A.N.: Please review!

The Twinkling

Chapter Three

The History Girl

Her first class on a Monday was second-period Italian after a study-hall period, which she and Caleb always stayed home for. There was no point driving to Spenser if they didn't have to be there; Emmeline spent the hours before school at the bagel-shop downtown with Caleb, eating a bagel with smoked-salmon, cream-cheese and red-onion and capers, reading the newspaper, while Caleb finished a bit of last-minute homework.

Like the dutiful twin-sister she was, Emmeline tsked at his lack of responsibility at having partied till the early hours of the morning and spent yesterday lying on the couch playing video-games rather than finishing his homework and studying for their test on Shakespeare on Thursday, however, she bought him a bag of donut-holes and a coffee to tide him over until lunch.

"I can't wait till Grandpa gets home," she said, smiling softly to herself. She had given her grandfather a list of books and things she would have liked for him to find and buy for her, if she couldn't have gone with him to visit Pogue's grandma.

"Yeah, I've missed him," Caleb agreed, eyeing the sports page. "The Bruins are playing at home soon."

"Yeah, I saw that," Emmeline smiled. "We should go."

"Yeah we should!" Caleb grinned. "Hey, when's the opening night at the Boston Ballet?"

"Soon," Emmeline said, checking the Garfield comic-strip. "And Grandpa's promised to take me."

"In the box?"

"Where else?" Emmeline said.

"Maybe if Mom gets out soon enough…"

"Don't rush her, Caleb," Emmeline said quietly, glancing up from the comic-strips. "If she's not going to come out of rehab in her own time, knowing she's ready, she shouldn't leave at all."

"You don't want her to come home." It was a statement, not a question, and completely untrue.

"I don't want Mother to do a Yo-yo trick with that rehab facility. If she's not ready to leave, she'll relapse as soon as she gets out," Emmeline said sagely. "That's what the people at the centre said, and no matter how much we want her to get better, she has to do it on her own time."

"Are you going to go see her when she gets visiting privileges?" Caleb asked, not looking at her. Emmeline squirmed in her seat uncomfortably.

"I don't know. Maybe. The doctors said it might be important for us to go and see her, to help her realise why she's doing this," Emmeline said. It was just so…so O.C. to go and visit her mother in a rehab facility for her alcoholism. She and her mother hadn't gotten along during the best of times for many years—all because Emmeline was an unsatisfactory daughter who didn't like throwing parties and didn't have a thousand friends on Facebook. She didn't understand that there were certain things that Emmeline's magic prohibited; like truly honest friendships and getting close to a boy. She was eighteen years old and had never had a boyfriend. Aaron in sixth grade didn't count. He was a bastard now.

"She wants to see you," Caleb said, wiping his sugary fingers on a napkin. "She told me so last night, on the phone." It had been a very awkward conversation on the phone last-night with their mother. She had cried during most of it; Emmeline had cringed during her time on the phone with her. It was the detox; the doctors had explained that their mother wouldn't have any phone or visiting privileges until at least seventy-two hours after she had checked in.

Emmeline shifted awkwardly in her seat. She didn't know if she was ready to see her mother yet. She had seen Evelyn Danvers completely off her face drunk, ranting about their dad, angry and upset, crying her eyes out over a failed waffle, almost burning the kitchen down; she had seen her unconscious in the bathtub and curled up on the floor by the toilet in a vomit-stained chemise; she had seen her asleep on the lawn, the sprinklers on, holding a half-empty bottle of Jack. She had seen her crying her eyes out over a photo of their dad and blubbering stories about him, and Emmeline had seen her in a drunken-induced rage, trying to destroy the drawing-room. They'd had to use magic on her that time to stop her.

Seeing her mother detoxing had to be worse than seeing her off her face drunk, didn't it? Her mother had been drinking since Emmeline was about fourteen, since she and Caleb started freshman year and had been forced to move out of the dorms because their mother had passed out in the tub, and they had to take care of her.

Driving to school was awkward; perhaps Caleb regretted having brought up their mother, because he kept silent all the way to school, not mentioning the rehab facility or the phone-call last night. They parked up in the student parking-lot (which was comparatively tiny, since most students were live-in and everything was within a good walking-distance from Spenser) and made their way into the front building, in which Emmeline had her Italian lecture; Caleb went off to the Garwin Building, in which he had a Physics tutorial, and Emmeline was, once again, left to her own devices while the clock ticked closer to nine a.m. and her AP Italian 4 class.

Sitting down in the History amphitheatre for a gruelling double-period seminar after break, she grabbed her textbook and flipped her notebook open to the next fresh page, grabbed her pencil-case and crossed her knees, observing the rest of the class filing into the lecture theatre.

