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this,” she said aloud with exasperation, and put her back against the door, staring up at the painted tin of the ceiling.
    She had hoped that everything would change in college. She’d never had friends in high school. She’d never had a date, much less a boyfriend. How could she? Before she’d turned sixteen, she’d been a practicing witch, living on the outskirts of a small town with her grandmother, who was known to be strange. And she had the feeling that even if she’d still been with her parents, kids would have sensed something “off” about her.
    Until she was thirteen, for instance, she’d never really cared for popular music, preferring folk, jazz, and classical. She’d more or less gotten into popular stuff because of Simon and Garfunkel, Donovan, the Turtles, and the Irish Rovers, and then she had discovered Cream and from there she had ventured into the realms familiar to her peers. But her tastes were still eclectic, and even though 1968 was the height of the hippie revolution, with Woodstock a mere year away, in that small town, most of the adults voted straight Republican ticket. And Di was still the weird girl with the weird grandmother, the one who had been called“Wednesday Addams,” the one who made people feel just a little uneasy when they looked at her.
    Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, not even a hint of a boyfriend. No best friend. No slumber parties, no invitations to “study,” which really meant to get together in the bedroom, giggle about boys, listen to records, and try to learn to dance by watching what the cool kids were doing on the dance shows on TV. No one hated her, but no one liked her either.
    And she was too smart. The smartest kid in the school, as it turned out, which was one reason why she was at Harvard. No guys dated a brainiac, even when she bloomed at sixteen, and developed a great figure and the kind of long hair you saw in shampoo commercials.
    And all her clothing, except for the jeans and leotards she wore after school, was handmade. Never mind it looked a thousand times better, and hipper, than the stuff you got at Sears; everyone knew her grandmother had run it up on her ancient treadle sewing machine.
    And…there was the fact that once in a while she slipped, and said things that scared people. Things she shouldn’t have known, things that people didn’t really want anyone knowing.
    Nope. No dates for Di.
    At least they didn’t egg the house on Halloween. They just kept their distance, whispered sometimes when they saw her. They never treated her badly, but they nevertreated her as if they thought she was one of them. She might just as well have been a Star Trek alien, blue, with antennae.
    Heck, some of them probably thought she was a Vulcan in disguise.
    Then after her sixteenth birthday, well, there was never any time, even if a boy actually had approached her. Between school, learning everything she could about magic, and keeping herself and others alive, all her waking hours were pretty much accounted for.
    Isn’t a Guardian supposed to have a life? She’d wondered about that. More than once, because the other Guardians she got a chance to talk to all said that things were getting a lot more dangerous than they had been before. There were more incidents, more things waking up, more things breaking through.
    She’d asked Memaw about that, and Memaw had a theory about why so much weirdness was cropping up. She was sure it was the hippies, and truth to tell, Di was inclined to agree with her. Where once you had to go into the bad parts of big cities to find an occult store, or get the mailing address of one that would ship books to you, or find libraries with really obscure collections, now occult stores were cropping up all over. The stores were in college towns mostly, but there were science-fiction stores in bigger cities that would get you occult books if you knew what you wanted, and you