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said.
    Nita finished with the sticky note, then put the pen down and told him.
    Kit’s eyes slowly went wide. “Wow,” Kit said at last. “Halfway across the galaxy, he said?”
    “Yeah,” said Nita.
    “That’d really be something. You don’t get to do a transit like that every day, and this would be a sponsored one! Think of being able to go that far and not have to pay for the energy.”
    Nita had been thinking of it, in an idle way. “Halfway across the galaxy” was forty-five thousand light-years or so. If you independently constructed a spell to do that kind of distance, it would really take it out of you. And doing such a transit using a previously set-up world-gate had its costs, too—you needed a good reason to do it, such as being formally on errantry.
    “It’s a shame you couldn’t go, anyway,” Kit said.
    “Oh, come on,” Nita said. “I couldn’t go now.”
    “Why not? It’s spring break. We’ve got two whole weeks off!”
    Nita frowned, shook her head. “I don’t know… It wouldn’t be right somehow. My dad—”
    “Your dad wouldn’t mind,” Kit said. And then his expression went very amused. “Come to think of it, my dad wouldn’t mind.”
    Nita looked at Kit in confusion. “What?”
    “You haven’t been over in the past couple of days,” Kit said. “Between Carmela and Ponch—”
    “Oh no,” Nita said. “What’s Ponch doing now?”
    “Wait till you come over,” Kit said, looking resigned. “It’ll be easier for you to see than for me to explain. But when I told my pop we were going to have to go to Mars, he said, ‘Don’t let me keep you.’”
    Nita stared at Kit in surprise. “I bet your mama didn’t say that, though.”
    Kit’s grin had a slight edge to it. “No. Mama suggested I go take a look at Neptune while I was at it, and not hurry home.”
    Nita snickered. “Seriously,” Kit said. “This would be really neat! If we went to see Tom… ”
    They heard the door to Nita’s dad’s bedroom open. “Look,” Nita said, “let’s talk about it later. But I don’t think—”
    Nita’s dad came in from the living room. “You ready?” he said to her.
    “Yeah,” Nita said, getting up. “Daddy, can I have dinner at Kit’s?”
    “Sure,” her dad said. “Kit, she’ll see you later. Neets, let’s get this shopping done.”
     
    ***
     
    Fifteen minutes later Nita and her dad walked in the sliding doors of the grocery store. The way things had gone in the old days, on occasions when the whole family went to the store together, it had been Nita’s dad’s job to push the cart and make helpful suggestions: her mom had done the choosing. Nita now sighed a little as her dad went for the cart, and she consciously took on the choosing role for the first time. When shopping before, she had been rather halfhearted about it, which possibly had been the cause of some of the trouble. I guess I owe the fridge a little apology, she thought, and got out the sticky-pad page on which she’d made her list.
    They went down the vegetable aisle and got potatoes, celery, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce, which Nita very pointedly handed to her dad. “The crisper this time,” she said. “He’s counting on you.”
    “‘He’?” Nita’s dad said, turning the lettuce over several times in his hands and looking at it closely. “How can you tell?”
    “If you’re a wizard, you can look at the gender equivalent of the word lettuce in the Speech,” Nita said. “Or, on the other hand, you can just ask him.”
    “I’d probably prefer to pass on that second option,” Nita’s dad said as they came to the cold cuts and prepackaged meats. “I don’t know if I’d want to talk to something I might eat.”
    “Daddy, this might sound weird to you,” Nita said, looking for her preferred brand of bologna, “but some things are less upset about being eaten than they are about being wasted.”
    “Ouch.”
    Nita looked at her dad in shock. “Daddy, I’m sorry, I