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didn’t mean it that way.”
    Her dad smiled as they turned into the next aisle. “I didn’t think you did. But sometimes ‘ouch’ is a healthy reaction. Or so I hear.”
    “You’ve been talking to Tom again,” Nita said.
    “No, Millman. Never mind. We need some pizzas.” Her father paused in front of a freezer case.
    “Yeah.” Nita picked a pizza from the freezer compartment. The front of it was full of images of ancient stone ovens. Nita turned it over and started reading the ingredients. “This is disgusting,” Nita said. “Look at all the junk they put in this!”
    “That’s probably why they call it junk food.”
    “Used to be that just meant the empty calories,” Nita said. “These days… ” Not even this year’s unit on organic chemistry had prepared her to cope with some of the ingredient names on that label. Nita made a face and put the package back. “I’m not sure I want to be eating so many things I can’t pronounce.”
    “Home cooking means a lot more work… ”
    “I know,” Nita said. “I’m starting to get why Mom was so intense about it. Guess I’m just going to have to learn.”
    They turned into the paper-towels-and-toilet-paper aisle, and Nita’s dad put a couple of the giant economy-size bundles of toilet paper in the cart. “It has been tough, hasn’t it?” her dad said.
    Nita sighed and nodded. “It hurts sometimes,” she said after a moment. “Hurts pretty bad.” Then, having a sudden thought, she added, “But not so much that I need to leave the planet for extended periods.”
    Her father looked thoughtful. “You sure about that?”
    Nita looked at him, uncertain what was going through his mind. “What are other kids at school doing over spring break?” her dad said.
    Nita shrugged. “Some of them are going away,” she said. Among a few of her friends there had been excited talk of family vacations, trips to Florida or even, in one or two cases, to Europe. These by themselves had left Nita unimpressed, for travel by itself was no problem for a wizard. You could be planets or star-systems away from home in a matter of minutes or hours, depending on whether you used private or public transport. But the idea of being able to get away with the family, even for just a few days, had an entirely different attraction. Unfortunately, this was the busy time of year for Nita’s dad. The Easter rush had been wearing him down, and he was tired too, Nita knew, but no florist in his right mind took a vacation right now.
    “It doesn’t matter, Daddy,” Nita said. “Kit and I have a lot of stuff we’ve been planning to do. We might need to travel, but not far. No farther than Mars, anyway. It’ll be nice to just kind of take it easy for a while. Don’t worry about it.”
    “I’m not worrying,” said her dad. But there was a strangely neutral sound to his voice, and Nita didn’t know quite what to make of it.
    “Daddy,” Nita said, “are you okay?”
    “Sure, honey,” he said.
    Nita wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t say anything. She and her dad went to the checkout, dealt with bagging and paying for the groceries, and carted everything out to the car. Then they headed for home. They were only a few minutes away from the supermarket when Nita’s dad said, “There were going to be aliens in the house?”
    Nita’s thoughts had been occupied with the weather on Mars this time of year, and the question took her by surprise. “Uh, yeah,” she said. “It is an exchange program.”
    “Not incredibly strange aliens, I take it.”
    “Well, they’d have to be able to handle the basic environment,” Nita said. “Our atmosphere, our gravity. That doesn’t mean they’d be humanoid; there’s a lot of variation in body structures among the kinds of carbon-based life that breathe oxygen. Anyway, whoever these guys were supposed to be, they might look pretty weird. But that wouldn’t matter. If they’re wizards, we’d have the most important stuff in