." Oh, shut up and get in," the trucker grumbled. "And spare your poor father all those heart attacks when you just want to hitch a ride."The driver's...name was Eugene Manning. He was about thirty, had a picture of a pretty lady and a small kid in his dashboard, and he had his stereo set to a classic rock station."Keeps me from falling asleep. You running from the law?" Nah, not really. Just campus cops, and they've got nothing on me. Still, I need to put some distance between them and me.". “Oh, wow! It’s already almost eleven! I need to finish picking out what I’m going to wear!”She unwound her hug on her big brother and skipped her way out of the dining room toward her room. While she laughed down the hall, the door to the bathroom opened, and his mother’s sandals slapped their familiar drumbeat as she walked down the hall.“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll just clean up after you two brutes. Make a mess in the kitchen dirtying every pot and pan in the house just to make some bacon and. It was funny because Benji screamed the loudest of anyone. That night we all let Chip oversee grilling the steaks, since he is actually great at that and he usually insists. Of course, he grilled them to perfection. We ate and drank and then got very mellow, partly because we had eaten a large batch of marijuana brownies for dessert.Later that evening, we played charades and just hung out. When we sacked out that night there had to be about three or more couples to a room. We were all in. Tember sat at his desk and replayed the healer's story in his head and saw how truthful it had actually been. Keal's father had died in the war and his mother was indeed unable to keep her holdings. What then was the lie? What had made the Truth Seer react the way she had? The part about his mother returning to her family was true. Tember's own spies had seen her at her father's castle in Lynnshyre. Maybe it was whenever the healer referred to the prince as a 'she'. That did not make sense.