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Chapter Three
The plane landed four hours later, but in Pennsylvania it was seven hours later. Ness stepped off the plane feeling much too awake to watch the sun set in just a few hours. In her mind, it was still two-thirty.
“Where’s all the smog?” she asked her mother. The sky was clear of any unnatural gases.
Well, what did you expect? she asked herself.
“Welcome to Pittsburgh,” her mother said, smiling. Ness followed Cassandra off towards the baggage claim, noticing how different it was here compared to California. There definitely weren’t as many people as there were back home.
This is home now, she reminded herself.
“The bags should be coming around any minute now,” Cassandra said reassuringly.
Ten minutes later, Ness started to get worried. “Where are they?” she asked, peering up the chute that other passengers’ bags kept sliding down. “What if they’re lost?”
“I’m sure they’re not.” Cassandra studied her cuticles, clearly not worried. “Sometimes these things take a long time.”
Ness shrugged and continued to watch the luggage chute.
“When is Cliff going to get here?” she asked a few moments later.
At the mere mention of Cliff’s name, Cassandra’s eyes lit up. “Our flight was early…probably not for a little bit. He’s supposed to meet us here, though. I cannot wait for you to see the house. We fixed it up so nice.”
“Have they always lived there?”
“Yes; for the past couple of years, anyway. But we fixed it up a lot—especially your room. It was just a storage room over the garage, but now…” Cassandra’s voice trailed off for a few seconds. “Now, you’ll absolutely love it. When I was over here at the beginning of the summer—right after the wedding, you know—we got a lot done.”
Ness felt a stab of jealously and anger as she thought about her mother’s trip to the East Coast earlier that summer. She couldn’t go because she wanted to keep her summer job—which was, of course, just an excuse to stay in California longer—so Cassandra headed over for a few weeks while Ness stayed behind alone. Now, she found herself regretting her decision: Cliff’s kids got to spend time together with her mother and she didn’t.
“How did you meet Cliff, anyway?” Ness asked. She didn’t think that her mom noticed the tone of resentment in her voice.
Cassandra’s whole tone changed when she began to tell Ness the story of her and Cliff. “Well…we were old high school friends. Actually, he was my boyfriend for a few years. A lot of people in town thought that we’d end up staying together forever.”
“Oh yeah? What happened?”
“Graduation happened. College,” Cassandra explained. “His parents had had his tuition paid for Bucknell since his first birthday—Cliff didn’t really have much of a choice. Me, however…I wanted to get as far away from Pittsburgh and my mother as possible.”
“And you ended up in California?”
“I wanted to be a movie star. A singer, an actress…whatever. It didn’t matter to me. Los Angeles seemed to be the best place to go. Obviously, it didn’t turn out that well.” Cassandra shrugged. “I ended up going to beauty school and eventually I met your dad when I was a waitress.”
“What was he like?” Ness asked cautiously. Her mother rarely talked about her real father, and Ness was always very careful to bring up the subject.
She received the expected reaction, too. Cassandra’s eyes lost their shine and she looked away. “Your father,” she said under her breath.
“I’m sorry I asked,” Ness said quietly and tried to think of ways to change the subject.
“I met your father when I was twenty-one. You were born a year later.” Her mother paused and looked at her hands. “He ran from the hospital room as soon as he saw you—saw your eyes. I haven’t heard of him or from him since.”
Ness let that fact about her father sink in, and suddenly she realized that she hated him. “Why didn’t you run when you saw my eyes?” she asked.
“Because you were mine—my beautiful girl. At that moment I told myself that I would never abandon you like that.” Finally, Cassandra looked Ness in the eye. “And I knew you were going to be different from everyone else, and I couldn’t live without you—that it was us against the world.”
“Not anymore. It’s us and the Horowitzes against the world.”
Cassandra put her arm around Ness. “Please don’t feel like that,” she pleaded. “It will always be us against the world. Trust me.”
After a few moments, Ness said, “Alright, I trust you.”
Cassandra smiled. “You know, I still don’t know what exactly is different about you. But it still happens every time I look at you, you know—you’re not like everyone else your age…”
Ness swallowed, trying to ignore the twisting feeling her mother’s words put in her stomach. “You have no idea,” she said.
Again, they sat in silence for a few moments until Ness asked, “Why didn’t you try to get in touch with Cliff again? After my dad left, and all.”
“Because when Cliff was in Bucknell, he got a girl pregnant, that’s why. They had to get married—both of their parents were forcing them to—and the baby was born a little bit before you were.”
Ness rolled her eyes. “Claire.”
“I don’t understand why you don’t like each other,” Cassandra said, her voice a little harsh. “She’s such a nice girl. Really, Ness, a sweetheart.”
“Uh huh. That’s why she always calls me names—”
But Cassandra didn’t seem to hear Ness’s reply, because at that moment she jumped up and let out a squeal. A few peoples’ heads turned at the noise, but they looked away smiling after Cassandra threw herself into Cliff’s arms.
Ness tried to look away. She felt her face growing hot as her anger and embarrassment rose up inside of her. It was weird to see her mother acting this way with Cliff—a man who was still a total stranger to Ness.
