“Do what?” Leisha said, bewildered.
Alice threw something at her: a hard-copy morning paper, on newsprint flimsier than the Camden systems used. The paper dropped open at Leisha’s feet. She stared at her own picture, three columns wide, with Kenzo Yagai. The headline said, “Yagai and the Future: Room For the Rest of Us? Y-Energy Inventor Confers With ‘Sleep-Free’ Daughter of Mega-Financier Roger Camden.”
Alice kicked the paper. “It was on TV last night too — on TV. I work hard not to look stuck-up or creepy, and you go and do this! Now Julie probably won’t even invite me to her slumber party next week!” She rushed up the broad curving stairs to her room.
Leisha looked down at the paper. She heard Kenzo Yagai’s voice in her head: The dogs bark but the caravan moves on. She looked at the empty stairs. Aloud she said, “Alice — your hair looks really pretty curled like that.”
FOUR
I WANT TO MEET the rest of them,” Leisha said. “Why have you kept them from me this long?”
“I haven’t kept them from you at all,” Camden said. “Not offering is not the same as denial. Why shouldn’t you be the one to do the asking? You’re the one who now wants it.”
Leisha looked at him. She was fifteen, in her last year at the Sauley School. “Why didn’t you offer?”
“Why should I?”
“I don’t know,” Leisha said. “But you gave me everything else.”
“Including the freedom to ask for what you want.”
Leisha looked for the contradiction, and found it. “Most things that you provided for my education I didn’t ask for, because I didn’t know enough to ask and you as the adult did. But you’ve never offered the opportunity for me to meet any of the other sleepless mutants—”
“Don’t use that word,” Camden said sharply.
“—so you must either think it was not essential to my education or else you had another motive for not wanting me to meet them.”