Stunned, Mina fingered the small packet under the table and kept running her fingers over the gold character. She wanted to ask Mei Wong about it, or even her mother, but that wasn’t what the Chinese woman probably had in mind, when she purposely gave it to her without her mother’s knowledge. For all she knew it could be poison, but then again, the Wong’s have never shown anything but good will toward the Grime family.
When Mina was sure that Mrs. Wong wasn’t going to change her mind and walk in on them again, she decided it was time to tell her mother about her incident at school.
“Mom, it’s starting again.” Mina tried to sound very nonchalant as she stirred her hot bowl of soup.
“What is, dear?” Sara asked. She opened up a container of Lo Mein noodles and scooped out a portion to an eagerly awaiting Charlie.
Mina stabbed up a piece of orange chicken with her fork and blew on it. “Oh, you know, stuff, with a capital ‘S’.” She took a bite of her rice.
Sara’s hand froze mid-air. Her inner turmoil was evident on her face and her shaking hands, but both of the Grime women were experts at hiding their emotions from Charlie. Sara swallowed nervously, but continued to portion the rest of the food.
“Ah, I see.”
“Yeah, my um, biology class was interesting. And let’s just say that not everyone agreed with the stuff in the specimen jars. Let’s just say they were very…animated.” Mina let the words hang in the air.
She watched Charlie sit in his chair wearing his normal plethora of super hero costume pieces, which included a Hulk shirt, with a Batman utility belt, and cape. His small feet wearing his favorite rain boots kicked back and forth happily. He made overly loud slurping noises while sucking up the noodles, and when he was finished, he grinned at Mina.
In no way was Charlie dumb, but there were certain things Sara never wanted to discuss with Charlie in the room, for fear of worrying him. Mina had convinced her mother that they couldn’t run anymore, that she needed to take her place as a Grimm and do her part to break the curse on her family by completing the quests. Reluctantly, Sara agreed, but she had conditions. One of those conditions was never to alarm Charlie if possible.
Sara patted Charlie’s head affectionately. “Anything I should be overly concerned with?” Her brown eyes began to fill with tears, but she hid them well by getting up to get a gallon of milk out of the fridge. Mina could see her mother furiously wipe at them with her apron before approaching the table. When she sat down, Sara was solemn with only a hint of red rimmed eyes.
“Nope. It was just a small problem. Nothing bigger has presented itself.” Mina tried to hide her words. One time she had entered a pet store and all of the animals began to behave erratically: trying to get out of cages, birds speaking terrible warnings to her. Other times, she would be followed by geese as if she was the original storybook goose girl.
“I was hoping for more time between…and then since we never found the Grimoire...” Sara trailed off. She sat at the table silently for the next few minutes watching her children eat before picking up her uneaten bowl of egg drop soup and putting it in the sink.
Mina knew better than to say anything else, so she waited and watched as her mother furiously cleaned up her own dishes, put the leftovers away, and then retired to her room, complaining of a headache.
Charlie immediately jumped up from the table and ran over to the small living room, flipped on the TV, and engrossed himself with the Justice League of America cartoons.
Left sitting alone, Mina looked into her bowl of soup and found herself unable to eat anything else. Leaving her bowl on the table, she awkwardly got up and hopped to her small bedroom.
Even though Sara cleaned houses for a living, she never dared to enter Mina’s domain and clean her teenage daughter’s disaster zone. There were piles of clean laundry, dirty laundry, and magazines all over the floor. Mina tried to navigate the maze of mess that was her bedroom with a crutch, and she secretly wished she had cleaned her room.
She wheeled out her chair and sat at her garage sale desk, which was badly in need of a new coat of stain, but she never got around to painting it. She opened the vellum envelope and was surprised when it contained nothing more than a single tea bag. Mina pulled out the tea bag and studied it carefully, trying to identify the components of the leaves, but nothing struck her as out of the ordinary. Since everything looked the same, she flipped the switch on her hotpot and waited for the water to boil.