A Trip to the Grocery Store

Something touched Aru as she was flung through the Otherworld. Claws scraping lightly against her. Aru didn’t feel safe. She had the prickly-neck sensation that someone was watching her. She looked down and saw something that nearly froze her blood:

The end coil of a thick black tail that was studded with stars.

It slithered over her feet. All the while she murmured, “Don’t look, don’t see, there’s no such thing as me.”

The whole thing lasted maybe a minute. All the while, Aru heard the Sleeper’s voice in her head. Just like your mother. Slippery and deceitful.

How could the Sleeper possibly have known her mom? Did that mean Mini’s mom was a hero, too? Not for the first (or last) time, Aru wondered why all this had been kept from her. How come Mini got to know and she didn’t?

Light broke over her. Aru looked around to see that she was standing in another parking lot. Mini and Boo were there, too. She couldn’t tell what city they were in, but it was a little warmer than the last place. Here, autumn gilded the world. The sky was bright, and the clouds seemed closer, as if they were weighed down by unspent rain.

“Why do we always end up in parking lots?” asked Mini.

“Better than in the middle of a road,” said Boo.

They were standing in front of a Costco. Bright red grocery carts were lined up next to bales of hay. The trees burned scarlet and saffron, so vivid they looked as if someone had covered each leaf with gold foil.

Aru’s palm itched. She glanced at her hand. The number eight had disappeared, replaced by a new, shining mark:

“What the heck does that mean?” asked Aru. “Please tell me the universe feels bad for us, and it’s Sanskrit for Treat yourself to a demonless day and not the number three, which it kinda looks like.”

Mini examined Aru’s hand. “It’s not the number three.”

“Yay!”

“It’s the number six.”

“WHAT?”

“Saat. Six,” read Mini. She frowned and turned to Boo. “But yesterday, our maps said we had eight days left! What happened?”

Boo shook out his wings. “Traveling through the Otherworld requires a cost. Time does not always adhere to mortal standards.”

“But that means…that means I’ve been awake for seventy-two hours,” squeaked Mini. “I should be dead! Am I dead?”

Aru pinched her.

“Ow!”

“Nope. Alive and kickin’.”

Mini rubbed her arm and glared.

“You’re Pandavas,” said Boo. “You need less sleep and food than mortals. But occasionally you do need something to keep your strength up. We’ll get some snacks inside.”

“Inside the Costco?” asked Aru.

Not that she had a problem with this. On the contrary, an industrial-size box of Oreos was just what she needed.

“That’s not an ordinary Costco,” said Boo proudly. “For Otherworld folks, it becomes a different store depending on who you are and what you need. For us, it will be the Night Bazaar. Inside, we’ll find the Seasons and ask them to design you some weaponry. After that, we’ll look for the second key.”

Aru dearly hoped the second key would be located next to an industrial-size box of Oreos. But all thoughts of Oreos quickly vanished with Mini’s next words.

“I’ll go anywhere as long as we don’t run into the Sleeper again. Did you see him when we left Valmiki?” she asked. “He was right next to me! I could’ve sworn he wanted something. He even touched me!” She shuddered. “At least I think it was him? It was just a giant snake tail. But it felt like him?”

“Did the Sleeper say anything to you?” asked Aru.

Mini frowned. “No. How ’bout to you?”

Aru stilled. “Earlier. The last time we tried to get to…wherever this is. He spoke in my mind and compared me to my mom. Called me deceitful like her. It was so weird.”

Boo looked as if he was trying to make himself smaller on top of Mini’s head.

“Do you know anything about this, Boo?” asked Aru.

“Me? No. Not a thing!” he squawked. “Come along!”

“If he figured out where we were last time, and he can find us when we’re traveling between places, he can probably do it again, even if we have the mantra to cover our tracks,” said Mini. “What do we do if the Sleeper catches up to us?”

“Run faster than the other person,” said Boo. And with that, he flew off toward the entrance to Costco.

Aru was about to make a joke to Mini, but she had turned on her heel and was jogging into the jungle of parked cars and abandoned shopping carts.

“Hey! Mini! There you are!” shouted Aru.

Aru had circled Costco Parking Lot Section A twice before she saw her. Mini was curled up on the hood of a minivan that boasted MY CHILD IS AN HONORS STUDENT.

