Magic in the Mix Read online

  For Jeffrey again

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Annie Barrows

  Chapter 1

  “I think I hear them,” said Molly.

  Miri listened. “No,” she said after a moment. “If it were them, they’d be yelling.”

  The two girls waited patiently on the front steps. Sort of patiently. Not so patiently. On the hard, cold steps.

  “They’d better be grateful,” muttered Molly. “My tush is going to sleep.”

  “Mine’s frozen,” Miri grumbled.

  All at once, two boys exploded into the front yard. Skinny and shouting, they sprinted up the sloping lawn toward the house, trying to hit each other as they ran.

  Miri and Molly rose to their feet. Each of them held a piece of paper. On Miri’s, in big black letters, was the word PROGRESS. On Molly’s, in the same big black letters, was the word REPORTS.

  “And he’s down!” screeched Robbie, dragging his brother, Ray, backward by the strap of his backpack until he collapsed. “He’s down in the dumps! He’s a loser! He’s—” Robbie glanced up and froze.

  Ray took the opportunity to hook his foot around Robbie’s ankle, but before he could flip his brother over, he, too, caught sight of his sisters. “Oh, man,” he said under his breath.

  Miri and Molly flipped the papers over. MOM, said one. RAGING, said the other.

  Ray and Robbie nodded slowly. Thanks, they mouthed, and turned to slink toward the tangle of blackberry coils and apple trees that grew wild on one side of the yard, the traditional hiding place for Gill children waiting out a parental storm.

  The front door opened, and a small blond head poked out. “Ooooh, they’re home! Mommy’s really mad at you!”

  “Shut up!” moaned Ray. But it was too late. They all heard the clatter of their mother’s shoes hurrying down the hall.

  Miri winced in sympathy. “We tried.”

  Robbie nodded, his face glum.

  And here came Mom’s voice, shooting out the front door ahead of her. “How on earth is it possible that you boys got Fs—Fs!—in history? Just come right into this house, the pair of you”—now she burst into view, hands waving—“and I’ll make one thing perfectly clear! There will be no, I repeat, no sports, including cross-country, until you earn at least a B in history! Am I making myself understood?” She stood on the porch, her hands on her hips, her eyes flashing.

  Ray and Robbie knew better than to argue. “Right, Mom,” they mumbled. “Sorry, Mom.”

  But she was too mad to stop. Their father said she was like a music box; once she was wound up, she had to keep going until she ran down. “Of course I immediately made a call to Mr. Emory”—Ray and Robbie gulped—“and I learned, to my horror, that the pair of you not only flunked, flunked, your last test, but you cut class as well!”

  “Only once!” protested Ray.

  “Ooh, bad move,” whispered Miri to Molly.

  She was right. “Once!” squawked their mother. “Once is one time too many, Raymond Gill! Once! Once!”

  “I don’t know why he says things like that,” Molly murmured to Miri.

  “You’d think he’d learn,” said Miri, shaking her head. “Check out Robbie.”

  Molly nodded appreciatively. “He’s good.”

  “Sort of ashamed and pathetic at the same time,” Miri said with admiration.

  Their mother whirled around. “What are you two muttering about?”

  Uh-oh. Trouble was contagious. Miri tried to look innocent.

  “Miri and Molly were telling!” squealed Nora from the front door. “They had signs!”

  Mom frowned. “What?”

  “They had signs!” Nora repeated triumphantly. “They were telling Ray and Robbie things.”

  Miri took a breath, preparing her denial, but Molly laughed. “You goof,” Molly said to Nora. “We were doing homework. See?” She picked up her conveniently located math book and waved it at Nora. “We were multiplying percentages.”

  Her mother’s frown disappeared, and Miri marveled. Quick thinking was Molly’s specialty. When trouble reared its ugly head, Molly decided what to do and did it, pronto. Miri, on the other hand, was usually thinking about something else and taken completely by surprise. Miri was good at imagining possibilities; Molly was good at dealing with realities. As Molly showed Nora a page of math problems, Miri thought, Molly’s a genius at evading trouble. And Miri knew why, too. Molly had had a lot of practice.

