I was bouncing around on Santa’s lap, reading off my list of demands. I was willing to compromise on the razor wire and machine-gun nests, but I insisted on at least one sniper on Sally’s roof and a troop of ninjas guarding the route to school.

“Focus, Virginia.”

“Sorry, Santa, it’s the espresso. I am buzzed like you wouldn’t believe right now, and I am not letting that witch get her hands on my friend Kit again, who probably only wants her daddy back for Christmas but deserves a lot more, and…”

He wrapped his huge, black-gloved hands around my head and pulled my face up to his. Damn, Santa, buy a girl a drink first!

<Focus, Virginia Vesta White>

Owwwwwwww. He took his hands away and I looked into the Old Man’s eyes from way too close. They twinkled. He’s always liked that trick.

I scrambled down off his lap like it was on fire and snapped to attention. Then I remembered that I was technically retired, and then I remembered a recent promise I’d made to myself and kicked him in the shin as hard as I could.

“Ow, you little… well, perhaps I deserved that. But just the once. Don’t be childish.”

I thought about kicking him again, but decided not to push my luck. “If you didn’t want me acting childish, you shouldn’t have turned me into a child. Sir.”

“You’re a child because your Retirement Gift was a life. A complete life. I skipped the diapers and the baby food because you’d have gone mad before you learned to walk, but…”

I interrupted, because, hey, I could interrupt now. “I saw you palm that card! Being a baby would only suck if I remembered being me, and that’s not supposed to happen. Not only do I know too much, I’ve already said too much, to someone capable of understanding it. You set this up. You set us up. What’s your game?”

“Life, yours and theirs. A true reincarnation wouldn’t be a reward, because there’d be no you to deserve it, but turning you loose on the universe as you were would have been tossing a live grenade into a fireworks factory.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment. Meanwhile, Sally’s people aren’t the first to break out and start exploring other worlds, but they might be the smartest, and they’re definitely the nicest. What do you think happens to mortals who stick their noses into Our business?”

Chills down your spine were something else I didn’t know was literally a thing until just now. “They’ll be unmade. You’ll send someone like me to go back and change their history, and they’ll never break out. Sally won’t… there might not even be a Sally.”

He actually grinned at me. “Don’t worry, her existence is surprisingly resilient. This isn’t the first time her people have done this, it’s just the first time they’ve had a friend on the inside. I’ve hidden their latest efforts from the other Powers, and that’s all you need to know.”

Oh, this was way above my former job description. “So what do I do? How do I help them? And how does Kit’s wicked stepmother fit in?”

“In order, nothing, you just did, and she doesn’t. There’s no job, no mission, no quest. You are here to be here, and your life and its problems are yours. This was a courtesy call, unofficial and off the books, and we won’t speak again.”

“Wait, that’s not…”

I woke with the first light of dawn, oddly refreshed and thoroughly tangled up with blankets and Kit. Yes, Virginia, there was a Santa Claus, and he was a bit of a dick. No quest? I had a princess to rescue and a dragon to slay, armed with nothing but my wits and a witch who’d never ridden a man into battle.

No, I had one more thing: three centuries of experience deceiving, intimidating, outwitting, undermining, cat-fighting, back-stabbing, and fucking. Okay, that last one wasn’t going to be useful, but it still counted. Maybe I could write a book after Princess Kit was saved.

The point is, I wasn’t just a little girl, I was the meanest little Mean Girl this world had ever seen, and while first grade was terrifying, bitch-fights were right up my alley.

“Okay, accepting for the moment that I am the child in this relationship, which is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, our immediate problem is this Wicked Stepmother. As the responsible adult in the room, what have you got for protection?”

I could tell I’d be seeing a lot of her surprised face from now on. “You can’t feel the wards on the house? After the way you just walked through that binding spell?”

I shook my head with a dismissive snort, annoyed that it probably looked really cute. “Never had the patience for magic; I’m just good at breaking things. Honestly, I used to get worse from my ‘sisters’ just for cutting in line at breakfast. Unfortunately, my best spell-breaking technique only works on men, and would be illegal at twice my current age.”

Her eyes widened, and I decided that maybe now wasn’t the best time to talk about my experience. “Anyway, wards. We have some, and you seem pretty confident. Good. What about school? Do we need to stay home and hide Kit here for a while?”

She must have caught the eagerness in my voice. “Oh, no, young lady, you are not getting out of school that easily. I have a masking charm that will make you ‘less interesting’ to anyone hostile, and I can get another one for Kit from…”

“…the lovely Miss Bobo, right? I could tell you two were close, but I figured you were just closeted lesbians, not a pair of witches from a less-racist universe.”