Mr Hoffman stood at his desk preparing a pile of presentation folders, his briefcase open and retrieving his lecture notes, the title of the seminar subject already projected onto the screen. Emmeline eyed the stack of presentation folders; their essays were being passed back today. A surge of excitement razzed her and she suppressed a smile of anticipation; she had worked hard on that last History paper.

Someone walked past the teacher's desk and Emmeline caught sight of the hairstyle; Tyler had, since the Fall Fest, retained the hairstyle she had made him adopt for the first formal dance of the year; slight side-parting, hair combed away from his pretty face. He looked very handsome in his pressed white shirt, crimson and gold tie, royal-navy blazer and dark-grey pants. All the boys did, but Tyler in particular caught her eye. He wore a dark navy pea-coat over his blazer and a golden-oatmeal scarf draped around his neck; the days were getting a lot colder; by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, there would be snow on the ground. Tyler caught her eye and smiled, flashing his beautiful white teeth, and climbed up to drop his leather satchel beside her backpack.

"Hey," he said quietly, leaning in to give her a hug, something only Reid and Tyler ever did. Pogue and Caleb were more the knuckle-knocking types, even with her. But she always got hugs from Tyler and Reid. "How are you?"

"I'm okay. How's your head today?" Emmeline asked, smiling; Tyler blushed slightly.

"It's a lot better," he said, sighing. He glanced at her and blushed a little darker. "Listen, I just wanted to say…you know, thanks, for taking care of me."

"You're welcome," Emmeline flushed. "Not like I haven't done it before."

"Yeah," Tyler blushed, glancing down at Mr Hoffman. "Hey, I, uh, I heard you talked to your mom…"

"Yeah, last night," Emmeline sighed heavily. Had Caleb told all the boys about it? Usually it was only Pogue he revealed his deepest and darkest thoughts to.

"How was that?" Tyler asked, dragging his dog-eared and tattered notebook out of his bag. Emmeline shrugged noncommittally, and Tyler nodded sagely. "Kinda weird, very awkward…"

"So awkward," Emmeline sighed. "I know I should be supportive and try and help her through this, but… I don't know."

"You can't forget what she was like," Tyler said, and Emmeline nodded again, glancing covertly at one of her oldest friends. Tyler was quiet, shy, but he was very observant. That was his thing; he was quiet and slightly withdrawn from anyone he didn't know too well, but he always knew the right thing to say or who to give a hug to when he suspected they were feeling down.

"Settle down, please," Mr Hoffman called, and the class fell quiet; only a few at the back continued to whisper, regaling each other with the weekend's gossip. "Now, the first order of business; I have your last papers ready and graded. While I hand them out, please copy the following questions down; we shall be discussing them in the course of our seminar." He clicked on the computer and a fresh slide appeared, with several questions typed up. Emmeline copied them down, waiting for Mr Hoffman to approach her with her essay.

"Tyler—good effort," Mr Hoffman said. "Next time, try using a few more textbooks for your resources, and make sure to spell-check. You lost a few marks for basic grammar errors." Tyler nodded and eyed the B marked in red at the top corner of his essay.

"Ah, my star pupil," Mr Hoffman said, smiling broadly when he produced Emmeline's essay from the small pile still lingering in his arms. "As always, excellent work; your analytical skills have really matured. Excellent research, too; I was impressed with your bibliography. A grade well-earned!" He chuckled and Emmeline smiled, as she received the A+ essay; 'Sexism and Opportunism during the Salem Witch Trials: Why Women were Targeted.'

"Now," Mr Hoffman called, when the last essay had been given out and he had called everyone to attention. "We've gone over the Salem Witch Trials. I thought we would move on to the more obscure local legends and histories our town boasts. Ipswich has a long and very colourful history; five of the original colonists' descendents sit amongst us, and I'm sure their next essay projects will be extremely well researched." Mr Hoffman eyed Reid, sprawled halfway up the amphitheatre seats, half-asleep, with disbelief, but his eyes twinkled when they settled on Emmeline. "We will be looking, over the next fortnight, at Ipswich history and local legends. So, where did this town begin?"

