody. You are mistaken. I told Nevada. Ha!”
Matilda frowned. “But you didn’t tell Ms. Penelope.”
“No.” Sometimes talking with Matilda was like conversing with a very old, sage witch that somehow ended up in the body of a nine-year old.
“Why?”
“My mom hates Augustine and doesn’t trust him. If she knew I was doing an internship at MII, she would try to talk me out of it, and then she would stress out about my safety. I don’t want her to worry.”
Matilda nodded.
“Also, when I was much younger, I told my mom that it was her fault that my grades were bad, because she didn’t pay enough attention to me. It wasn’t true. My grades were bad because I didn’t care. But I was angry at the time, and I didn’t want to be in trouble. It upset my mom. I don’t want her to know that my grades aren’t enough because she might blame herself.”
And that just kind of flopped out. Great going, me. It had been eating at me for weeks, ever since I secretly started the Path to College. Here I was, baring my soul to a girl I just met and to Matilda. Awesome. Just awesome. Maybe it was the lack of sleep.
“What’s your GPA?” Tia asked.
“3.4.”
“That’s not bad.”
“No. But it’s not good enough for what I want to do. It needs to be stellar.”
“Why?” Tia asked.
The two of them were looking at me. Well, I started it.
“I have two sisters,” I explained. “My oldest sister, Nevada, took over the family business when she was seventeen. She kept us fed, and got a degree, and she is a truthseeker Prime. She is super competent. At everything.”
I just kept talking. It felt like a good idea for some reason.
“My second sister is like a super-computer. She can do math in her head. Not like baby math, like the complicated, people’s-eyes-go-big kind of math. She is now the Head of House. She thinks in multiple directions. Like I honestly think that she isn’t human. Our evil grandmother is Victoria Tremaine.”
“Oh shit.” Tia set up straighter.
I wasn’t surprised she knew who Grandma Victoria was. She was a terrifying legend. People used her to scare their kids at night.
“Catalina managed to contain Victoria Tremaine. She outmaneuvered her.”
“I thought we were bad. Your family is fucking scary,” Tia said.
“Exactly. Those are my sisters. My cousins also live with us. And, if you ever meet them, and you hear Leon call me sister-cousin, it’s because they were officially adopted. He says shit like that because he thinks it’s funny. Anyway, Bern, my oldest cousin, can hack any computer and writes programs that make elite coding people weep with envy. Leon shoots around the corners and never misses.”
Tia stopped eating. “That’s a lot.”
“Yeah. And here I am. I get big and smash shit.”
Tia put her fork down, reached out, and took my hand. “Hey. I feel that.”
“Thanks.” I squeezed her hand.
It hit me like a train. I needed a friend. I didn’t have one. I had my family, and I had Runa, but she was older and she was dating Bern, which made things slightly complicated.
“I want to accomplish something. Something that has nothing to do with my magic. I want to do it without my family’s help. I want to be competent and scary, and I want to take care of my mom and everybody else. I’m not good at a lot of things, but I’m good at business. And I’m good at people and politics. When we have a difficult client who won’t pay their bills, I go and talk to them, and I get that payment. Nobody in my family can do that as well as I can. Nevada did okay with it, but she is married now, and honestly, I’m better at it. That’s my thing.”
I was just having verbal diarrhea now.
“You get the money,” Tia said.
“Yes. I realized at some point that unless I could control my temper, I wouldn’t ever be able to leave the house because I kept crashing out and getting into fights. So I studied people. I watched them, and I figured out what drives them, so I could manipulate them instead of bashing their faces in. When I came to talk to you today, everything I did—the hair, the makeup, the clothes—was calculated. I could tell you were angry, and I knew that pissing you off even more was the only way to get you to tell me where Phillip was.”