“Why don’t we go inside to talk?” Gemma suggested.
“Yes, of course,” I said, stepping up to unlock the front door. “Come on up.” I led the way up to our apartment and ushered Nita inside.
I could see her trying to keep the dismay off her face. “Wow, it’s, well, um, cozy,” she managed.
“It’s a lot bigger than where we used to live,” Marcia said.
Nita’s eyebrows raised. “This is bigger?”
I patted her on the shoulder. “I told you, it’s not nearly as glamorous as on TV. This is the way real people live.”
“At least we all have actual bedrooms now,” Marcia said, sitting on the sofa. “I used to sleep on a sofa bed in the living room.”
Nita nodded. “The hotel rooms here are half the size as in our motel, and they charge about six times as much for them. If we could move our motel here, we’d make a fortune.”
Gemma sat on the sofa and gestured for Nita to join her. I dragged a dining chair over to join the group. “What did your parents say?” I asked as I sat.
Nita shrugged. “I have no idea. I left them a note. My brother took me to the bus depot, and he gave me a job reference. I’m lucky that the woman who hired me is also Indian, so she knew all about escaping the family business.”
My stomach dropped. “You moved to New York without telling your parents?”
“They’d never have let me come. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?”
“That’s always worked for me,” Gemma said with a laugh.
Nita grinned at Gemma and crossed her legs. “I figure they’ll come around when I remind them that I’ve now significantly increased my chances of meeting a nice Indian boy I could marry. You don’t know any Indian men, do you? I hear you’re quite the matchmaker.”
“I’ll see what I can find for you,” Gemma promised.
“Have you found a place to stay?” Marcia asked.
I was pretty sure where Marcia was going, and I knew she thought she was doing me a favor, but I wished I could think of a way to signal her to shut up.
“I haven’t started looking,” Nita answered.
“Now that we have the bigger place, you could stay here,” Marcia offered. “We’d have to do some rearranging, but you and Katie could take one room and I’d move in with Gemma. We did say we might take on a fourth when we moved here.”
“Sounds great!” Gemma said.
They all looked at me, and I forced a smile. “Yeah!” I said. Under other circumstances, I’d have loved to have Nita move in. When we were in high school, we’d talked about going off to some big city together. But it had been so nice not having to be careful what I said around my roommates, and I hated to go back to lying and keeping secrets. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about magic, and I didn’t want Nita to find out the way Gemma and Marcia had, by being put in danger by the magical bad guys.
“You’ll barely notice I’m around,” Nita promised. “I’ll get all the worst shifts while I’m new.”
“You’ll need to get a bed,” Marcia said. “In the meantime, the sofa folds out, and you can sleep there. I’ll talk to the landlord about getting you on the lease, and we’ll recalculate the rent and the chores list for everyone.”
“I’m so excited!” Nita squealed. “It’ll be just like Sex and the City, except they never all lived together. Maybe we’re more like Friends, except we don’t have guys across the hall—or do we?” She bounced to her feet. “I’ll go get my luggage at the hotel. I don’t have a lot of stuff. I’ll have my family mail things to me once I’m settled—that is, if they don’t disown me. But I figure they’ll be a lot happier knowing I’m living with Katie.”
Marcia went to the cookie jar where we kept a set of spare keys. “You’ll need these. The one with the blue dot opens the outside door, and the other one opens the apartment door.”
“Okay, got it. Back in a bit!” She hurried out before we could offer to help, her squeal of joy echoing up the stairwell.
Once she was gone, I allowed myself a long, low groan.
“What, you didn’t want her living with us?” Marcia asked.
“I do,” I said. “It’s just that she doesn’t know about the M-word, and there’s all this crazy stuff going on. I don’t want her getting into any danger.”
Gemma cocked her head to one side. “Would you ever have told us if we hadn’t been caught up in it?”