Free Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede Page B

didn’t have to take half his classes from his own father.
    Rennie was still at home, though she’d graduated upper school and should have started work or been studying for college. But Rennie didn’t want more schooling, and she couldn’t seem to find a job that suited her in Mill City, however hard she looked. I thought it was probably because nobody would let her start right in bossing people, without taking a turn being bossed first, but I kept my opinion to myself.
    It wasn’t long before I was glad I hadn’t said anything, because a month after school started, Corrie Bergston came to class with a hacking cough, and nearly everyone caught it, including me and Lan. Rennie split the nursing with Mama, and I didn’t like to think how miserable a time I’d have had if I’d given her reason to be cross with me. I was miserable enough as it was.
    Lan wheezed for a week, like everyone else, and then the coughing slacked off and he went back to school. I wasn’t so lucky. The cough turned to a putrid sore throat, and then to something else that made me hot and achy all over for weeks. Mama had the doctor in, and then another doctor, and then pretty nearly every professor at the college who might have some practical use to them, and the minister on top of them all. Most of the time, I was too tired and achy to care about anything except making them go away, but after a while it sank in through the fog in my head that I must be really sick for all those people to keep coming with nasty-tasting potions and spells.
    One of the times I felt clear enough to think, I finally asked Mama what was wrong with me.
    “You have rheumatic fever, Eff,” she said. “It’s a very dangerous disease, but you’re past the worst of it now, if we’re careful.”
    “If we’re careful?”
    “Rheumatic fever lingers in the body, even after you start feeling better,” Mama explained. “You’ll have to lie here quietly for a long time if you don’t want to have a recurrence.”
    “You mean I could be sick all over again?” I asked.
    Mama nodded. “All over again, and worse than ever,” she told me. Her voice wobbled, so I knew it was serious. “You might die, or the fever could weaken your heart, despite all our spells and potions. So you see how important it is for you to stay quiet.”
    I nodded. Mama looked like she wanted to say something more, but I lay back and pretended that I wanted to go to sleep. She tucked up the coverlet and kissed me before she left. I lay awake for a long while when she was gone, thinking as best I could.
    My head was still fairly muddled, but I’d got the part about dying, all right. It seemed wrong to me that all the doctors and magicians should put so much work into trying to keep me alive, when if they’d known I was a thirteenth child and bound to turn evil in a few years, they wouldn’t have lifted a finger. Only then I thought maybe they wouldn’t mind about me being thirteenth, after all. Mill City was different from Helvan Shores. In the five years we’d been here, nobody’d made any fuss about me being a thirteenth child. If anybody had noticed, it seemed they didn’t much care. Nobody had made any fuss about Lan being a double-seven, either, except for the Settlement Office. If I stayed away from the Settlement Office, maybe it would be all right.
    Not that I had any call to go anywhere near the Settlement Office, or anywhere else, that year. Mama meant it when she said I had to stay quiet. I spent most of that year in bed, and missed all of school. For a while, Lan brought lessons home and I tried to catch up, but Mama wouldn’t let me put in a full day working, for fear the fever would go to my brain, so I finally had to quit. I was really sorry. Once you get over the novelty of the thing, it’s almighty boring, lying in bed all day for months. Even lessons would have been better.
    My older brothers and sisters tried to cheer me up, but except for Rennie they were all in school