Her parents looked at each other again.
“You are our child,” her dad bellowed, “and you will do what we say. End of discussion.” He whirled around, long hair flying, and stomped back into the master suite.
“This is ridiculous.” Holly dropped her fork into the plate of edamame with a clank. “Elijah Brown is a nice guy”—and funny, and quiet, and smoldering—“and I invited him on a date, and I already told him yes to the prom. There’s no way I’m going back to school tomorrow and telling him no.”
“That’s ex-act-ly what you’re going to do.” Her mom tapped her long red fingernail on the table for emphasis. “Or I will call his mother and tell her myself.” She stood abruptly and swept into the master suite after Holly’s dad.
Holly stared through the open doorway framed with grand molding. Her mom would call Elijah’s mom, as if she and Elijah had gotten in a slap-fight on the elementary school playground. She didn’t understand her parents’ reaction. Their elitist attitude was fake. Her dad played pickup basketball games with the security guards in the employee gym at the casino. Her mom went to lunch with ladies from the public relations department. None of Holly’s friends’ families were rich or famous, and her friends spent the night with Holly all the time. Holly didn’t spend the night with them, but that was because her parents were overprotective and worried about stalkers, not snobby.
Overprotectiveness was the only explanation for the way her parents were acting now. They wouldn’t admit it, but they were afraid for her to go on a date. They didn’t want her to grow up.
There had to be a way out of this. Maybe she could cancel the matinee but still go to the prom with Elijah secretly? She didn’t see how. Her parents would be on the lookout. And who knew whether he liked her enough to play along? He’d asked her to the prom. He hadn’t pledged his undying love.
The doorbell chimed. Holly’s dad emerged from the master bedroom, dressed in a suit this time.
“That’s the chauffeur from the casino,” he said, stopping at the kitchen table and crouching until he was at Holly’s eye level. “I’m sorry, kiddo. We’re not saying you can’t go to the prom at all. If it were some kid besides Elijah Brown—”
“Any kid besides Elijah Brown?” Holly didn’t buy that her parents wanted to keep her away from Elijah because his mother was a dealer. There had to be something else.
“Not any kid. We’ll take it on a case-by-case basis.” Her dad wasn’t meeting her gaze anymore. Before he rose and headed for the door, his eyes had already shifted toward his escape.
Then Holly’s mom clopped in on four-inch stilettos and a cloud of perfume. “In bed by ten, sweetie.” She stopped and kissed the top of Holly’s head as if she hadn’t just ended Holly’s social life.
Holly didn’t respond. She stared straight ahead at the darkened doorway into her parents’ bedroom until she heard the front door close and the limo pull away.
And then the plate of salad and edamame lifted off the kitchen table in front of her, zipped across the room, and smashed against the front door. She jumped at the noise. Shards of china tinkled onto the floor.
She flushed hot, and her body sparkled with pleasure—a lot like the way she’d felt when Elijah stood so close to her and looked down at her in the hallway after lunch, but ten times more intense. The feeling was delicious and shocking. Yet she wasn’t surprised that she could fling her dinner plate across the room with her mind. Somewhere deep down, in a dark place she hadn’t acknowledged, she’d always known that she could do magic.
But she knew she should be surprised, so she eased up from her chair and crossed the room to examine the plate-shaped mark on the door. Vinaigrette oozed down between bits of lettuce pasted flat.
Prom date out, telekinesis in. Not a fair trade at all.
She didn’t clean up the mess. She knew she’d get in trouble if she left it until her parents came home, but that was just tough. She flounced into the living room, stretched out on the chaise, and tested her magical power. First she pressed the button on the TV remote without physically touching it. She was pleased to find her power had this much precision. She clicked through the shopping networks to a music channel. Now her levitation had a kick-ass sound track.
After a few moments of knocking magazines around on the side table, she turned to bigger objects. The more she used her power, the more the sparkling sensation raced through her body. She lifted the armchair five feet in the air, moved it across the room, and set it back down. She lifted the coffee table all the way to the ceiling and accidentally scraped the plaster. Hastily she lowered the table and set it down. She lifted the chaise she was sitting on and propelled it around the room, tilting it on its course, like a car in an animatronics-filled fantasy ride at Disneyland. She set it down in a new location and adjusted it a little so she could still see the music videos on TV.
Next she turned her attention to the sofa. Here she had a problem. She managed to make it hover a few inches off the floor, but this gave her a headache. Lifting heavy things hurt, just as if she were lifting them with her body rather than her mind. She preferred a happy medium between the addictive sparkles through her limbs and the pain in her head. She set the sofa down.
She lifted herself into the air, careful not to lift too high and hit her head on the ceiling. The chandelier was dusty, she noticed. This was the best feeling yet—producing the strongest sparkles—and she had only a lingering headache from her battle with the sofa. She moved all the furnishings exactly where she wanted them, then imagined opening the medicine cabinet in the hall bathroom and taking out the painkillers. When she saw the plastic bottle bobbing toward her down the hall, she opened a kitchen cabinet, removed a glass, and filled it with chilled water from the refrigerator. The glass had just arrived in front of her, and she was concentrating hard to defeat the child safety cap on the bottle without giving in and using her fingers, when the front door opened, scraping broken bits of plate along the marble floor.
“Sweetie,” her mom called, “we’re home for just a second. I forgot my pur—”
The painkiller bottle and the glass of water hit the floor. Pills and bits of glass splashed all the way to her mom’s sequined stilettos.
Holly and her mom stared at each other. She pictured how her mom must see her, floating in the air, no strings attached. She became painfully aware of the rock music blaring from the TV. It made her power seem underhanded, like her mom had caught her smoking pot.