She stood back and watched as her mother finally pulled herself away from Cliff. Cassandra bent down to give Charlie, Ness’s new stepbrother, a hug, who returned it eagerly. She did the same with Claire, who returned the hug just as eagerly as Charlie had.
Take deep, cleansing breaths, Ness told herself. Her head felt as if it were going to explode. Worse than that, it felt like her power—that stupid, freakish part of herself—was going to unleash itself from her mind and create an earthquake in the airport.
She looked at the Horowitz family—which now included her mother—and held her breath. There was no way her mother was going to tell her again that she’d fit right in: no way, no how. Cliff, Cassandra, Claire, and Charlie looked like the perfect family: they all had dark hair and olive skin tones; they all had names that started with C; they were all incredibly short. Cliff was the tallest and he only stood at about five feet-seven inches; Ness was five feet-ten inches. She had the fair skin of a redhead, and obviously her name didn’t start with a C.
And, of course, there was the whole telekinetic powers thing.
It seemed like a few minutes passed before Cliff even realized that Ness was there.
“Ness!” he called. “Come on over here! Let me take a look at you!” Ness rolled her eyes and walked the few paces to where her new family was gathered.
Immediately, she felt like a giant. She pretty much towered over her mother, Claire, and Charlie; she could see straight over Cliff’s head.
“How’s your summer so far?” Cliff asked her, a smile stretching across his face. “Hopefully it’s just as nice here as it was in California!”
“I doubt it,” Ness muttered. Cassandra shot her a nasty look. “But I’m sure it’ll be okay once we get to your house—I mean, um, home,” she said quickly. “When are we going?”
“How about now?” Claire suggested impatiently. “I still want to call Angela and Lila to come over so we can swim.”
“I told you, they can wait until tomorrow,” Cliff told his daughter.
“And I told you that they were coming over at five thirty!” Claire reminded him.
Cliff shook his head and reached down to pick up a suitcase. “Just take something, will you?”
“As if!” Claire scoffed, backing away from the luggage. “I just did my nails before we left.”
“God forbid you chip one,” Ness said to her. She picked up her heaviest suitcase and thrust it at Claire with a sweet smile. “Make yourself useful, won’t you?”
The petite brunette let out an angry gasp, but before she could get a word out, Cliff spoke. “Everybody got something? Okay; good. Let’s roll!”
Ness turned her back on Claire and followed after her mother and Cliff. She smiled to herself and walked with a new bounce in her step, happy to have left Claire behind her.
However, Charlie quickly caught up to her. “Ness! Hi Ness!” he said excitedly, zooming along next to her like a human cannonball.
“Um—hi, Charlie,” she replied uncertainly. “What’s up?”
“I’m so glad you came before school started! You can come swimming in the pool now! We aren’t going to close it up for a long time yet.”
“Oh—well, that’s cool,” Ness told him. She didn’t mention, though, that she didn’t really like to swim. As a redhead, her skin tended to burn very easily in the sun.
“Claire wanted to stay there with her friends today. I begged her to come, but she said she didn’t want to waste her time on you,” Charlie explained bluntly. “Then Dad yelled at her, and she threw a fit, but she had to come anyway.”
“That’s nice.”
When they stepped out into the Pennsylvania sunshine, Ness suddenly found it very hard to get in a deep breath. It was hot.
“Jeeze!” she gasped. “I thought it would be cooler here.”
“It’s the humidity.” Cassandra turned and smiled at her daughter. “We don’t really have much of that back in Los Angeles.”
The air was so thick that it probably could have been cut with a knife. Ness was very grateful when they reached Cliff’s car—a large, black Mercedes—because the suitcase she was carrying seemed to be sucking the life out of her.
“Do you like the car?” Cliff asked as he opened the trunk.
“Oh, Cliff, it’s gorgeous!” Cassandra squealed. Again, she threw her arms around Cliff’s neck.
“I know how much you wanted a Benz,” Cliff told her. “I just couldn’t resist.”
And neither, apparently, could Cassandra. She was a sucker for big, expensive cars, Ness knew—and that’s exactly what was sitting right in front of them.
“You bought her a Mercedes?” Ness asked, shocked.
“Well, yes—you couldn’t expect to drive around that thing you had back in L.A., could you?”
“What’s wrong with that thing back in L.A.?” Ness demanded.
“It’s old. It’s going to die soon—or worse, blow up.”
Ness looked over at her mother only to see Cassandra’s eyes wider than they’d ever been before. She was practically drooling all over the black leather interior and heated seats.
The five of them then piled back into the car, with Charlie bouncing around in the seat between Ness and Claire. Cassandra and Cliff were talking about the house and remembering events that had happened years ago, laughing and exchanging a tender glance every few minutes.
Ness tried to tune it out. She didn’t want to hear about any more of her mother’s past...not tonight, anyway. It was weird enough to sit there and listen to Cassandra giggle and smile in a way she had never seen before. This man seemed to take her mom away, turn her into a person that Ness didn’t know.
She stared glumly out the window with her hand under her chin. It was going to be a long ride.
One thing...you could say 'chin on her hand' rather than 'hand under her chin', if you get what I mean... 
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