Welcome to Gaia! ::

"I grown now?"

Wisp Darnell had gone from being tearful and confused about her big sister's sudden and arresting change to big sister in a matter of days: in fact, just two days after the amazing growth spurt, she had gotten it into her little golden head that the best way to take the matter was to join Jacoba in her bigness. Their mother had made sure that the changes were swift: the nursery was now only half a nursery, with the junkroom being renovated to make it more appropriate for a growing girl. Having her two daughters share a room had been a pipe dream quickly popped. One of the cribs had been taken out and Jace was sleeping on a camp bed, which Wisp was constantly in awe over. She would stand up in her crib and watch Jace sitting on the bed - resting her chin on her clasped hands - just watching, with her big eyes, until Jace would close her book or stop doing push-ups and holler:

"M.B.!"

(That was another argument, one that stubbornness drew out into a Beatrix-Jacoba standoff. Jace declared that she wouldn't call Beatrix mom because mom was lame and Beatrix declared that Jace would call her her first name over her dead body, so M.B. was the result: Mama Beatrix. Long after the fight her eldest daughter regretted it and regretted the slight disappointed slump to her mother's shoulders every time M.B. left her lips. They shared their stubbornness: M.B. Beatrix remained, except sometimes in Jace's head and when she was very sleepy at night and mumbled mommy.)

"M.B.! She keeps watching me!"

"A usual symptom of having eyes," floated in her mother's voice. "Is she harming you in any physical or emotional way?"

"It's annoying!"

Wisp, nothing loath, was busily trying to attach some smuggled Play-Doh to her ears, possibly in lieu of earrings. "I grown now," she confirmed.

"You're not grown. You're just putting red goop in your ears, okay? That's retarded. That's so severely retarded. I don't even know why you think red goop is being grown up."

"Grown!" chirped the small girl in the crib. "Yay me! Yay Jac'ba! Hooray! Party time now."

"Your sister thinks, perhaps erroneously, that you hung the moon," came her mother's voice again. "She is also too little to understand about growing up. She asks nothing more of you than you humouring her, you know."

The redheaded girl sighed as loudly and as violently as she could to show her displeasure. (Beatrix, in the next room, quietly and resignedly dreaded Jacoba's teenagerdom.) She slithered off her camp bed and hooked her legs around the back and did press-ups, which comforted her. She had found that she had about ten times more violent energy than any other kid she knew, and had to take it out in push-ups. Wisp would watch her and clap and then put herself down for a nap, because disgustingly, Wisp was one of the nicest and easiest to care for toddlers in the whole entire unfair world. She sang out in her sweet, high voice: "Goodnight Jac'ba!" and napped henceforth. This was probably cute.

And then, of course, thirty seconds later:

"I grown now?"

"Nah, Wisp," said Jace. "Not yet, okay? So shut up and go back to bed."

"Okay," said her little sister happily.

"'Leet'," repeated Beatrix aloud.

Wisp's eyes were large and innocent, as sweetly blue as cornflowers. "Google says it's the language of the Internet so I was all, 'hey!'. Also I thought that I shouldn't take too much time on a language 'cos I have Plans. And it's like everyone goes on the Internet so I guess they all haveta know the language - "

Her mother scribbled down French, and resigned herself to what was probably going to be years of Wisp's inexpert schoolgirl parlez-vous. She also put down Spanish in Jacoba's column, finding the other option not worth discussion. "Percussion, although a worthy addition to the orchestra, is going to be your pick over my cold and dead and rotting body," she said to her first daughter. "Guitar it is and flute for Wisp."

"I couldn't be bothered coming up with three options for the first two so I put four for the last," said Jacoba, and took another large bite out of her grilled cheese. "And that's electric guitar, okay?"

"In this household, car driving isn't a sport," added Beatrix, judiciously ignoring her. "'Swords is also overly vague and I don't think you're referring to the noble art of fencing. I was actually on the fencing team early in university; it's an Olympic sport, you know. I'll therefore narrow your options down to kung fu and kickboxing, the latter of which probably gives you an unfair advantage if you think about it."

"Her legs are made of metal! She'd be awesome!" said Wisp.

"Rather what I was driving at. And as for you, soccer is perfectly acceptable. I don't think you'd quite like how much time would be taken up by gymnastics and general dance sounds a bit wishy-washy."

The matriarch of the Darnell household capped her red pen: the spelling errors (and she was impressed that Wisp very nearly spelled gymnastics and that Jacoba was continuing to approximate) would be sent back with them to be corrected and handed into her once they'd consulted the dictionary, and she could add the errors to their list of spelling words to look out for. It would stop Jace trying to pick hers from whatever words she found vaguely rude in the thesaurus. Both seemed fairly satisfied with the exercise: of course, they were also far more interested in lunch, with Jace tearing into her sandwich like a wild beast and Wisp delicately disassembling hers bit by bit.

And there was Jack, who had his sole offspring only a few inches high and lodged in a glass. He'd probably had the right idea about it, in fact.

"Want to hear how much leet I can speak already, Mommy? Do you?" Wisp dangled a piece of ham into her mouth and ate it with relish. "'j00!' I don't know what that means. I can also say 'w00t'! I think that means 'yay'. My very favourite word is LOL! Because that stands for laugh out loud so it's like being able to say a laugh. I think that's so neato cool. And if you want to say goodbye you say - "

"You're maybe the stupidest person in the whole wide world," announced Jace.

"Lol!"

Jack had definitely had the right idea.

Life had not gone well for the Darnell family that year. At least, it hadn't started out that way: with the chickenpox, both Jacoba and Wisp's immune systems had taken a nosedive and packed up for the winter, and quite quickly after they were still recovering from the chickenpox they both developed whooping cough.

