“There’s definitely a bit of a glow there,” she said happily. “Of course, the books said this might happen. A healthy glow—that’s all it is, Giles. I’m sure it’ll fade eventually.”
But it didn’t. It got deeper and deeper, and started spreading down the rest of her body over her clothing, down her neck and arms, across her chest, down towards her legs.
“Hmmm. It’s a bit more powerful than I thought. But you know, Giles, I really feel younger. Do I look younger?”
In fact, she was looking younger.
She was also looking shorter.
She was also looking smaller! Her clothes seemed a little too big—sagging at the shoulders, bagging around the hips and ankles.
“Um, Aunt Lillian,” said Giles. “I think you’re shrinking.”
She turned back to the mirror.
“You know, I think you’re right.” Her voice was different now, too—slightly higher. Her face was changing as well—smoothing out, rounding out. Her hair was sprouting and curling. And all the time she was getting shorter and shorter. You could see it happening now, right before your eyes!
“It’s wonderful!” Aunt Lillian cried. “I mean, look at me. I look twenty years younger…well, maybe twenty-two…or twenty-three…or twenty-four years younger…”
“Aunt Lillian?” Giles said.
Suddenly she stopped glowing, and standing before him was a girl who couldn’t have been any older than him.
“Well, I think it worked,” said the girl. “We’ve got a winner, Giles!”
At that moment, Giles heard the front door open.
“Hello!” Mrs Barnes called out.
Chapter 4
A Kid Again
Mrs Barnes walked into the kitchen and stopped dead in her tracks, staring at the colossal mess.
“What on earth have you been doing?” she demanded.
“Just a little experiment, Liz,” said Lillian.
Both Aunt Lillian and Giles were standing very still, watching Mrs Barnes, waiting for her reaction. But she was too busy taking in the dirty pots and pans, the seeping mess on the counters, the gooey footprints across the tiles.
“Well, you can start cleaning it up right now, both of you. I knew this would happen, Lillian, with all this hocus pocus you…you were…”
Mrs Barnes’s gaze now settled on her younger sister, and the oversized clothes hanging from her small body. A frown of confusion flickered across her brow.
“Lillian?” she said. “What happened to your clothes?”
Aunt Lillian looked puzzled. “My clothes?”
“They’re huge!” said Mrs Barnes. “What are you doing in clothes so…big, so…”
Mrs Barnes took a quick step back, her eyes wide. “Lillian, you’re…small!”
“I’m young,” she said happily.
“About eleven, I figure,” said Giles.
Mrs Barnes narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “All right, what’s going on here? What have you done?”
“It’s the super-goo,” sighed Giles.
“My wrinkle cream,” Aunt Lillian explained. “It worked!”
“A little too well,” Giles added.
“It turned you into an eleven-year-old again?” Mrs Barnes said in a dazed voice. “All those herbs and spices and crackpot recipes?”
“Wonderful, isn’t it?”
“No, it is not wonderful!” roared Mrs Barnes. “I spent my whole childhood taking care of you, little sister, and I am not prepared to do it again! Now, I want you to just…grow up, this minute!”
“That might be a bit of a problem.”
“Why?”
“Well, first of all, I think the wrinkle cream might be permanent. And second of all, I don’t want to grow up.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want to? You’re eleven years old! You’re telling me you want to stay this way?”
“Yes. How many people get the chance to have their youth again, Liz? I’m not going to miss out on a chance like this!”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs Barnes. “Not on your life. You are not staying young, Lillian. Absolutely not.”
Aunt Lillian just smiled stubbornly. “Oh, yes, I am.”
“She can’t stay here!” Mrs Barnes said. “I will not have her in this house!”
“Elizabeth, we can’t just turn her out!” said Mr Barnes.
“She’s just a kid,” said Giles.
“Oh, no, she’s not just a kid,” Giles’s mother said severely. “She’s a fully grown woman. She just looks like a kid—and I won’t have her in the house!”
