Free Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates by Kristine Grayson

day I was in the house—and rubs the butter on the red patch.
    Then she explains about burns and how to cure them without magic and I’m watching like I’ve never seen anything like this before (and truthfully I haven’t) and I’m not sure why I should care since I don’t get injured as one of the magical and then I wonder if that rule’s been rescinded too.
    Probably. I’ll ask Megan.
    Mom picks up the wok and pours the contents over some rice she made (I didn’t even notice until now), then she hands me the bowl with the rice and the other stuff (broccoli, water chestnuts, mushrooms, baby corn, and things I don’t recognize, all in a brownish sauce) and tells me to put it on the table.
    I do, she comes over and sits, so I feel like I can sit too. Then she says, “What did you ask me before?”
    My face gets hot again. I wish this blushing thing would end, but I’m beginning to think I’m cursed with it for the rest of my life. I’d hoped she’d forgotten all about my question because it would steer the conversation too close to Josh and the stuff I talked to Megan about and I don’t want to get near either of those topics.
    “I asked if it’s okay to like servants,” I say quietly. I don’t know what I’m thinking. Maybe that speaking quietly will prevent her from hearing the question, but then she’ll only go “What?” and I’ll have to repeat it all over again.
    So what I do is pretty simple: I just load up my plate with food. That tends to please Mom, who says I’m too thin.
    “Servants,” she says.
    I shrug.
    “What do you mean by servants?” she asks.
    “You know,” I say, stirring the food around. It smells like garlic and ginger and stuff I can’t recognize and my stomach rumbles.
    “No,” she says, “I don’t know. Illuminate me.”
    She says stuff like that. Like “Illuminate me”: she’s not giving some magical command to cover her with a stream of light. She’s being all intellectual and stuff. Daddy says the reason I have a good vocabulary in all my languages and Brittany and Crystal say the reason I like to read is because Mom is all brainy. I think they’re wrong, but I am the only one of my close siblings (the ones exactly my age—all twenty of them) who likes to read and to learn.
    “Tiffany,” Mom says with caution in her voice. It’s like a warning sign. Don’t do what she says and she becomes supermom, with anger that just makes me all quivery.
    “Hmm?” I ask, taking a bite of dinner. It’s good. It’s like some Chinese food we got in L.A.
    “Tell me what you mean by servants,” she says.
    I’ve said something wrong, but I’m not sure what it is. So I have no choice but to answer. “Y’know,” I say, trying to put it off. “People who do manual labor.”
    “Like what?” she asks.
    “Like, I dunno.” I don’t want to say, Like cook dinner because that would reflect badly on Mom, since she just did. “Like, wait tables or something.”
    “Those are servants?” she asks.
    I shrug.
    “You had servants at home?” She still hasn’t touched her food. My stepmother would have refused to eat at that point, thinking someone was trying to poison her. But I know better. My mom won’t poison me, no matter how bone-headed I am.
    “Yeah,” I say slowly. “We have servants.”
    She probably missed them because she wasn’t there much. Besides, Daddy tries to make sure the mothers never see exactly how we live our lives on Olympus. He says it would spoil them. So we have a kind of fend-for-yourself party when they’re around at which, come to think of it, the mothers do most of the work.
    My flush gets deeper. I know because my cheeks feel hotter. Have I just insulted her? I didn’t mean it if I did.
    “And you’re not supposed to fraternize with them, I assume.”
    Fraternize. Frater which has its roots in Latin and means brother. So I guess the word is some bastardization of brother and in context it seems to mean become close to or something,