It was always gratifying to sit in a class where Emmeline knew the answers to all the questions and considerably more even than the teacher. It was probably the only class Tyler and Reid could both answer questions without having to look at their neighbour's paper or notes. Emmeline took notes out of habit and necessity; she and Caleb corrected Mr Hoffman several times on the accuracy of the notes he was reading from; the founding families were from Suffolk county; Oliver Garwin was actually a landed gentleman but who had experience with carpentry; Robert "Robin" Simms was also a member of the landed gentry, the best hunter in the county, who tanned his own pelts. Charles Danvers III was the younger son of an English duke and had moved his wife Mary to the New World; their first child, Isabel, was born during the passage. He had become governor of the original Ipswich colony. Isaac Parry was the descendent of a famous knight favoured by Queen Elizabeth, an excellent horseman and skilled battle general.

The only descendent of John Putnam, Chase Goodwin-Pope, had disappeared a few weeks ago. They had heard nothing of his whereabouts, and couldn't confirm whether he was dead or not. They had the fathers searching the area for any body that could be his, and scrying for him, but they couldn't find a trace of him anywhere.

John Putnam had, once, been married, though. As Mr Hoffman wrote out the names of the original families—Emmeline's descendents; Charles Danvers III, his wife Mary, their children Isabel, Dorcas, Arthur and William—she noticed the Putnam family-tree. John Putnam had been married to a woman named Hannah. They had two children, Ruth and Nathaniel…but where had they gone? Why had the only descendent of John Putnam been illegitimate? What had happened to Ruth and Nathaniel? The name Ruth…

Sudden realisation hit her; she knew who the little girl from her dream was. A little girl in a plain dress, her hair covered in a dainty white cap, barely six years old… Ruth Putnam.

Resisting the urge to smack herself in the forehead for her oversight of the most obvious facts about her dreams—that they all featured images and words from documents about the original Ipswich colony—she waited until lunch to hastily scribble down what she had realised; that the key to her strange dreams was in discovering what happened to Ruth Putnam. In all her studies of the original families, she couldn't remember coming across that name. Maybe she just wasn't looking in the right place.

"Now, your next assignment is due on the fifteenth of November; I want you all to start thinking about what you're going to research; remember, your essays must be about local history," Mr Hoffman said, as the second hour of their seminar was up and everyone scrabbled to get to lunch. "Mr Garwin, please stay behind; I wish to speak to you about your paper."

"Hey, I'm gonna wait for Reid," Tyler said. "We were gonna go into town for lunch. You wanna come?"

"Yeah, okay," Emmeline said, smiling.

Five minutes later, Reid emerged, looking vengeful and annoyed; he hated being reprimanded by their teachers, but he never put the effort into his schoolwork that would stop their teachers getting on his case. Reid was a really smart guy; he just had a lot of stuff going on at home. Most of the time he was driving to and from Boston, where his mother lived full-time so she could be in the centre of the social network; his dad was sick, and making everyone anxious by not taking his medication. His records would show that, for the first two years of high-school, he had been a straight-A student; now, he was too anxious about his dad, too annoyed with his mom, and trying to make himself feel better all the time, that he didn't do his homework, or study for tests, and it was up to them to help write his essays and use magic to fill his empty test papers and sometimes use magic to make it appear that Reid was in fact sitting in class when he had really decided to take an unexpected road-trip or was curled up in a ball under Emmeline's duvet with the most horrendous hangover in the world and no clue what he had done the night before. Everyone was worried about him, but he responded as well to concern as he did to condescension.

Exiting the main building, Emmeline frowned and then jumped into action, recognising the inconspicuous (as far as they went) limousine parked out front. As she approached the car, the door opened, and a ruggedly handsome, dark-haired man in his early-sixties emerged, a slow, quiet smile lifting the corners of his lips. He had very dark eyes and salt-and-pepper stubble, his skin was sun-coarsened, but there was no mistaking him as anything but a blue-blood; he wore a custom-tailored suit, the top button of his silk shirt undone, a satin handkerchief completely contrasting the dark-navy of his pinstripe suit and the white of his shirt tucked into his breast pocket.

Grandpa Robin—Robert Danvers II, ex Mayor of Ipswich, ex Senator of Massachusetts and Emmeline's best-friend—was unmistakeable, and the coolest grandpa in the entire world, in Emmeline's mind. She wasn't the only one; as soon as they saw him, Reid and Tyler dashed over, on her heels, to say hi.

While all the other grandparents and aunts and uncles and even parents had left Ipswich, moved on to bigger and glitzier, more fabulous homes, Grandpa Robin had remained in Ipswich; he had helped Emmeline and Caleb's mother raise them, with their grandmother, since their dad disappeared the Halloween they were nine years old. And it spoke of how cool he was that Grandpa Robin was about as emotionally mature as Reid and Tyler were, which made him the height of fun, the best person to hang out with in the world. They always forgot that he was 'old' when they were hanging out with him, because he goofed around so much, told the most rib-cracking stories and had taught the boys everything they could know about how to handle the 'fair sex.' He'd taught all of them how to roller-blade by the time they were five and by the age of eight, the boys were all enrolled in ice-hockey lessons; Emmeline hadn't liked figure-skating and instead had chosen to practice ballet.

