Free Hallowed: An Unearthly Novel by Cynthia Hand

too long. It’s bad for the complexion.” I make a face at her.

    “You do have one big advantage when it comes to Stanford,” she says.

    “Oh yeah? What?”

    “Your grandmother went there, and she happens to donate a large sum of money to the university every year.”

    I stare at her. My grandmother. I don’t have a grandmother. Mom’s mother died in childbirth back in like 1890.

    “You mean Dad’s mom?” I’ve never heard anything about Dad’s mom. Neither of my parents have ever said much about their families.

    “No,” Mom says with a small, knowing smile. “I mean me . In 1967 I graduated from Stanford with a degree in history. My name back then was Margot Whitfield. That, according to the official records, anyway, is your grandmother.”

    “Margot Whitfield,” I repeat.

    “That’s me.”

    I shake my head incredulously. “You know, sometimes I feel like I don’t know you at all.”

    “You don’t,” she admits easily, which catches me off guard. “When you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve lived several different lives, and each one of them is, in some ways, like a different person. A different version of yourself. Margot Whitfield is a stranger to you.” My thoughts shoot straight to Samjeeza and the way he calls my mom Meg, the image of her he carries around in his head, this smirking girl with cropped brown hair. Definitely a stranger.

    “So what was she like, this Margot Whitfield?” I ask. “Nice name, by the way. Margot.”

    “She was a free spirit,” Mom says. “A bit of a hippie, I’m afraid.” My brain instantly conjures an image of my mom in one of those flowy polyester dresses with the tiny sunglasses and daisies in her hair, swaying to the music at Woodstock, protesting the war.

    “So did you do a lot of drugs?”

    “No,” she says a bit defensively. “I had my rebellious stage, Clara. But it definitely wasn’t the sixties. More like the twenties.”

    “Then why were you a hippie, if you weren’t rebelling?”

    She hesitates. “I had a hard time with the conformity of the fifties.”

    “What was your name in the fifties?”

    “Marge,” she says with a laugh. “But I was never the fifties-housewife type.”

    “Because you weren’t married.”

    “Right.” She’d told me this. Early on I’d been nervous that maybe, given her age, she’d already been married a few times and had lots of kids out there, but she assured me this wasn’t the case.

    “Did you ever almost get married?” Now this, I’ve never asked her. But she’s been pretty forthcoming recently, so I try my luck.

    She closes her eyes for a minute, takes a deep breath. “Yes.”

    “When?”

    She looks at me. “In the fifties. Now back to Margot Whitfield, please.” I nod. “So you’re a Stanford alum. How many times have you been to college, anyway?”

    “Let’s see,” she says, obviously relieved to be off the fifties and back to a time she’s comfortable with. “Four. I studied nursing, history, international relations, and computer programming.”

    I let that sink in for a minute. “International relations?”

    “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

    “Don’t tell me you were a spy?”

    She smiles blandly.

    “So that’s why you keep telling me to relax about the college thing. I don’t have to pick a single career. When you’re going to live hundreds of years, you have time to be everything that interests you.”

    “When you live a long life,” she says, “you can do a lot of things. You have time. But if you want to go to Stanford with Angela, I think that might be great fun.”

    “I’ll think about it,” I say. But if I go with Angela, Tucker and I are going to be separated.
    We’re going to have to do the long-distance thing, and that does not sound like great fun to me.

    I crawl back to bed around four, completely exhausted by this point, hoping to grab a couple hours of sleep before tomorrow begins. But