Valentine Duell
December 14, 2020 9:55 AM
Exciting news!! by Valentine Duell
Valentine clambered off the wagon and threw herself into Mama's arms. It seemed like an eternity since she'd seen her parents and she had awesome news to share! Papa was getting her things from the wagon, but she was bursting with excitement and just couldn't wait! She pulled back from Mama to look at her with her wide smile grinning brightly."Mama! Aunt Giselle was right!" She exclaimed, bubbling over. "I did have an 'admirer'!" She said that last word with a tone which she thought clearly conveyed the sense of adulthood. This was the most grown-up thing then anything else that had happened to her so far in her life, and it was wonderful. Right?
"Stanley wrote me a poem (sort of) and asked me out!" She tried and failed to explain calmly. An uncontrolled giggle erupted from her, she blushed and continued. "I said yes! I have a boyfriend!" The term still seemed strange to her, but it was fantastic! "That's great! Right?" She couldn't wait for Mama to share in her excitement! "He's Lavender's cousin and he's really nice! He has a twin brother Wally and a little sister Charlotte!" She paused a moment to catch her breath and think. She'd filled Mama in on her classmates before, so she'd already known about Wally. What else had she learned about Stanley since then?
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Valentine Duell
Exciting news!!
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Marissa Duell
December 14, 2020 6:54 PM
Indeed. Surprising too! by Marissa Duell
Valentine was getting taller, it seemed, by the minute, but in some ways, Marissa thought it would be a very long time before her daughter fundamentally changed, if she ever did at all. On the whole, she was glad about that. Val’s sheer enthusiasm for life could be a bit exhausting for her more reserved mother, but it also rarely failed to make her smile, as she did now as Val went straight from squeezing the breath out of her to exclaiming about Giselle being right about –Marissa did a double take. Had her twelve-year-old just said that she had a boyfriend?
“Wow,” she said, a bit stunned. “Sort of wrote you a poem? And – asked you out – what does that mean?” she asked. Her voice remained pleasant, without the suspicion that would doubtless have filled Andrew’s, though she was suddenly remembering in vivid detail some words she had said a few months earlier, words she rather suspected he was going to serve up for her dinner a lot for a few days at least….
”Honey,” she had said firmly. ”She’s twelve. Even if some little boys have crushes on her – or even if she gets one on one of them – I doubt it would be anything to worry about even if Sonora didn’t have all those charms on the stairs. Much less anything to post the banns about, or go turn some poor child into a toaster over. I think we have a few years before we have to consider anything that extreme.”
All of that was still true, of course, and she would remind Andrew of it all if he reacted too protectively about the matter, but she wasn’t sure she’d have made quite so light of it back then, if she’d been the Seer in the family….
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Marissa Duell
Indeed. Surprising too!
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Valentine Duell
December 16, 2020 6:05 PM
Isn't it fantastic?! by Valentine Duell
Valentine nodded with her wide grin, "Sort of," She confirmed with the hint of a giggle. "He wrote the traditional 'Roses are red, Violets are blue," then she blushed at the next lines, "You're really cute, Can I go out with you?" At which point she buried her face into Mama until the embarrassment subsided. He thought she was cute. Was she? A boy, Stanley, her boyfriend thought she was cute! The thought still made her feel all... twisted and fluttery and... she didn't even know what inside.Mama had asked another question, and Val wasn't quite sure what Mama was asking. "What do you mean?" She asked, "We sit together in some classes and mealtimes," Not all of them naturally, she still had Bonabelle and Lavender and Philippe and and Lorena and... everyone else to sit with as well, but she did her best to sit with him whenever she could. "we also hang out in the MARS rooms after classes... when I don't have club things happening." That happened occasionally, she hadn't really thought about how busy her schedule was before this, "but, he's come to some of the clubs to hang out with me as well!" Then she dropped her voice into a quiet, conspiratorial tone, "We've been holding hands!!" She gave Mama a wide guilty smile.
Now Valentine was pretty good at reading people, and she knew Mama pretty well. So when she looked at Mama just then, her expression dropped a few notches on the happy scale. Mama looked like she was trying to cover up something, she was... worried? Her own excitement dropped from her mind, "Is everything alright Mama?" Last year this time there had been some strange and wonderful things going on with Aunt Giselle's return. Were there more things like that happening?
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Valentine Duell
Isn't it fantastic?!