"Hey kids," Grandpa Robin grinned, completely disregarding his custom-tailored suit as he threw his arms around his only granddaughter and squished her in a huge hug. "Have you missed me?" he murmured in her ear, holding her tight, and Emmeline gave him a squeeze before releasing him so that Reid and Tyler could have their turn; Grandpa Robin was the product of an insipid mother and emotionally-crippled father, and had vowed young that his kids and grandchildren would never grow up being told that children were neither seen nor heard.

"Grandpa, what're you doing here?" Caleb and Pogue had arrived, both looking eager and excited; whenever Grandpa Robin appeared at Spenser, it usually meant he had created an uncle who'd died to get them out of school for a few hours to go into Boston and watch a baseball game or do something else really fun like going to Six Flags or going out on his yacht.

"I'm here to take you all for a steak lunch," Grandpa grinned, gesturing to the limousine. "Hop on in."

"Ah, Rob-man, you are a legend!" Pogue grinned, launching himself into the limousine without any further encouragement needed. Reid paused at the door to the limousine and fixed Grandpa Robin with a look straight in the eye, blew a quick kiss, and said, "I love you," and disappeared. Tyler smiled shyly and ducked into the limousine after his best-friend. Caleb grinned and followed, and Grandpa Robin smiled.

"My dear," he said, offering his hand, and he helped her into the limousine the way a gentleman would his lady.

"I thought you only landed at noon," she said, settling into a seat and tucking her pleated golden-oatmeal skirt under her thighs.

"Well, if I'd told you I got an earlier flight, it would have completely ruined the surprise," Grandpa Robin said, and Emmeline smiled. "So, what've you been up to while I've been away, other than the party I know nothing about?"

The boys' eyes all widened and they tried not to exchange shifty, guilty glances.

"Oh, come on, guys! Your mom left all those bottles of alcohol lying around and I skipped the continent over the weekend," Grandpa Robin chuckled. "You're not telling me you didn't have a party?"

"It was epic," Reid quipped, grinning, and Grandpa Robin chuckled.

It was just like Grandpa Robin to show up at Spenser, completely unexpected, and take them off to the best and most expensive steak restaurant in town; sizzling steaks and all kinds of sides were produced; Emmeline polished off her filet steak with garlic mash and broccoli-gratin, sipping a small glass of red wine, while the boys ate their way through huge porterhouse steaks and beers. Grandpa didn't care if they were still in school; all of the families had the quasi-European mentality that the more they were exposed to alcohol the less likely they were to abuse it. Drinking a little glass of wine with a rich dinner was a lot better than, say, downing a bottle of port wine for a dare, which she pointed out to Tyler, who was sitting next to her and eyeing her cheesy broccoli.

Before the hour's end, Grandpa Robin's limousine stopped outside Spenser's main building and they all filed out; Emmeline paused to kiss her grandfather's cheek, promising to see him later, and had to run up the front steps to get to her Classical Civilisation class.

Classics was a bit of a time-waster, really; they learned about Classical architecture and sculpture; they read Agamemnon, Medea and Oedipus. At the end of every week, their last class on a Friday morning (Spenser kids always had Friday afternoons off) they watched 'classical' movies; Troy, 300, Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, and Emmeline's personal favourite, Disney's Hercules. Their teacher was so jovial and fun that they rarely got anything done, but the class trip to Greece last year had been more than worth signing up to take the class in the first place. One whiff of Ouzo had Reid retching ever since Tolon! The Greece trip was the inspiration behind the sailing trip around the Aegean that Emmeline wanted to do for charity when she graduated Spenser.

She was eager to get home, and spent all of Trigonometry doodling in her dream-diary, even though it was her worst subject and she would regret it later, and was so out of it that Reid managed to draw all over her hand during Art before she noticed. Swimming practice meant she had only one more hour until she was home and could see her grandpa, and she beat Tyler and Reid in friendly races.

"Okay, dude, what the hell are you doing?" Reid asked, snatching the book out of Tyler's hands. Tyler scowled and glanced up, glaring at Reid as his best-friend dropped down to bounce once on his mattress and settled, flipping the book the right way up to read the title. "Wuthering Heights?"

"I got it out of the library," Tyler shrugged, making a grab for the book, feeling slightly flushed. He and Reid talked about a lot of stuff—practically everything—but talking to him about Emmeline felt…kind of taboo.