When Aru walked up to her, Mini didn’t turn her head. She just kept tracing the Sanskrit symbol on her left palm.

“You’re going to leave me behind, aren’t you?” asked Mini softly.

“What? Why do you think that?”

“I’m not as good as you are at…at this….I wasn’t even supposed to be going on any quests or anything! The first time my mom ever took me to the Otherworld, I threw up. The threshold guardians didn’t even let me past.”

“That’s better than me,” said Aru. “My mom never even took me to the Otherworld. At least your mom told you about all this stuff.”

“She had to,” sniffed Mini. “She’s a panchakanya.”

“What’s that?” asked Aru. She could break down what the words meant, but it didn’t help her understand.

Panch. Five.

Kanya. Woman.

“It’s the sisterhood Mom’s always talking about. Five women who are reincarnations of legendary queens from the ancient stories. These days their job is to raise and protect us.”

“So my mom is part of this…sisterhood?” asked Aru.

“I guess,” said Mini a little rudely.

Aru knew why Mini’s tone had changed. They had started off talking about Mini’s feelings, and now they were back to talking about Aru. But Aru couldn’t help herself. There was so much she didn’t know…and so much she wanted to know.

“Do you know who the other women are? Do they talk on the phone? Have you met the other Pandavas? Are they all girls our age?”

Mini shook her head. “Sorry.” Then her eyes narrowed. “Why? Do you wish you had a different Pandava with you, instead of me?”

“I’m not saying that….”

“You’re not not saying that,” said Mini. “But it’s fine. I’m used to it. Second choice for everything. I’m always getting left behind.”

“Is this about what Boo said? That the slowest one of us is going to get caught by the Sleeper?”

She nodded, sniffling.

“Boo was just being Boo. He’s a pigeon.”

As if being a pigeon explained a lot of nasty behavior. But in Boo’s case, the observation rang true.

“I just…don’t want to be left behind.” Her eyes welled with tears. “It happens to me all the time, and I hate it.”

“Did you get chased by a monster with someone else?”

Mini laughed, but because she was crying, it sounded like a wet hiccup. Aru scooted away a little. The last thing she wanted on her was snot. She was already covered in monster ashes.

“No,” said Mini when she had finished snort-laugh-hiccupping. “You don’t know what it’s like. You’re probably popular at school. I bet you’re good at everything….You’ve never even been to the Otherworld before and you fought Brahmasura better than me. I bet at school you don’t get called the Tattletale. And you’ve probably never shown up at a birthday party to find no one is there because they put the wrong date on your invitation….People wouldn’t avoid you.”

Aru tried not to wince. She had to admit that being a tattletale was the worst thing you could be at school. No one would tell you anything.

“Have you ever done anything you regretted?” asked Mini.

Aru didn’t meet her eyes. She could have told the truth about a lot of things. That she wasn’t popular. That she did know how it felt to be on the outside. That her best talent wasn’t defeating monsters…it was pretending.

For a moment, Aru even wanted to tell her the truth about what happened with the lamp. How it hadn’t been an accident at all, but something she’d done on purpose just to impress people who probably weren’t worth impressing anyway, but she couldn’t.

It felt nice to be considered more than what she was for a change.

So she asked a different question. “If you could go back in time and un-tattletale on someone…would you?”

Mini looked up. “No. Dennis Connor was about to cut Matilda’s hair.”

“So? Why stick your nose into it?”

That kind of thing happened at school all the time. Aru just let it be. It wasn’t her business. Or her fight.

Mini sighed. “Matilda had to leave school last year because she got sick, and when she got chemo, she went bald. Her hair has only just started to grow back. If Dennis had cut it, she would’ve been really sad.”

“See?” said Aru. “You did a good thing. Plus, Dennis has two first names. He was asking to get in trouble.”

Mini laughed.

“So you’re not a tattletale…you’re just honorable. Like a knight! Knights always rescue people.”

Mini raised her palm. The saat symbol still looked like a backward three. “What about when knights aren’t strong enough?”

“Even when they fail, they’re still knights,” said Aru. “Now come on. Boo said this was a special kind of Otherworldly Costco, and I want to see if their toilet paper floats. Maybe they have special Otherworld-Costco things like bulk bags of wishes or dragon teeth or something. We can pick some up as soon as we get that second key. What is it, again? A bite of adulthood?”

This seemed to perk up Mini. She nodded.