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Marissa Duell
December 16, 2020 6:32 PM
It's very sweet. by Marissa Duell
Roses were red, violets were blue. Sitting together in class and at meals. All harmless, twelve-year-old things, by the sounds of it, things that made Marissa smile indulgently more than worry - things that sounded more like little friends playacting at romance than something that stood any risk of making her and Andrew grandparents at an unseemly age. Or at least it was that way for now, and there was no use in thinking too much about what would be the case when Val was sixteen or seventeen. It was impossible, probably even for Giselle, to know for sure about where things would stand then. Marissa relaxed."Oh, yes," she said when asked suddenly if everything was all right, smiling fondly at Valentine. "Just thinking about how I can't believe that my baby is getting so grown-up already." She chucked Val under the chin affectionately. "And," she added, in a tone of admission, "how many times I'm going to hear 'I told you so' from Papa. He's been talking about inventing boy-repelling spells ever since he heard what your aunt said about you maybe having admirers this year," she added lightly, figuring it was only fair, as well as for the best, to give Val a little warning before she had a chance to bubble her news to her father the way she just had to Marissa about the charming-sounding Mr. O'Malley. "Don't be surprised if he wants to run background checks on everyone in his whole family." She did not add that by 'whole family,' she meant something along the lines of 'every distant cousin by marriage in existence, and all their lineages sixteen generations back.' She assumed that much was either obvious or unnecessary to disclose.
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Marissa Duell
It's very sweet.
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Valentine Duell
December 18, 2020 6:28 PM
Just sweet? by Valentine Duell
Mama was smiling, but there was still some sadness there. She still remembered what things were like before she went off to school last year. A lot of the time it was just her and Mama, now she was off at school and Mama was all alone. "Don't worry Mama," Valentine said with another hug, "I'll be your baby for as long as you want." She paused with just a moment's hesitation before finishing in a matter-of-fact voice with a serious look on her face, "But I'm still going to grow-up."She rolled her eyes at Mama's description of Papa's antics. Papa was weird. There were times he was pushing her to try all sorts of things, to experiment and take risks (some he told her not to tell Mama about). Then there were other times that he'd just stop her in her tracks, metaphorically bundle her up in bubble-wrap and that would be the end of it. It sounded like Mama was trying to tell her that this boyfriend thing might be one of those circumstances. She crinkled up her nose, "He didn't figure any out, did he? That wouldn't just work on Stanley, I wouldn't be able to hang out with Alexander or Philippe or Wally or Gabriel or..." she cut herself off starting to look worried. "Do you think we should break the news slowly to him?"
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Valentine Duell
Just sweet?
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Marissa Duell
December 21, 2020 6:45 PM
Also unexpected. by Marissa Duell
Marissa couldn’t help it: something about the sheer matter-of-factness of Val’s voice struck her as comical, somehow, and she laughed. “Yes, I know,” she said fondly, reaching out to smooth Val’s hair. “And yet, you’ll still be ‘Baby’ to me even when we both have grey hair,” she teased, though she suspected it was the truth.At least, it would be if nothing went wrong. That was a lot to assume, a lot more than she would have thought possible when she’d been Val’s age. She had never seen her mother with grey hair. She hadn’t been there when Giselle had been this age – an age where she should have been giggling over crushes instead of trying to survive as best as she could on her own in Greece. And Andrew’s parents…dear God, Andrew’s parents. All the things Andrew’s parents had missed…Andrew and Marissa’s wedding. Giselle buying her first wand. Val being born and growing and....
Perhaps that was a line to consider, should Andrew need a great deal of mollifying. Who knew better than they did, after all, how suddenly things could fall apart, no matter how carefully planned? It was not easy, she thought, for either of them to relinquish control voluntarily – not by nature, not by habits – but they couldn’t keep Val on a leash and drag her back by the hair if she put one toe away from some ideal path they imagined for her. They couldn’t have done that even had Val been a very different child, one more like Marissa had been, not without pushing her away all the further. Since Val was Val, though – independent, outgoing little Val – it was hard to imagine any such effort ending in anything but disaster. Which meant…she thought they would have to, up to a point, at least, have to let Val do what she would do and be there to comfort her when it went wrong, because the alternative might be even worse.
All very logical to think of. She suspected they would both find it much more difficult to do.
“Gently, at least,” she advised her daughter, nodding. “Very gently.”
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Marissa Duell
Also unexpected.
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