Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates Read Online Free PDF Page B

say breathlessly.
    “Tiffany VanDerHoven?” says an unfamiliar male voice.
    I feel myself wilt into the chair. Mom is frowning. She doesn’t know what’s going on. Me either.
    “Yes,” I say cautiously.
    “Hold for your sisters.”
    “Okay.” I learned hold from the movies. Hold I understand. Kinda. I had no idea it was this hard to just listen to some really bad music when all you want to do is talk to your sisters.
    “Tiff?” Brittany’s on the line.
    “Brit?” I say. “It’s me.”
    She sounds a little funny. Her voice is thinner than I remember, but that’s got to be the phone.
    Mom smiles and mouths, I’ll be downstairs .
    I nod. I really don’t care where she’ll be.
    “It’s good to hear you,” Brittany says.
    “Brit?” That’s Crystal. She sounds even more breathless than usual.
    “And me, too,” I say, not wanting to be forgotten.
    “Tiff!”
    We squeal and yell and if we were together, we’d be hugging and stuff, but we’re not, so we just do some laughing and joking and kidding around.
    “Gosh, it’s good to hear you,” Brittany says again.
    “Gosh?” Crystal asks.
    “Here you can’t say bad words without people looking at you weird,” Brittany says.
    “Bad words?” I have a hunch I know, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything anymore.
    Bad words, Brittany explains, includes tons of stuff we used to say, stuff not included in the swear words list I got from the movies. Brittany is talking a lot. I guess she hasn’t said much since she moved.
    She doesn’t like it there. All the kids in her school have been friends since they were little kids. Her mom has a husband and an ex-husband (who was divorcing her when she met our dad) and Brit has two half brothers she’d always heard about but never met.
    “It’s really, really isolated here,” she says, “and they tell me winter’s coming and that’s even worse.”
    We make soothing noises, but I can tell Crystal’s heart isn’t in it. Mine kinda isn’t either. I’m waiting for my turn, only I don’t know how to explain what’s going on here. On the surface, it seems pretty okay.
    Mom and I aren’t fighting, like Crystal and her mom are, and people aren’t actively being mean to me like they are to Brittany. How can I complain about being ignored when these guys probably want to be ignored?
    Crystal tells us about her school where all the kids are rich except for one or two, and her stepfather who is never home, and her mom who isn’t home either. She has a housekeeper who never heard of her until she showed up, and an au pair (for the younger kids—she has mortal siblings too) and she lives in two floors of this really ritzy apartment building—like the one in the remake of Dial M. For Murder —and there are rooms where she’s not allowed to touch anything. She can buy whatever she wants with her own credit card but she has to be careful because her mom goes over the bill at the end of the month to make sure there’s nothing illegal.
    I’m not even sure what’s legal, so I wouldn’t know, and when I say that, Crystal says her mom’s mostly afraid of drugs.
    Drugs. No one’s offered me any, not that I’d take them because I know they mess up your mind. But my movie sources (and the TV ones too) tell me someone should’ve offered me drugs by now.
    “How’re you, Tiff?” Crystal asks.
    “Yeah, Tiff, how’s it going in U-gene?” Brittany asks.
    “It’s Eu- gene ,” I say, just like Mom does when someone mispronounces her town, “and it’s pretty good.”
    The lie just comes right out.
    “Good?” Both of my sisters sound surprised.
    “Yeah,” I say. “Mom and I are getting along…” which is true “…and I’m not having any problems at school…” which is also true if you don’t count the invisibility thing “…and nothing really bad has happened so far…” again, if you forget that invisibility thing.
    “Really? Seriously?” Brittany asks. “Everything is fine?”
    I