did upstairs, my mother did down, and it took less than fifteen minutes to cover the house since we were old hat at it by now. I had left my room until last. I lay on the bed, trying to recreate my position of the night before. If I’d seen the shadow there and the light was there, that meant the faerie had to have been … I knocked over the stack of books while reaching the salt shaker over to where the faerie must have been standing.

“Enid,” my mother yelled, when the books had finished their gravity-driven thumps. “Stop dallying!”

“I’m not dallying,” I shouted back angrily. “Just because I don’t rush around like you always do doesn’t mean that I’m dallying.” I just hoped she couldn’t tell I was yelling this while lying down; my bed’s embrace was simply too cozy.

In reply, my mother slammed a cupboard door with force enough that the windows in my bedroom rattled in their frames. “Scornful comments are unnecessary,” she called up hypocritically. “Feel free to talk to me again when you can exercise some decorum. And bring your salt shaker down once you’ve finished, hopefully soon. I need another one.”

When I got back downstairs, my mother was in the vestibule, completing her dusting of the beaded curtain that hung inside the frame of our front door. One of my mother’s many decrees was that our front door be the only means of entry, ensuring that the beads would brush off any faeries that might have latched on to us or our visitors outside. When not protecting us from the plague of faeries my mother insisted were assailing our house, the beads were caught by drafts and knocked incessantly against the steel of the front door. I couldn’t stand the noise the beads made and shuddered as my mother ran her fingers through the strings, clattering them together.

“Done,” she said, stepping down from the white plastic stool.

“I thought you said you needed this.” I held up my salt shaker.

“I did but didn’t.”

“So you told me you needed it even though you didn’t need it at all. Why would you do that?”

“It meant you got done quicker,” my mother explained. “Now you have your own time back.”

“What if I didn’t want my own time back? What if I wanted to go at my own, leisurely pace?”

“You can’t because your school starts in ten minutes and you have a twenty-minute walk to get you there.” My mother raised her left eyebrow. “You needed that time.”

“I need to develop my own time management skills, not rely on you for them,” I retorted, shoving my feet into my shoes and grabbing my backpack off the floor. Banishing powder flew up in a cloud all around me as I slid my arms through the straps. I coughed. The powder tasted of cardamom.

“It’s not always going to be like this,” my mother said.

“Good,” I yelled back, and I dashed out the door.