"The library?" Reid blurted, his eyes almost bugging out of his face. "Wait—you know where the library is?"

"Yeah, I've been there a couple times; you might wanna try it out. All the cool kids are doing it," Tyler said drily, snatching the book out of Reid's loose grip.

"No need to snatch. Why're you reading a chick book anyway?" Reid asked, and he sat up straight, hand going to the plastic bag on the bedside table, unearthing a copy of the 2009 production of Wuthering Heights featuring Tom Hardy, and turned to gape at Tyler.

"I saw Emmeline reading it and thought, you know, we could at least make an effort and talk about stuff she likes for once," Tyler said. But damn, was this book difficult to get through. He was sorely tempted to just stick the DVD on and watch it, rather than struggle through 19th Century-speak, but what was the point of doing something if he didn't do it properly. And besides, he had gotten marked down on his Wuthering Heights essay last year because he'd written that Heathcliff shot himself at the end of the book—he'd gotten marked down because the teacher knew he hadn't read the book; apparently, Heathcliff just wasted away from lack of food.

Reid looked at him as if he was speaking a different language.

Tyler couldn't help it—he had always loved Emmeline. Maybe not as much as he loved her now, but he had always loved her. First, with the innocence of childhood, when she had been his best-friend and they'd sat in his kitchen on the island, swinging their legs and eating strawberry Pop-Tarts and drinking chocolate-milkshakes for breakfast. Then he'd started noticing that she wore pleated skirts, and he'd been the first to notice when her breasts had started filling out her tight swimsuit. She always wore high-legged black swimsuits that crossed over her shoulder-blades, and for several months, the only thing he'd been able to think of was wanting to trace his finger along the edge of the hip of her swimsuit. When they curled up watching a movie or when all of them fell asleep after a long night, he had noticed that her body felt different, that her skin was smooth and always warm and that her gentle curves were exactly matched to fill the places he didn't have any. He always felt it when her breasts pressed against him when they hugged, and he always knew that he enjoyed those hugs far too much.

He didn't know when the line had blurred between friend and sexual fantasy, but all he could think about when they were together was hugging Emmeline, holding her hand and kissing the curve of her jawbone, nibbling on her little ears, running his hands over her bare skin and holding all the places he visualised when he hid under his heavy duvet at night and knew Reid was asleep.

The time he and Emmeline had shared a sleeping-bag because there weren't enough to go round, when Reid had had a house-party and they'd all dragged bags out to the trampoline to sleep was probably one of the best memories of his summer, because she'd been wearing a tiny baby tee and had taken her skirt off rather than have it fly up by her waist whenever she jumped on the trampoline.

Every time he heard 'Eye of the Tiger,' he saw Emmeline sitting in the passenger seat of his car outside the drive-thru dairy downtown, lip-synching and doing a little dance along to it. He and Reid had videoed it on their phones, but had yet to add it to Facebook and YouTube.

He loved that, only around them, Reid and Tyler, was Emmeline an extrovert. With everyone else, she closed up like an oyster protecting a surprise little pearl; she was the loveliest girl in the entire world; Tyler's mom loved her, and thought she'd make any guy the most wonderful wife, and since they were kids, Tyler knew Emmeline had always wanted a huge family. Yes, she had been eight years old when she'd declared she wanted thirteen babies, but her desire hadn't changed to have a real, affectionate family.

When they had parties at their houses and got a little tipsy, they used to go out on the lawn and just lie, watching the stars, their fingers curled around each other's and just talk, in a way that he couldn't with Reid, and she didn't with any of the others. He knew she suffered from loneliness, but she would never make waves by saying anything to them about it. He knew it couldn't be easy being the only girl in their generation of the coven, but considering, she handled it well.

Tyler knew Caleb still hadn't mentioned to Emmeline that he'd told Sarah about them. He knew Emmeline's hidden temper well enough to know that he didn't want to be anywhere nearby when she found out.

He returned to Heathcliff and Cathy and ignored Reid's remarks about Tyler's hidden sexuality. By dinnertime, he had fallen in love with Cathy, and Reid got annoyed that Tyler was blabbing on about how great the book was, and that it wasn't about love at all, it was about hate and passion and revenge.

A.N.: I know, I know—nothing happened much, but Grandpa Robin is back at home, which is good; I need him for the plot. Cos every girl needs her grandpa to cry to. Wish I had mine… That bastard cancer… Oh, by the way—Grandpa Robin is supposed to look like a little bit older Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Supernatural, The Watchmen).