  “Good!” said Mom approvingly. “Excellent! Multiplying percentages is very important!” She slapped her hands together, full of energy. “Everyone inside! Time for homework!”

  “I’m only five,” Nora gloated to her older brothers and sisters. “Five-year-olds don’t have any homework.”

  Mom patted her cheek. “They do now.”

  An hour later, when their father came in, they were still at the kitchen table, all six of them, doing their homework.

  “These are my kids,” he said, waving his hand casually at the kitchen table. “Kids, this is Ollie.” He gestured to a wiry man beside him. “Ollie’s going to be helping me with the porch stairs.” Their father continued toward the back door.

  Ollie didn’t. Ollie came to a halt in the middle of the kitchen and frowned. Miri watched him counting. Comparing heights. Comparing faces. And then counting once again. His frown got squintier and squintier.

  Why not get it over with, thought Miri. “Three sets of twins,” she called helpfully.

  He shook his head. “No way.”

  “Way,” said Ray.

  “Way,” echoed Robbie.

  Nell and Nora nodded. Way.

  Their father’s head reappeared in the doorframe. “Um, Ollie? The porch is back here.”

  Ollie swung around. “Three? Three sets of twins?”

  Dad grinned. “That’s right.”

  Miri and Molly looked up, waiting. Ray and Robbie did the same. Even Nell and Nora paused in the midst of their massive pasting project. What was it going to be this time? Ollie didn’t look like the kind of person who would say, “Oh my! What a lovely surprise that must have been!” Mostly, it was little old ladies who said that.

  He also didn’t look like he was going to say “Better you than me, man,” which was what a waiter had said one time, probably because Nell had dropped two enchiladas on the floor at the exact same moment that Nora had thrown up.

  Once, a man had kissed their mother’s hand. “Madame,” he had said, “you are magnificent.” She had liked that.

  Ollie continued to inspect them, chewing on his mustache thoughtfully. “Huh,” he said, waggling a finger from Ray and Robbie to Nell and Nora. “Those ones look alike.” The finger waggled toward Miri and Molly. “And those ones don’t.”

  “That’s right,” said their father. “Identical, fraternal, identical. Statistically rare. Actually, statistically anomalous, with an incidence of …”

  Ollie obviously didn’t care about statistics. His eyes roved over the six children as their father spoke, and finally he made his pronouncement: “There’s always something been funny about this house. Guess you’re it now.” And with that, he turned and slouched toward the back porch.

  “That was random,” said Ray, rolling his eyes.

 
; Nell looked with satisfaction at the mountain of sticky paper in front of her. “I like homework.”

  “I like paste,” said Nora.

  As their brothers and sisters bent over their work, Miri and Molly exchanged quick sideways glances tinged with alarm. Something funny about the house? How did Ollie know about the house? And what did he know? Was it possible that he knew the truth?

  Impossible. Only Miri and Molly knew that.

  Only they knew that there had not always been three sets of twins in the Gill family. Only they knew that once, not too long ago, there had been just two pairs of twins: Ray and Robbie, Nell and Nora. And Miri in the middle, the single child between the pairs, alone and lonely, excluded from the world of her brothers, too old for the world of her sisters. All that, everything she had called family, had changed in one day, a bizarre day when time had collapsed, and Miri had found herself standing in her own bedroom in the year 1935. There, she’d met a girl her own age, a girl named Molly Gardner. It had been magic, of course, a kind of time-magic, but Miri soon learned that the magic hadn’t been given to her simply for entertainment. Magic didn’t waste itself like that. It wanted something from her, as magic always did. It wanted Miri to trick time, to take Molly Gardner away from the danger that she faced in 1935, from her scary cousin Horst and her nasty aunt Flo. And after that, the magic wanted Miri to bring Molly home.