Her furious blushing and stammered denial threatened to derail the conversation again, so I did something else I’m not good at: I apologized. “Sorry, that wasn’t appropriate or relevant; this is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with another woman, and I’m really not good at it.”

“Accepted, and we’re going to have to work on your social skills, if only to protect Kit from things she’s definitely not ready to hear. And I understand the soap at your school tastes terrible.”

I paled at the memory. “Right, so for now we’re safe here and at school, but we can’t keep Kit and we can’t hand her over to the witch, so we need to fix something. We can ask her about other family on the walk to school tomorrow.”

“I’ll drive; it’s safer. And I’ll contact Jem to bring her up to speed and get that charm.” She opened her purse and pulled out a small, intricately-carved amulet. Damn, I’d missed a secret pocket. “Meanwhile, if you can sleep after all that espresso, I’d suggest you get to bed. Your second day of school isn’t going to be any easier than the first.”

“Right.” As an old trooper, I could fall asleep anywhere, anytime, and with any number of bed-partners, and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, free of dreams and regrets.

Young troopers, on the other hand, apparently had dreams. And in mine, I wasn’t alone.

I helped mop the floor, not out of guilt for making Sally drop the coffee or an urge to help my new “mom” clean, but simple self-interest. I needed another espresso before I was up to telling the truth. Any truth.

Sally delivered a cup and a question. “So, you work for God?”

I sipped my hot black confidence-builder before replying. “Gods, plural, and most of them less pleasant than the one who brought us together. No names you’d be familiar with, although it’s a safe bet they’ve played the role in your world as well. The thing is, I shouldn’t even be able to say that much, whether I’m retired or still on active duty, which means that something really scr- odd is going on.”

Sally smiled, just a little too sweetly. “So, what exactly did you do for these gods? Run a lemonade stand?”

I shut her down with a look as black as my coffee. “I’m sure you have tales of divine messengers, muses, tricksters, assassins, and temptresses; I specialized in that last role, and I was the best, until I fu- made a mistake. One we are not going to discuss tonight.”

Sally opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, so I skipped ahead. “No, I was not a cute little six-year-old girl with glasses. I was the woman who walked into a party alone and walked out with your husband. And if you ever got him back, he’d been thoroughly inspired.”

“Huh; that sounds like our space program. Sixteen divorces on the team and somehow we still landed on the moon ten years early. Nobody ever knew what happened to the secretary all the engineers were fighting over; she just disappeared one day.”

Oops, I had been to her world; I knew my work. Fortunately, she didn’t. “Right, things like that. The Powers don’t necessarily agree on means and ends, and we usually have no idea whether we’re making things better or worse, but I didn’t really care. I was designed to turn boys into men and men into lapdogs, and I loved my work.”

A glance down at my current body was accompanied by another bitter swallow. “I’m a good ten years away from my usual methods, and I’ve never needed a fallback plan before. Which means that I have no idea how to deal with an evil mind-controlling bitch-witch that has her hooks in my best friend.”

A smile twitched into existence over the rim of Sally’s coffee cup. “You mean first friend, don’t you? I think you’ve been lonely for a very long time.”

For the record, I do not blubber. The sudden urge to throw myself into Sally’s arms and dissolve into a puddle of sniffles and tears was just this body’s reaction to stress, and I successfully fought it down. “Stop that; this is grown-up talk.”

“Yes, it is, and I think it’s more relevant than you realize. I didn’t know I’d be raising an older woman, but you definitely need a mother in your life. As does Kit, which helps explain how quickly you’ve bonded with her.”

The urge to blubber was rising again, like three-day-old sushi. I really needed to get this body under control so I could solve this problem and… then what, exactly? Get my old job back and leave? Get my old body back and retire to a beach villa with hot and cold running boy-toys? Without Kit, or Sally?

Shit.

The boss really got me good. I’d been here less than 24 hours, and I wanted to stay.

In my prior career, the few children I’d had non-trivial encounters with had been deceptive, manipulative, and deeply suspicious of women like me. With good reason, since I usually ran into them while stealing their daddies. The unfortunate result was that I simply wasn’t prepared for Kit’s brand of total honesty. When she said wicked stepmother, she meant Wicked Stepmother.