The three of them sat around the dining-room table while Aunt Lillian was upstairs in the spare bedroom, blasting the radio and singing along.
“Liz,” said Mr Barnes, “if anyone else saw her, they’d think she was eleven. She couldn’t get a job. She couldn’t even drive her own car now. If we kicked her out, the police would come and arrest us! Try explaining herbal wrinkle cream to them!”
“Why can’t she just go back to her own place?”
“It’s still being sprayed for spirits,” Giles told her.
Mrs Barnes tried to control her seething temper. “Of course,” she said through clenched teeth. “I was forgetting those pesky spirits of hers.”
“She’ll have to stay here for the time being,” said Mr Barnes. “We’ll just have to make do. Maybe this wrinkle cream will wear off. Maybe she’ll wake up tomorrow and be back to normal.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” said Mrs Barnes gloomily. “If I know Lillian, she’s managed to make things as bad as humanly possible. It’s permanent, Matt. Mark my words.”
“Maybe there’s another super-goo recipe that can turn her back to normal,” suggested Giles.
“No more super-goo!” said Mrs Barnes firmly. “Tomorrow morning, I’m taking her to the doctor to get this straightened out!”
“What seems to be the trouble?” Dr Plint asked when Mrs Barnes walked into his office with Giles and Aunt Lillian.
He was sitting behind his desk, reading his mail, and he didn’t even look up as they came in and sat down. Giles didn’t like Dr Plint. He never seemed to be paying much attention. Whenever Giles went to see him, he was always reading a magazine, or talking on the phone, or staring out the window, lost in thought. Occasionally he would get up from behind his desk, glance down Giles’s throat, poke his stomach, and then tell him it would probably get better on its own.
Mrs Barnes cleared her throat. “Well, my sister, Lillian, here—” she pointed at the young girl at her side—“she’s about twenty-five years younger than she was yesterday.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” said Dr Plint distractedly, still reading his mail. “I’m sure it’ll clear up on its own.”
“Dr Plint,” said Mrs Barnes firmly. “You don’t seem to understand what I’m telling you. Yesterday she was a woman of thirty-six. Today, she is eleven.”
With a sigh, Dr Plint put down his mail and stood up. He looked at Aunt Lillian and frowned irritably.
“This is your sister?” he asked Mrs Barnes.
“Yes.”
“You say she’s actually thirty-six years old.”
“That’s correct.”
“I whipped up a potion,” said Aunt Lillian helpfully. “A herbal wrinkle cream, actually.”
Dr Plint didn’t seem very impressed by this information.
“A wrinkle cream,” he muttered. “I see. Well, we’d better take a look.”
He glanced down Aunt Lillian’s throat, poked her in the stomach and then sat back down behind his desk.
“Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Can’t you…make her go back to normal.”
“I don’t want to go back to normal, Elizabeth!” said Aunt Lillian. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
Mrs Barnes ignored her sister. “It’s not normal,” she told the doctor. “This is not normal. She shouldn’t look like this! You’ve got to give her som
ething that will make her look her age again. I’ve got a picture of how she used to look.”
She rooted around in her purse for a photo, but Dr Plint wasn’t interested. Just by looking at the faint smirk on his face, Giles could tell the doctor thought this was all some big joke—or that they were all crazy.
“My advice to you,” said Dr Plint to Aunt Lillian, “is to enjoy your second youth. Few of us are given such a miraculous gift. Make the most of it. Good-bye.”
Chapter 5
The War Council
At first, Giles liked it that Aunt Lillian was his own age. It was just like having a sister. Now that he’d decided to erase Tina and Kevin from his life, it was great to have a new friend right at home. After school, they’d watch TV or do a crossword puzzle together, or they’d work on one of Giles’s model airplanes, or she’d teach Giles about crystals and horoscopes. Aunt Lillian wasn’t very good at helping him with his homework, but he didn’t mind that. He’d much rather listen to her endless supply of ghost stories.