  Together, Miri and Molly had puzzled out the rules of magic, piece by piece, until they’d opened a door in time, a door just big enough to slip through. Then they’d changed history, giving Molly a new past and Miri a new twin. In the process, they’d turned the Gills from an unusual family, with two sets of twins, to a positively extraordinary family, with three.

  And only Miri and Molly knew that it had happened. Everyone else thought that Molly had always been Miri’s twin.

  Of course, there were clues, a few loose ends that might have been noticeable, if anyone had been in a noticing frame of mind. As Ollie had pointed out, they weren’t identical twins, and the others were. Miri’s eyes were green; Molly’s, gray. Though they both had brown hair, Molly’s was straight and streaked with gold, while Miri’s drove her bonkers by curling wildly in some places and lying flat in others. As a girl who’d grown up in the thirties, Molly had a dress-wearing habit that was hard to break. Miri usually wore jeans. But the differences weren’t huge, and they made themselves look alike by getting the same round glasses and wearing their hair in braids. They felt like twins, they looked like sisters, and no one thought a thing of it.

  Sometimes the secret threatened to burst free—not because they wanted to tell it, but because it was so enormous. Miri snatched at the words as they fell out of her mouth—“back when I was alone” or “before Molly got here”—and hastily changed them into something that sounded reasonable. More often, it was Molly who slipped into the wrong century: “She’s a real humdinger,” she’d say absentmindedly, watching Beyoncé. Or she’d sing advertising jingles for products that had disappeared by 1940. Once, she had said something about “the forty-eight states,” and Miri had kicked her, hard, in the ankle. But as the months passed, Molly’s 1930s childhood became less and less real; her time with Miri—the lifetime of shared memories that had been created the moment she’d passed into the Gill family—became stronger and stronger. Even so, for both girls, the easiest time of day was the end, when they stretched out in their bunk beds and talked about what had happened to them.

  “Everyone in the whole world wishes for magic,” Miri had said one night. Her voice had drifted through the darkness, filled with wonder. “And we got it. How lucky is that?”

  “Pretty lucky,” said Molly. “Pretty incredibly lucky. Especially for me.”

  “Pooh,” said Miri. “Especially for me. I got a sister. I got a twin. And I got to go back in time.” She let out a long breath, remembering it—the shimmering moment when she and Molly had realized that magic was real and it had happened to them. “We’d be crazy to think that it would ever happen again. To us, I mean.”

  “It could,” said Molly.

  “It probably won’t,” said Miri. She rolled over and looked out the high round window of their room. The moon fit perfectly inside it. Could you wish upon the moon? She decided you could. Let magic happen to us one more time, she begged. Please. And if you take requests, I’d like to go back and hang out with the Indians. The American ones, please. Thank you. “Do you think I’m being greedy even to want it?”

  “No,” Molly said at once. “Remember what Grandma said—magic is just a way of setting things right. Remember?”

  “I remember,” said Miri. Molly’s 1935 grandmother, May, had known all the secrets of magic. It was Grandma May who had told them they were meant to be sisters.

  “Well, see, that’s it,” said Molly. “If magic happens to us again, it will be because we’re supposed to set something right.”

  Miri brightened. “So it wouldn’t be greedy, would it? Because we’d be doing good.” Maybe she could bring the smallpox vaccine to the Indians. “We wouldn’t be just playing around, having a good time. We’d have a task. We’d be in the line of duty.”

  Molly snickered. “Gee, it sounds really un-fun when you put it like that.”

  “It could be fun, too,” said Miri, picturing herself gliding silently through a moon-silvered forest with a bow slung over her shoulder. “But even if it isn’t,” she added, “we’ll have to do whatever the magic wants us to do. I mean, I think we owe it something for letting you come here. Don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Miri heard Molly flop over and pummel her pillow into shape. “Sometimes …” She paused.

