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The Darnell household was made up of four people whom life butted in on constantly. It was weird. Wisp Jacqueline Darnell had always assumed that teenagerhood meant that her sister would finally find her cool, that her mother and the rest of the family would have mature discussions about the nature of adulthood while baking bread together, something domestic and wholesome -- and with the addition of Irelia Torstenn, they would all become some kind of chick flick movie where they learnt life lessons about each other and had makeover montages. This was not to be.

Irelia and Jace went off constantly to case the town, doing whatever it was Iree and Jace did by themselves: sometimes they came back late at night, sometimes Irelia came back early and locked herself in the study to put on her glasses and go over long tomes with letters that looked like spiderwebbed Wingdings. Sometimes Beatrix and she would shut themselves away and go over the fine filigree of Linear A, of the Minoans, of Eteocretan languages. That was a barrier she could never hope to break into. Sometimes Jace would come home and just do crunches for hours and hours on end, haul herself up on the pole she'd bolted into her room in endless chin-ups, like life was a frenzy she used to get better quad muscles. One day she'd come into the kitchen to find Jacoba steadily burning a newspaper into the sink in wadded-up clumps of ash, sweating, eyes alight, the flame coming from her fingertips. She wanted to talk about it to her so badly: but there was silence between them, wadded-up clumpy silence just like the burning newspaper.

Sometimes the Darnell house felt like a thief, rifling through her pockets of any colour and happiness she had and leaving her grey and thin. Maybe this was being a teenager. "It is soul sucking," she said, but her mother didn't get it. It was hard to tell Ophelia, to tell Rory, to tell Chris. She painted her nails six colours, and she stayed up until five in the morning trying to save the world.

Wisp's own magic was something that now broke out, like zits. It terrified her. She would be painting in her room, or using her dye toothbrush to carefully put in streaks in her already-overdyed hair, and star sprinkles would clatter out unbidden to shatter on the bathroom countertop in splashes of crimson and vermillion and viridian. (Wisp loved colour words. They never described it enough, but they tried: and she loved things that tried!) She would be cutting up carrots at the daycare and colour would squelch out. The colours grew more subtle, more accurate -- the faint grey-beige rasp you got in the pages of a paperback, once even the fine transparent cucumber green of hand lotion, pushing the spectrum to all it could give.

It took her mind off homework. It took her mind off Iggy. It took her mind off a lot of stuff, but it still scared her as much as it delighted her sometimes. The rainbow that came out her everpresent locket now wound itself around her finger like a good pet -- could spread out wide, wide, wide as the entire road even if it left her feeling dizzy and drained, lifted her up and now fed on the star sprinkles like they were high-grade petrol. It was out of her control, too much throttle and not enough, uh, not-throttle.

Wisp went to her first-ever rave that spring: mainly by accident. They didn't flier for the raves that went on in the old mattress warehouse downtown, they stencil-sprayed and announced it in the weirdest places -- alleys, underneath park benches, pedestrian crossings. When she'd seen all the people waiting in line that Saturday, bored and snapping gum or talking excitedly on cellphones, she was struck: they were all people who looked like she did. These were people who dressed just like her. She had never known it was socially acceptable to totally wear pacifiers.

And they were colourful. They dressed like a rainbow had thrown up on them. She liked that. She'd watched with longing eyes as they'd filed in, stamped sealed and delivered, hands in her pockets over the other side of the street. And something in her said: next time.