And he didn’t even miss the Quarks! Frankly, he was glad to be free of the genius business. There was always something going on—some big new case to solve, some mysterious problem, some new invention of Tina’s to test. He was tired of Tina’s infuriating know-it-all attitude, and Kevin’s kooky ideas. It was all too much trouble! No, he was glad to be finished with them for good.
As for his orange hair, he’d tried several times now to dye it back to its normal colour, but it had never worked. Whenever he hurried from the shower to the mirror to look, it was still bright, flaming orange. There was nothing to do but let it grow out. At least Aunt Lillian didn’t laugh at it, like everyone at school did!
Mrs Barnes, needless to say, did not share Giles’s enthusiasm for the new Aunt Lillian.
“What about your job?” she would ask her sister pointedly. “Don’t you want to get back to work?”
“Not really.”
“And your house! You’ll want to get back to your own house!”
“I was thinking of renting it out, actually.”
“What about Roger, your boyfriend?” she asked desperately. “Don’t you miss him? He won’t be very happy about this!”
“I never liked him all that much. No, Liz, I’m glad to leave all that behind me. I’m happy with things just as they are.”
But over the next few days, Giles started to understand his mother’s feelings a bit better. For one thing, Aunt Lillian was messy. When she’d first arrived as a grown-up, she had at least kept the mess mostly in the guest room, but now that she was eleven, she let it spread—down the hallway into the bathroom, down the main stairs, into the living room and kitchen. Her things—clothes and hairbrushes and shoes and CDs and astrology books—were everywhere.
And there was something unsettling about Aunt Lillian’s looking young, but not really being young. Like the way she kept on smoking (more than ever, it seemed), puffing away as she read a magazine. Or the way she’d gulp down a vodka martini before dinner. Or the way she’d stay up till the wee hours of the morning, watching old movies on television. And she didn’t even have to go to school, which Giles thought was just a little unfair.
Even though their house was pretty big, Aunt Lillian seemed to fill it up completely. She liked taking hour-long baths—sometimes twice a day. At breakfast, she would finish off the last of Giles’s favourite cereal. After school she insisted on watching the TV shows she liked best. She sprawled on Mr Barnes’s favourite chair and used Mrs Barnes’s hair dryer and curling iron without telling her. She wasn’t, Giles realized, very good at sharing.
Then one day, Mrs Barnes snapped.
Giles had just come home with his mom after a dentist appointment. Walking into the front hallway, Giles thought the house must be on fire.
The living room was so packed with smoke he could barely see Aunt Lillian. As usual, she was slouched in front of the television, smoking furiously, with a dozen ashtrays overflowing onto the carpet, and junk-food bags and pop cans strewn around her.
“Oh, hi, you guys,” she said, with a lazy wave.
It was then that Giles realized the room wasn’t just filled with cigarette smoke. There was another smell, too.
“Lillian, did you remember to take out the roast?” Mrs Barnes said in alarm.
“Oh, the roast. Whoops,” said Lillian, without much concern.
Mrs Barnes raced into the kitchen.
“Lillian!” she roared. “It’s completely incinerated! I told you to take it out at four!”
Lillian yawned and clicked off the television. “Well, I felt like a veggie burger anyway,” she said, standing and putting on her coat. “Can I get anyone anything while I’m out? No? Well, see you later.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Mrs Barnes.
Giles looked up at his mother, startled. He’d never heard her sound like this before—or at least, not since he was eight years old and had been using the sofa as a trampoline (even though she’d told him not to) and had bounced right off and landed on the side table, smashing her favourite vase. It was that kind of voice, a voice that made you stop everything and freeze.
It had the same effect on Aunt Lillian.
“Take your coat off,” said Mrs Barnes in this calm, steely voice. “Now…go to your room this instant!”
“Lillian,” said Mrs Barnes sternly, “we’ve decided that since you’re determined to stay young, we’ll have to treat you like you are young.”
“What do you mean by that?” said Aunt Lillian, taking a suspicious puff on her cigarette.