Ninety seconds after Aunt Sally said a cheerful hello, we were back in the car, fleeing at high speed. I’m not really sure how we made it to the house. I mean, obviously she drove, but I was too busy wrangling a hysterical Kit to figure out how she’d managed it after being whammied to the eyeballs. You see, the Wicked Stepmother had turned out to be an actual wicked witch.

I got the first clue when I tried to get Kit out of the car. Used to be I could wrestle any man in the universe and end up on top, but getting a hexed and howling little girl into a come-along was not in my professional toolbox. Sally just opened the door, laid a hand on her forehead, and she was out like a light. Interesting.

Once safely behind locked doors, we put Kit to bed in my room, then went into the kitchen. Sally waved me over to the table, and I watched silently as she went through a calming ritual of ridiculously-precise coffee-making. I understood the need; the ground wasn’t quite shifting under my feet, but the story was, as if the Power pulling the strings wasn’t quite sure which way it should go.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one with suspicions. She brought over two double espressos, sliding one in front of me without a word about stunting my growth. She sipped, I gulped, so I got to ask first. “How did you do it, Sally?”

“Me? That witch hit us with a binding that stuffed my head with cotton and convinced me to walk right into that house. If you hadn’t kicked her so hard…”

“Maybe I’m just stubborn. And since when does squeaky-clean Sally Sanders believe in black magic? That’s not the sort of thing adoption agencies approve of when handing out little girls. You did acquire me legally, didn’t you? I wasn’t here at the time, so I wouldn’t know.”

Oops. I really shouldn’t have said that. Bye-bye cover story, hello questions I didn’t have good answers for.

I couldn’t tell which hit her harder, the caffeine or my words. “What do you mean you weren’t there? We talked for hours at the orphanage, and it was like we were made for each other! The old man said you’d been through a tough time and nobody wanted you, but he didn’t think you were a bad kid; you just needed a loving home, and I was determined to give it to you. What kind of game are you playing?”

She looked at me like I was some kind of changeling, which was basically correct. I didn’t have to ask what her “old man” looked like. I knew what he was, and if I ever got within range, he was getting a hard-shoed little-girl kick for that nobody-wanted-you crack.

Oh, well, in for an inch, in for the shaft. “Not me, sister, I just met you this morning. You got played by a Power, but if it’s any consolation, he’s one of the nicer ones, so if he shoved us together it was for our mutual benefit. But you’re dodging my question. What’s your game?”

I’d rather be asking questions than answering them, so I pushed. “You’re too good to be true, Sally. You’re young, sweet, gorgeous, a terrific cook, motherly-but-not-smotherly, and you’ve got a house, a car, and half the men in town sniffing your tail. You’re a catch, honey. How are you single in 1956? What are you up to, playing house with Little Orphan Annie and hiding an industrial-strength sex toy under the bed? Oh yeah, I found it.”

She squirmed a bit at that. “That’s not… okay, maybe sometimes… I… It’s complicated. You’re too young to understand.”

I laughed so hard I fell out of my chair. Dragging myself back upright, I shoved the coffee cup across the table and said, “make me another double, sweetheart, this is gonna be a long night.”

As she turned toward the stove, inspiration struck, and I hit her from behind. Bitch, remember? “Let me guess, you’re a time traveler.”

Good thing linoleum was soft, because that meant the coffee cup didn’t break when she dropped it and whipped her head around to look at me. “And don’t try to spare me the complications, I’m a lot older than you look.”

Her eyes went wide. “Who… what are you?”

“Impatient. Now hurry up with the java and the explanations; I hear little girls get cranky if they stay up past their bedtimes.”

Sally got busy with the giant steam engine (hmmm, were lattes a thing yet?) and started to spill. “Do you know what parallel worlds are?”

“Sideways time travel, basic multiverse stuff. So, you and your mega-vibe are from another Earth, huh? Similar enough that you can pass for a local, but different enough that you weren’t expecting to run into a witch. And you’ve been here long enough to have convincing paperwork and a fan club.”

Her hands were shaking, but my double espresso was still coming. Y’know, I was actually kind of glad things had gone tits-up tonight, or it might have been months before I found out Sally’s coffee was as good as her cooking.

“I’m a sociologist, and, yes, a witch, but not like that… creature. We don’t do mind-control. It’s not just illegal, it’s wrong, evil. I’ve been here for nearly two years now, helping document the differences between worlds. The prevailing theory is that it’s simple probability divergence, where worlds split off every time non-trivial decisions are made but collapse back into a smaller number as the changes average out over time, leaving behind little inconsistencies that get dismissed as coincidence or déjà vu.”

