The start of Homecoming Saturday was brutal. I slept in but still felt like I had left a particle or two — brain matter, for sure — back at Alpenstock. Or would it be Asgard?

On rubbery legs, I limped over to my desk. It couldn’t be good that Frigg — queen of Asgard — was panicking. With the nearest pen and scrap of paper, I scribbled down the names she had called out. When I got to Bleik, Norn of Childbirth, my hand cramped and I had to set the pen down. What had she and Eyra given to Frigg? And what was with the lark calling my attention to the empty basket, which could only have been Idunn’s? Naïve Idunn, who had wanted to play games with the wicked Loki but ended up stripped of her magical apples and expelled from Asgard. Had she been there? If so, what was she trying to tell me? And one of the blonds had shape-shifted into a swan and followed the messenger. It made for an interesting convoy and for some wild speculations on my part, but nothing I could prove or act on. And I’d about had it with patience.

Downstairs, my mom had left a message stating that she and Stanley were at the hospital but would be home in time for pre-dance photos. With the house to myself for the entire day, I holed up in my room, writing notes regarding every piece of advice I’d received from Hulda, what I knew of the other worlds and their portals, what was bequeathed to me by my amma — her lullaby, for instance, and the cameo — and both vision quests and their potential meaning. Those, I felt, were the most important. More than once I thought about reaching out for help: Hulda, Ofelia, Jinky, Jack. Above all Jack. I was ready to. And ready to admit that I was unequal to this challenge, unworthy of my gifts, and responsible for so much that was amiss: Leira’s not-meant-for-this-world frailty, the presence of a merman among us, and the looming threat of Brigid’s domination scheme.

At the end of this exercise, I’d filled a good portion of a composition book, my hand was cramped, and I had come to only one conclusion. If the goddess Frigg was rallying her maidens against a threatening “evil,” I was in — we all were in — seriously deep trouble. Trouble it was up to me, and me alone, to fix.

In the late afternoon, I turned my attention to the dance. Plenty of girls, I knew, had spent the day at the salon getting pampered. I seriously gave my hair a long look before deciding I could not get away without washing it.

As I was putting an iron to the last of a few curls, my mom called out, “Knock, knock,” as she ascended the last few steps to my attic space.

After filling me in on Leira’s holding-stable condition, she fussed over my dress and said all the things a mother is supposed to. And, in spite of the overall funk I was in and entitled to, I did like the way my dress had turned out. What was once a silvery chain-mail jacket was now a scoop-necked bodice that shimmered like glass. And the gauzy, light putty-colored skirt had its own gossamer qualities.

“It’s gorgeous,” my mom said. She lifted one of the skirt’s layers and then stood back and watched it drop into place. “Your creations always amaze me. A talent from your father’s side of the family, I have to admit.”

I’d inherited enough from my mom’s side, with both the Stork and selkie lineage dropping from her branches of the family tree. Besides, there had never been any question where my style gene came from. My mom had no less than four pairs of Birkenstocks, while the clerks at the Coach store at Santa Monica Place knew my grandmother by name. No need to consult the Human Genome Project on this DNA sequence.

“Thank you. And it didn’t even cost that much.” I knew that feature of the dress would impress my number-crunching mom.

We heard the old-fashioned dong of the front doorbell.

“That must be Jack,” my mom said, springing to action. “Give it a minute or two and then make your entrance.”

So maybe I’d sold my mom short on the vogue gene; the ability to premeditate an entrance required some innate understanding of style.

I did give it a few minutes, but not many. I had a sudden onset of restless body syndrome that produced in me an irrepressible urge to get the evening under way —“over with” being the sentiment I couldn’t quite admit to at the time.

Jack held up his side of the requisite girl-enters-and-boy-goes-gummy equation. Another thing to add to the growing list of things for which I could count on him.

“You look beautiful,” he said, coloring. He was always a little different, more reserved, in front of the parental units.

My mom and Stanley did their best to get the obligatory photos quickly so that we could be on our way. My mom did want a few snapped in front of the house. We didn’t have too many of it in its still-pink capacity, and she thought it would be fun “in the future” to remember it that way. Personally, I thought it would be fun to have a future at all, but I didn’t bring that up while we were posing for posterity.