That was too much to bear. Chickenpox was one thing -- you could sit around being itchy with the rest of the children who also had chickenpox -- but living in an apartment block, and having whooping cough, were two things that were not going to work out. One couldn't whoop in private, and as a teacher there was no time in Beatrix's schedule for whooping-cough, and anyway leaving two pissed-off and bitching children at home was illegal and slightly against her moral code. (Not to mention how popular she would be with the other parents, spreading an epidemic of whooping-cough.) Dr. Darnell took the time off of work, packed her two girls up, and left smartly on vacation.

It was glorious. It was nearly worth being separated from creature comforts -- for Wisp, being separated from Christian and Rory and Missy and Tyler, and for Jace, being separated from... well, being separated from her bike and Jack, mainly, maybe missing having Antony around as a kick-toy and foil, whatever Jace missed in particular. Never doing anything by halves, their mother packed them away to Africa: they whooped all they wanted on the great golden expanse of the vaal, the veldt-fires and the summers in the south, the four o'clock thunderstorm that happened every afternoon right on the dot and was over in a few violent wet hours. It was also -- though Jace would have rather died than admit it -- nice to have Beatrix all to themselves, armed with her sunhat, sitting in a chair outside with them listening to them mess around or reading them a book or reminding Wisp with some asperity that, no matter how much she painted or drew or smeared colours on herself, her mother's blindness would not change, and even with Thwomp's assistance no amount of repetition could make her appreciate her art. This depressed her youngest daughter, except when she realised that at that juncture what she should really do was describe every single aspect of every piece of artwork in laboured detail. Jace came into a room too many times hearing the tail-end of, "... and then the fuschia pales out into lavender and the lavender has backlights of blue -- "

The coughing fits had taken them a while to recover from, especially Jace, who had been furious the entire time she had been stricken with pertussis that she could not exercise to her liking. Beatrix had very nearly contemplated stapling her to her bed in order to prevent her eldest from developing double pneumonia: only a very hoarse throat had stopped Jace from her normal bouts of yelling. Instead, she cultivated slit eyes and a sibillant hiss. Normally it was only teenagers who passionately hated their parents, but "I hate you" was a normal occurrance every time she had to very nearly be smothered by her parent to stop her from doing push-ups. "For one thing," Beatrix snapped, "you're ruining your flexibility, foolish child. Build muscle when you're a teenager. Don't try it now."

At least that sort of logic tended to shut Jace up.

School had continued for both of them, even language instruction, though it was as terrible as Bea had ever thought sitting with Wisp in bed as the girl haltingly said her "Comment vous appellez-vous?". She tried hard, but her accent was horrific. On the other side of the coin, Jace's Spanish was actually not too shabby, but she was as lazy as she was sharp when it came to the habla espanol and seemed to only enjoy learning slang words. Wisp showed willing: it was just that she was awful.

"Was cooking breakfast all right?" she would say.

"DE RIEN," said Wisp, who obviously hoped that force and enthusiasm would win out over grammar or making sense.

That was new, too -- dinner, the consensus was, especially as they all started to get well and sulk instead of malinger -- would be on a three-way rota. Cake seemed to get into the menu with depressing regularity when Wisp cooked supper, and though Jacoba offered more than two courses those two courses always seemed to have sausages in them. Nonetheless, they both blossomed -- lost their jaundice and Jace burned as brown as she could in the sun, a freckled skinny redhead instead of a white skinny redhead, metal legs flashing in their separate parts as she ran around and walked on her hands. Wisp sat down on the chair outside their little house in Botswana and drew the countryside with her fingers, entranced.

"That's kind of ghetto," Jace would say at seeing her work, which was vaguely graffiti-meets-Matisse.

"Ha ha," Wisp laughed agreeably, "it's wack!" (Beatrix wondered what planet her daughters had come down from and reminded them in the next breath that they were very white.)

They had all left tired and sick and frustrated with life: even Thrwomp had seemed to wilt a little under the pressure, not dancing about as he used to but simply rolling from place to place unless his mistress bade him move. Going away perked them all up. Both girls write hundred s of postcards home, which -- as their mother reminded them -- due to the unnatural law of postcards would not arrive until after they had gone back. This aggrieved Jace, who wanted Jack and Antony to know as quickly as damn possible that her snake-killing tally was up to four and there was still time for more animal murder.

Coming home was a relief, too. The house smelled a little of dust as both girls tried to get through the door at once, complete with yelling and pushing (mainly for the joy of yelling and pushing on Wisp's part), all suitcases and souvenirs -- God only knew how Jace had smuggled the knives through customs, but how she did it was a mystery possibly to be examined by the government. Beatrix's youngest ran around opening up the curtains and greeting all the furniture ("HI, TABLE!") as Jace flopped down on the couch and stretched out like a part-robot starfish: the answering machine was full of messages, choc-full, but Jack knew that if he had set himself on fire that he would have reached her by some other means. With a relieved sigh, Dr. Darnell set down her bag, leant against the countertop and breathed in home.

"Well, girls," she said. "We're back."

"BIENVENUE CHEZ TOI," said Wisp. "Lol! Mommy, can I phone Christian right now -- " ("Unpack first," said her mother. "And it's bienvenue à la maison.") "I missed him and Missy and Rory and everyone so much! I can't believe how much! I'll never leave him again!"

"Well, why don't you marry him," sneered her sister, with a well-placed and sophisticated curl of her lip.

"Because he is the platonic love of my life," argued back Wisp sanguinely, "and also, we're going to be superheroes, I've decided this. You can't fall in love with your sidekick. Did Batman fall for Robin?"

"Batman was totally gay."

"I don't care -- "

"Less in-depth discussion of homosexuality in Western print comic," said their mother. "More unpacking."

Coming home was -- coming home.