Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates (10 page)

“I’m just me,” I say as primly as I can. “I have another class.”

He hands me a slip of paper with printing all over it. “Extra reading,” he says. “And a pop quiz once a week. You’re probably going to want some tutoring help, so if you can’t get it at home, see me and maybe we’ll assign someone. You have no real concept of America at all, VanDerHoven, and that makes this class really hard for you. Weren’t you ever in the States before this year?”

I shake my head.

“Well, here’s a tip,” he says. “Everything we’ve talked about in this class has happened in the United States.”

“Then why were you talking about French and Indians?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Roseanne Roseannadanna, you’d better go before the next bell.”

And I scurry out of there, wondering how come he suddenly cares.

NINE

BY LUNCH, IT’S
all over the school that I “took on” Helen. People actually mention it to me. They’re talking to me like I’ve done something major.

It doesn’t seem major. I just corrected the airhead about her misconceptions about my people. I tell the kids that who stop to talk to me, and they want to know about “my people.” By that, I guess they mean Greeks, because they don’t know about mages. So I say a few things, and suddenly I’m totally exotic.

Finally, after lunch, I see Jenna in the hall, and I know I meant to ask her something, but I can’t remember what. So I stop her and say, “Is my slang dated?”

She grins. “You sound a little Valley Girl.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I say.

“Like you come from the Valley, y’know?”

“This is the valley,” I say.

“This is the
Willamette
Valley,” she says. “Valley Girls are from some valley in California. They’re very 90210 or
Clueless
, that movie, you know?”

“I love that movie,” I say.

“It’s ancient,” Jenna says. “If you’re trying to learn stuff to fit in, don’t get it from the movies. If it’s in a movie, it’s already too old to be cool.”

“Oh.” I nod, and worry all the way to English class. I’m not sure what I say that’s slang and what isn’t. I just learned to talk like my favorite characters. It seemed like the best way.

I’m not even paying attention as I go into class. The English classroom is my favorite room in the whole school. Mrs. Fiddler has busts of famous people on various shelves and books everywhere, and plants blooming in the windows. The room even smells good, like vanilla with a hint of lavender, which I’m guessing is her perfume. She has posters all over the wall—mostly quotes from the writers she’s having us read—and they’re pretty inspirational, even for me.

I sit in the back. In the other classes, I try to be in the back but near the door, so I can escape fast; but here I’m in the back near the window, by the violets, which are always blooming, it seems (which I guess is some kind of great feat because violets are hard to nurture—so says my friend Google. I’m beginning to think Google is magic all by itself).

Mrs. Fiddler isn’t nicer to me than anyone else or meaner, and I don’t like her class the best. Just the room, which seems more like a room in a house or a library than one of the school rooms around here.

Mrs. Fiddler is kinda flamboyant. She wears dresses when most teachers (women teachers) wear pants and she drapes scarves over everything. She used to be the drama coach, but I guess the school dropped drama a few years ago and assigned her English, and she’s making do.

At least, that’s what she said on my first day.

Then she ignored me like everybody else.

Only today, when the bell rings signaling the start of class, she lasers right in on me (is that slang? Crap. I don’t know what sounds right and what doesn’t). She closes the door and follows her bright blue gaze with, “Tiffany, I hear you are an expert on Greek myths.”

Great. That means Helen told her. Or someone. I feel that heat rising up in my cheeks.

“Not really,” I mumble.

“Now, don’t be modest,” Mrs. Fiddler says. “Most of my students don’t know the Greeks had myths, let alone the details of the first Olympic games. Is this something you studied in your European classrooms?"

Everybody is looking at me. Some of Helen’s minions (I mean friends) sit up front and they’re so intense they look like they’re trying to film everything with their eyes. A couple of the boys blink like they’ve never noticed me before. And everyone else just stares with a little relief, probably glad they’re not on the spot.

“I was homeschooled,” I mumble. By Athena half the time, I want to say, but don’t. If I can’t magick people to mess with them, I wish I could say stuff that’ll mess with their heads. But I can’t do that either.

“Well, in your homeschool then,” Mrs. Fiddler says, “did you learn about myths there?”

Mom warned me about the whole myth/truth thing—that what’s true and historical in my family is myth to everyone else, so I don’t slip this time.

“I learned it from my mom, mostly,” I say. “She’s a professor of Greek Studies, you know.”

“Hmm,” Mrs. Fiddler says, which I’m beginning to understand as mortal-adult-speak for “No, I didn’t know.”

“She would tell me the myths when she came to visit me in Greece.”

Everyone’s still staring. Imagine how they would look if I told them that Mom showed me the difference between the magical Mount Olympus (truly a place in the clouds) and the mountain the Greeks call Mount Olympus, which is spectacular, yes, but certainly not like home.

“Well, then,” Mrs. Fiddler says, “you know who Zeus is, then.”

I almost blurt,
Yeah, he’s my dad
, but I catch myself at the last minute. I’m getting irritated enough to drop some kind of bomb into the waters here, though. Maybe if I do mention my dad’s name, then people would leave me alone.

Although I get the sense that there’s no real respect for the Greek gods here in America.

“I know him,” I say.

“Can you tell us who he is?”

Mom prepared me for this too. I say, “It depends on who you read, Homer or the later works. He’s sort of an amalgam of all sorts of mythical figures, which is why he’s seen as promiscuous. My mom says that scholars believe that he’s like the great almighty, who, when the myths moved to a new town, took over for the local god, and as a result, in story and in song, got the local god’s wife.”

I didn’t say—and neither did Mom when she was telling me all this (she didn’t have to)—that in real life, my dad often took over for the local “god” (no magical person is supposed to set himself up as a god, according to the Powers That Be, not that it stopped anyone in
my
family) and really
would
get the local god’s wife.