After making Aunt Lillian stay in her room for an hour, Mrs Barnes had summoned her downstairs to the dining room. Giles and his father were there, too, seated solemnly around the table. They’d just held a war council, the three of them, and they now had a plan.
“To begin with,” Mrs Barnes told her sister, “bedtime at eight—after all, you’ll have to start getting up early for school.”
“I don’t need to go to school,” Aunt Lillian said. “I’ve been to school! I’ve learned everything!”
“There’s always new things to learn, Lillian,” said Mr Barnes. “Why, just the other day, Giles taught me about glaciers and French verbs.”
“You’ll be eating Brussels sprouts for dinner at least three times a week,” Mrs Barnes continued.
“I hate Brussels sprouts! I’ve always hated them. You know that, Liz.”
“Good nutrition,” said Mrs Barnes. “Of course, you’re only allowed one hour of TV on weeknights, and you’ll be starting piano lessons right away.”
“That’s outrageous! I don’t want to take piano lessons!”
“And one last thing. You’ll have to quit smoking.” She reached across the table and plucked the cigarette from Lillian’s mouth, grinding it out in the ashtray with a smile. “It’s very bad for the young.”
Chapter 6
Snapped
“Ten out of twenty-five!” moaned Aunt Lillian. “I can’t believe it!”
Giles shook his head. Miss Laframboise was handing back yesterday’s French verb quiz, and Aunt Lillian had got her usual failing score. It was no wonder, really; she never did her homework. She’d been going to school for almost a week now, and Giles could see it was nearly killing her. Every morning she practically had to be dragged out of bed. She walked to school like a zombie. And it wasn’t just French verbs she was failing; she couldn’t seem to get a handle on any of the subjects. What’s more, she’d already been caught twice having a smoke in the girls’ washroom in between classes.
“You should try studying a bit more,” Giles whispered to her.
“I’m not cut out for this, Giles. The pressure of school is too much for me.”
“Lillian, shush!” said Miss Laframboise.
“Sorry, ma’am,” muttered Aunt Lillian.
Giles couldn’t help smiling. Gradually, their plan had been working. School, homework, the eight o’clock curfew, and Brussels sprouts for dinner were
all beginning to take their toll on Aunt Lillian. So were the piano lessons. For half an hour every evening, Aunt Lillian drooped listlessly over the piano, Mrs Barnes supervising, and slapped away at the keys. Frankly, Giles wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand it, either. Every other note Aunt Lillian played was wrong; so to make up for it, she would bang away at the keys louder and louder, until Mr Barnes would suggest she’d done quite enough for one day, thank you very much.
Giles glanced across the class at Kevin and Tina. For the past week, they’d all been pretending to ignore each other. But the fact was, Giles was actually starting to miss them. He didn’t know why, but he was. Still, he certainly wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence. They hadn’t even apologized for the orange hair glitch yet!
“I’m beginning to crack, Giles,” Aunt Lillian hissed to him a few minutes later. “Maybe this kid thing isn’t so great after all.”
Giles just nodded, copying down the verbs Miss Laframboise was writing on the board.
“I mean, I’m dying for a cigarette, and I haven’t had a drink in ages and—”
“Lillian!” exclaimed the French teacher. “I’ve heard quite enough out of you for one day! Come back after school for a detention!”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Lillian feebly.
But then something seemed to snap inside her. She jumped to her feet. “A detention?” she exclaimed. “You’ve got to be kidding! I’m thirty-six years old! You can’t give me a detention!”
Everyone in the class just stared at her in amazement.
Aunt Lillian turned to Giles. “That’s it! I can’t take it anymore! I want to smoke and stay up late and watch as much TV as I like and eat junk food and drive my car, and never, ever do homework again!”
And with that she stormed out of the classroom.
When Giles got home from school, he found Aunt Lillian upstairs with all her strange recipe books spread out around her.
“What are you doing?” he asked.