Huh; not bad for a bunch of mortals, and her academic tone increased my estimate of her intelligence quite a bit. No flies on Aunt Sally. “And it sounds like you’re part of a group that disagrees?”

“Yes. The half-dozen worlds we’ve explored all show signs of deliberate tampering to set them on different paths. Including our own, which could cause some serious social problems if we went public. The truly frightening part is that some of it seems to be retroactive, with real time-travellers tweaking the knobs.”

Damn, these people were good. It couldn’t be an accident that the Old Man had hooked us up. Was this life really my Graduation Present, or was I his latest pawn in a game he was running on the other Powers? I mean, this was some serious shit: the kids were breaking out of the playground, and he was in on it.

“Well, looks like this is your lucky night, Sally. I’m one of those ‘tweakers’. Or at least I used to be.”

Dammit, I really should have waited to say that until after she’d delivered my new coffee.

Mission accomplished and new mysteries unlocked, we parted from the delightful company of Miss Jemima “Jem” Bobo, loaded up the trunk with our loot, and planned our next move.

Sally’s thoughts were completely compatible with mine. “Why don’t you come home with us for supper, Kit? You could even spend the night.”

“Oh, I’d love to, Miss Sanders, but I think I should go straight home now. She… my stepmother will be quite concerned if I’m out after dark.” Sally didn’t need to feel the sudden squeeze of Kit’s hand to notice her distress.

“Well, then, let’s take you home and introduce ourselves, to assure your mother that you’ve been in good hands, and see how she feels about that sleepover!” Clever Sally cheerfully swept us into the back seat and asked Kit where she lived.

“By Oak and Ash.”

Sally and I both twitched at that, although it must have been for different reasons. Maybe it wasn’t as nice a neighborhood as ours.

If someone had accused me of being self-centered and egotistical, I’d have congratulated them on their ability to recognize basic laws of the universe. Mockingly, of course. I’d naturally assumed that the Powers had assigned me a friend, and it had never crossed my mind that Kit had her own reasons to seek me out, or her own agency, for that matter.

The mix of reluctance and fear on her face made me oddly homesick. For there, I mean, which wasn’t a very nice place, although admittedly some of that was just me. In any case, I could tell that there was at least one Mean Girl waiting at home for Kit, and I was itching for a fight. Not out of any mortal concern for a friend, of course; I was pretty sure I hadn’t gone native yet. No, this clearly fell under “hands off my stuff” rules. 99% sure. 95%-ish.

I whispered my question, though I was sure Sally was listening in. “Why don’t you want to go home, Kit? What are you afraid of?”

Her hand trembled in mine, and she looked down and away. “My wicked stepmother.”

Sally introduced her to us as Jemima Bobo, Jem for short. I was pretty sure she wasn’t in the pancake business, and I was certainly in no position to make fun of anyone’s name, but I was surprised to find that Kit didn’t react, either.

We found an out-of-the-way table where the two grown-ups could chat without scaring the horses, and Sally sent us off to fetch drinks. My partner-in-waitressing was happy for the excuse to leave, which puzzled me. “What’s up with you, Kit? You’re acting like you’ve seen a dark-but-extremely-friendly ghost.”

“It’s just, I’ve never actually seen a… colored person up close before, much less spoken to one. How did you do it so naturally?”

“Wow, if you were any whiter, you’d be Canadian. Relax, they’re just people, no better or worse than any other sort. Get to know this one, and you’ll never think about it again.”

She looked at me like I was handing down the wisdom of the ages, which was definitely a new experience for me. This day was turning out to be full of them.

By the time we returned with drinks for four, Kit had her shit together enough to hand Jem her coffee with a smile and a minimum of awkwardness. Good girl; I decided to keep her.

I didn’t know what they’d been up to without us, but while Sally and Jem were chatting politely like casual acquaintances, their body language screamed Very Close Friends. Had I guessed wrong about the reason Sally wasn’t interested in all the men sniffing after her? Was her weird secret sex toy a bicycle built for two?

I considered the logistics of cookies-and-cream adult sleepovers, and how Sally might try to explain it away to her sweet innocent ward, and the ironic hilarity sent hot cocoa up my nose. Napkins and hankies were quickly deployed to clean me up, adding further to my new-experience collection. I’d never been fussed over before. Fought over, of course, usually arranged by me, but this was… different. I kind of liked it.

Still, note to self: do not mix chocolate and sex. No, wait, do mix them, just don’t do one while imagining someone doing the other. Pretty sure that one’s commutative.