“Well, yes,” Mrs. Fiddler says, looking a little uncomfortable. “Zeus is rather popular with the ladies.”

That’s rather an understatement, given how many women have flocked to him over the centuries.

“But he is married, isn’t he, Tiffany?”

She uses my name like a club. I don’t like it, and I’m not really fond of this attention. I’m really not fond of lying about my family.

Only I don’t have to lie here.

“He’s married to Hera.”

“Who is, for all practical purposes, the queen of the Gods.”

“Not really,” I say. “There’s a lot of dispute between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. They fight about a lot of things—not just who is the strongest or the most powerful, but also who is the fairest. That’s how the Trojan war started, not the way that it started in that dumb Brad Pitt movie.”

Mrs. Fiddler brightened. “You’re familiar with the Trojan War.”

Familiar? Beyond familiar. I had to travel back to the origins once just to see the stupid golden apple that Eris tossed out marked
To the Fairest
. Hera had me look to see if Aphrodite should’ve won that competition after all, not telling me, of course, that Paris, the guy who chose Aphrodite, chose her because she promised him that the most beautiful mortal on earth would be his forever. That would be the fair Helen, for whom Gym Class Helen has probably been named.

Helen’s just an unlucky name, that’s what I think. It should probably be banned.

“I know the true history of the war,” I say, “not the movie version, although I’ve seen that too.” Because I never miss a chance to see Brad Pitt without a shirt. Never.

The class is starting to stir. Like I’ve said something controversial. Hey, Jenna just told me movies can be wrong. That can’t be news to these people.

“Now, Tiffany, surely your mother has taught you there is no ‘true’ history to the war. There are the myths and there’s the
Iliad
, of course, but most of the scholarship that exists is divided on the actual historical facts.”

Because they aren’t privy to most of the facts. I resist the urge to sigh, and say instead, “I mean the mythical history. Y’know, the horse and everything.”

She nods as if she approves. “Have you read Homer?”

“Who hasn’t?” I ask before I can stop myself. My dad is proud of all that old blind guy wrote, even when he was wrong.

“So you’ve had quite an education, after all,” Mrs. Fiddler says.

Everyone is looking at me like I’ve vomited green blood all over the desk in front of me. I’m not making friends here, not that Mrs. Fiddler cares. She’s just amazed I know stuff.

“Not a good one,” I say.

“Not many students can claim to read Homer,” she says.

“Yeah, but I’m going to school in America now,” I say, “and I’d trade Homer any day to find out stuff everyone else takes for granted, like the fact that Massachusetts is a state, not a country, and everyone puts up with the idea of being equal.”

“Puts up with?” Mrs. Fiddler asks just as someone next to me says, “Huh?”

I shrug. “Mom’s trying to explain the whole equality thing to me. It’s new.”

“Greece is a democracy, isn’t it, class?” Mrs. Fiddler asks in a way that makes me thing she doesn’t know either.

“Not in my household,” I mutter, and to my surprise people sitting closest to me laugh.

“Anyway,” Mrs. Fiddler says, “we’re going to be studying the Greeks in a few weeks, and I’ll be calling on you to help me a bit then, Tiffany. All right?”

I frown. I have no idea if that’s all right. It’s probably geeky and unpopular and stupid, but as I said, I promised myself I’d try here, and that would be part of trying.

“Um,” I say before I can stop myself, “can I ask why we’d study Greek stuff in an English class?”

Mrs. Fiddler clasps her hands together as if she couldn’t wait for someone to ask that question. “Well, you see, class, the Greek myths and their Roman counterparts are, like Biblical literature, the basis for much in Western fiction…”

And off she goes, onto new topics so fast that I’m getting lost.

The girl beside me, a dark-haired Goth chick wearing all black with black makeup (that is still called Goth, right?), leans toward me.

“Cool you took on Helen,” she says.

I want to say I didn’t take her on, but there’s no combatting rumor, I guess.

I shrug.

“Can you tell me about Greece sometime?” she asks. “It’d be cool to grow up somewhere other than here.”

“Sure,” I say, wondering what I can tell her. How blue the sky is and the way the Mediterranean looks in the middle of summer? How good olive oil really is when it’s fresh and how feta cheese tastes when it doesn’t have yucky preservatives?

I have a hunch that’s not what she’s interested in.

“When do you have lunch?” she asks.

I tell her—I’m finally beginning to remember which period is which—and she smiles.

“Me, too,” she says. “Tomorrow, then. You can tell me everything.”

Like I’m holding some great secret.

“Did you have something to add, Olivia?” Mrs. Fiddler says.

The girl across from me scowls. Apparently, she is Olivia. “No.”

“Then please refrain from talking until class is over.”

“Okay,” Olivia says and flounces back in her seat.

The girl behind me whispers, “Like she can’t say ‘please stop talking’ like a normal person.”

It takes me a minute to realize the girl means Mrs. Fiddler. I guess there’s specific ways of speaking for everyone, not just students, and I don’t know any of them.

I scrawl in my notebook, not words really, just doodles. A couple of kids, mostly boys who also sit in the back, are still staring at me. What, were they so gone in their heads that they missed the new student until this week?

I sigh, and wish I was back home with Brittany and Crystal. At least I understand them.

I don’t seem to understand anyone else.

TEN

AND MAYBE
I don’t even understand Brittany and Crystal. When I get home from school, tired and cranky (mostly because Mom has a class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and she expects me to walk, like a common…ah crap, I shouldn’t use that word. But I will. Like a common servant), there’s this package on the porch.