Minerva missed being young. Well, she was young, but she had privately held the belief for quite some time now that she was one of those people that was suited to being old. Her mother had been one of those people who perhaps was never going to leave the summer of her life — Minerva loved her, really she did, but it was hard sometimes to like her.
She remembered one of the maîtresses at her old primary school — Mme. Bekhti was one of the younger teachers, only 30 at the most, and the floral blouses she wore made her look like a film star. At the beginning of her sixième year, Mme. Bekhti had complimented her last name, showing her the page in the textbook where it provided the root.
Paradizo, most commonly written as Paradiso, was derived from the Latin surname, "Paradisuis". It meant garden. Minerva had ghosted over the text, barely feeling the gloss of the pages. She filed the information away, intending to share it at dinner. Maman had smiled, the laugh lines around her eyes crinkling up.
The irony that Maman had remarried Théo, the gardener from Cagnes-sur-Mer, was lost neither on Minerva nor Papa. It was what it was, though. She had mentioned the affair, keeping her voice light as she pretended to work on her essay, to Mme. Bekhti a week ago, and the woman had seemed flustered.
Minerva made a mental note to not joke about connection between her last name and Théo again.
Life was increasingly funny like that lately, and it made her tired. He may have liked how life seemed to be one big cosmic joke, with people's fates intertwining in clever ways, but the uncertainty made her feel unmoored.
He was gone now, she thought only slightly petulantly, so perhaps she was right to be wary after all.
It had been a week since the rift had closed with Artemis and Captain Short on the other side. Guilt simmered under her skin, waiting for her to think about what had happened in the building that day. She remembered talking to Butler on the top floor, adrenaline making her heart pound in her ears as she shakily made her way towards the stairwell. He had told the guards that he was her father, she thought, and they had left without running into any obstacles.
Butler was quiet on the way out, and she was grateful that he didn't cry in front of her, although she suspected he wanted to from the hitch in his voice when he talked to the one of the security officers. The thought of seeing an adult feel powerless made her uneasy— she had avoided her parents for days when Théo became a point of contention. The memory of this made her slightly ashamed. She frowned. She had been feeling guilty quite often as of late.
Even so, she knew Butler didn't blame her for what had happened.
She wasn't even sure if Artemis was "gone" forever; perhaps he would be back this evening, or tomorrow, or the week after next. She still wanted to apologize. "Ce n'était pas ma faute," she wrote in her lab notebook after the shuttle had dropped her off at Maman and Théo's new place.
Papa was noticing, she could sense it. The tech-y fellow whose voice she had heard over Short's com link was most likely responsible for the fact that neither her brother nor father could recall the details from the incident with the People, but it didn't take a genius to see that Minerva had been jittery as of late.
Magic was real.
The fact hadn't hit her, really hit her, when it was just Nº1 that had been part of her investigation. She made it a point to deal with the hard sciences more often than she did the arts— ambiguity and uncertainty held little appeal. Mme. Bekhti had laughed when she saw Minerva's scores on the practice test for le Baccalauréat; Minerva had scored well (obviously), but her strengths clearly lay in the maths and computer science section. Factoring in what magic did to things like physics and computing, Minerva felt for the first time in a while that she had lost her edge. She winced. It wasn't logical to learn the wrong way to do a problem, but she couldn't exactly say anything to her professors.
She imagined herself for a moment, standing in front of le département educational de la France, holding a stack of papers as she explained why she simply could not take le Bac. The directors would push their glasses up the bridge of the noses, asking why she should be exempt from the higher education exam. "You see," she would say, drawing herself up to her full height, "it's potentially all wrong".
That would go over splendidly, she snorted. Ethical or no, she would have to wait until she was old enough to publish to even breach this kind of conversation with academia. She'd be careful about it — there was no way the People would be pleased if she revealed anything that would lend itself to someone inferring that perhaps humanity wasn't alone in the world. Minerva didn't plan on being forced to forget what had happened, the thought of being robbed of her memories making her palms sweaty, no matter how she might feel about losing some of her new friends.
Maybe Butler had a perspective on the matter that could help her, she thought as she looked out at the dusk sky outside her window. He was going to be in the south of France this weekend, and she was going to take the train to visit him, logistics be damned. They would both be all right, she knew it.
Her name whispered to her that she was going to be a garden one day. She thought of Théo, Mama, Papa, and Beau. She thought of Madame Bekhti. She thought of Butler. Paradizo, Paradiso, Paradisuis.