We were lucky, I guess, Nita thought. So many wizards don't dare "come out" to their families at all. Or they try it, and it doesn't 't work, and then they have to make them forget… She got down some sugar from the cupboard. But look at him now. You'd think everybody had alien wizards living in their basement… "It's almost nine," her dad said. "I should get ready to go, honey." "Okay," Nita said as her dad headed through the dining room and toward the back of the house. She wandered back into the dining room with her tea and pulled one of the spare chairs over from the wall, pushing it down to the far end of the table between Sker'ret and where Dairine had been sitting. The centipede-Nita smiled at herself. / should lay off that, she thought, it's so Earth-centric… The Rirhait was carefully tearing out another page from the teen magazine. He then examined both sides of the page with great care before shredding it up with several pairs of small knife-sharp mandibles and stuffing it into his facial orifice. "Where'd these come from?" Nita said to Dairine as she came back in. "Carmela brought them," Dairine said. "They're sure not mine. I mean, look at the covers! You could find them in the dark. The publishers must think human females are nearly blind until they're eighteen." The Christmas tree-The Demisive, I mean, Nita thought-reached out a frond-branch to pull another magazine off the pile. "I think the colors are delightful," he said. "That's just because you're a sucker for DayGlo, Filif," Dairine said. "It's a newbie thing. You'll get over it." Nita somehow wasn't so sure about that. "And as for you, Sker'ret," she said to the Rirhait, "you're a one-being recycling center." "There's a pile of Dad's old Time magazines by the chair in the living room," Dairine said. "For when you want something a little more substantial." "Oh, substance isn't everything," Sker'ret said. "Sometimes a little junk food is just what you need." He munched away.