  “What?” Miri prodded.

  “I sometimes wonder if …” Another uneasy pause.

  “What?” urged Miri, curious. Molly was usually the opposite of hesitant.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I’m supposed to be here. If I’m going to be allowed to stay. I mean,” Molly said hastily, “I want to be here, but why can I remember both worlds? Why does the magic let me remember being a kid in the thirties and being a kid with you and Mom and Dad?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I remember both, too,” Miri said. She gazed at the moon. “I remember walking into kindergarten on the first day holding your hand, and I remember walking into kindergarten the first day with just Mom. I guess it means that both things actually did happen.”

  Molly sat up abruptly. “But don’t you think that’s weird? If the magic really meant it, we shouldn’t remember both lives. Nobody has two pasts. We should only remember this life, the one together.”

  Now Miri sat up, too. There was something worrisome in Molly’s tone. As if she doubted the new life would last. “Well,” Miri said slowly, “I guess it’s a little weird, but I think that the magic lets us remember both because we’re the ones who made it happen. We know too much to forget it.”

  “That sounds like we’re secret agents or something,” Molly said doubtfully.

  “We are like secret agents.” Miri pounced on the idea. “We have double identities. We’re the only people in the world with two pasts.”

  “I guess so,” Molly agreed. “But that’s what’s bizarre. How can they both be true? It’s like two pieces of train track coming together: first we were separate, and then we joined, but we’re the only ones who can see both tracks. For everyone else, there’s just one track.”

  Miri thought about that for a moment. “I picture it more like a cake.”

  “A cake? What’s a cake?”

  “Time. It’s like the layers of a cake. In my mind, all of time, all the people who ever lived, and everything that ever happened in all of history is still going on, but in separate layers, stacked one on top of the other, like a cake. Right at this moment, it’s also a million years ago and yesterday and 1935 and every other time, too.”

  “Crowded cake,” said Molly.

  “No, because see, all the layers are separate, so everyone thinks that theirs is the only layer.”

 
“Okay, time’s a cake,” said Molly. “But I still don’t get why you and I can see more than one layer.”

  “The layers of time are separate from one another,” Miri continued, “just like frosting separates the layers of a cake. But I think there are certain places where the frosting between the layers is very, very thin. Those are places where one time can mix into another. I think our house is one of those places.”

  Silence from the bottom bunk. Then Molly said slowly, “Grandma said something like that. Remember? She said, ‘Time means nothing in this house.’”

  “Yeah, and she knew more about magic than anyone,” Miri said.

  “Huh.” Molly flopped back down. “Layers of time. That’s pretty good. First our times were separate, but now they’re mixed together.”

  “Yeah,” said Miri. “That’s it. That’s why we can see both times.”

  “In a way, we’ve had two lives,” said Molly thoughtfully.

  Miri hesitated. “Which life is better?”

  She had never asked that before; it had seemed too private. But there was no hesitation in Molly’s voice as she replied, “Well, gee, let’s see: In this life, I’ve got you. And a mom and a dad and two cute little sisters and two dorky but funny brothers. In my first life, I had no mom; a missing dad; Aunt Flo, who hated me; and a cousin who was trying to beat me up all the time. And, oh yeah, it was during the Depression, so I was really poor. It’s a tough call.”

  Miri dangled her head over the side of the bed. “It’s better for me, too,” she said happily. “It’s better for all of us.”

  Molly’s voice came again in the darkness. “I have a family now. I didn’t really know what that meant before. To have people be glad to see me every day—I didn’t know about that.” There was a silence, and then she said, “Sometimes I’m scared it’s all going to disappear. You know, like maybe I’m going to wake up in 1935.”

  “No. You came through. This is your time now,” Miri said. “And you’re supposed to be here. Grandma May said so. She said we were setting things right.”

  “Yeah,” said Molly. “I guess so. But she also said I might see her again someday. Remember?”