“Still have the first key?” asked Aru.

Mini patted her backpack. “Right here, still wrapped in your Kleenex.”

“Handkerchief.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Let’s go, Sir Mini.”

Like at every Costco Aru had been to, lots of customers were walking in and out. But here the people changed as soon as they crossed the threshold. For example, one woman pushing a cart toward the entrance looked like any woman you’d see on the street. Sensible shoes. Sensible hair. Sensible outfit.

The minute she stepped over the mat that said WELCOME TO COSTCO, she was suddenly covered in golden feathers. Like a giant bird! And her feathers were edged in flames. Little embers sparked and burned, falling onto the pavement and sputtering like a blown-out candle.

Another family was getting their receipt checked at the door before exiting. On the other side of the mat, they looked like humans from the waist up, but from the waist down they were snakes. The moment they crossed the mat, they were all human.

The snake boy winked at Mini.

She walked into a telephone pole.

“You are the Daughter of Death,” hissed Aru. “You don’t walk into a telephone pole because of a boy.”

“I didn’t! I tripped. It wasn’t because…you know. It’s not because he did the thing with his mouth where it went up and his teeth showed.”

“You mean when he smiled?”

“Yeah,” said Mini, rubbing furiously at her bright red cheeks. “That.”

Boo glared at them from the top of a grocery cart. “What took you so long? I almost started aging.”

“You don’t age?” asked Aru.

“If you do, you can use the sprig of youth,” offered Mini. “Not sure how it works, though. Do we just hit you with it?”

Boo flew to Aru’s shoulder and then poked his head out from underneath her hair. “You shall do no such thing, fiendish girl!”

“I was only offering to help,” said Mini, crossing her arms.

“Well, stop offering before you get one of us killed,” said Boo. “Now, before you go into the Costco, remember that it won’t become the Night Bazaar until you stop looking so hard.”

Aru blinked. “What does that mean?”

“It means go to the frozen food aisle, and start counting all the breakfast items. That should be enough to make your mind detach itself from reality and drift off. Or you could do algebra. Or read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. That’s my go-to.”

“That sounds dangerous…” started Mini, but with one glare from Aru, she took a deep breath. “But I am the Daughter of Death, and so that sounds…like something I should like?”

Aru grinned.

The moment they walked inside, Aru was hit with that musty, industrial smell of supermarket. Why was everything made of concrete here? And it was so cold….

Even if it was the middle of summer and so blazing hot outside that the road was melting, supermarkets were always freezing. Aru wished she’d brought a sweatshirt with her.

On her shoulder, Boo had made a strange nest for himself out of her hair and was now peering out of the hair-turned-shawl like an angry grandmother. “Not that way! That leads to the electronics. Too many bright, shiny things.”

There were tons of people walking around them. Moms and dads and kids with those weird sneakers that had wheels on the bottom. There were all kinds of people, too—white, black, Hispanic, Asian, tall, short, fat, skinny. Not all appeared human, either. Some of them were feathered or furred, fanged or feline.

Aru’s eyes widened. “Are they all…like us?”

“Dense as bricks?” offered Boo.

“No, like—”

“Scrawny heroes?” Boo guessed again.

“Ugh!”

“I don’t know what an ugh is, but probably not,” said Boo smugly. “But if you are asking whether they all have a connection to an Otherworld…Yes.”

“Like ours?”

“Like theirs,” said Boo. “Whatever their version of the Otherworld happens to be. But let’s not get into the question of metaphysics. Many things can coexist. Several gods can live in one universe. It’s like fingers on a hand. They’re all different, but still part of a hand.”

They passed a display of potted trees. Apple trees with glistening fruit the color of pearls. Pear trees with fruit that looked like hammered gold. There was even a giant Christmas tree, sparkling with the flames of a hundred candles nestled on its branches.

Aru watched as a redheaded girl reached for the Christmas tree. The girl giggled and, right in front of Aru, stepped into the tree. The tree gave a contented little shake. But no sooner had she settled into the tree than a tall woman with long strawberry blond hair started knocking on the trunk.

“Come out of there, now!” she said. She had an accent. Irish? “I swear on the Dagda, I’ll—”

The woman yanked on one of the pine branches, pulling it like an ear, and hoisted the girl out of the tree. The girl looked very unhappy.

“Every. Time,” said the woman, who appeared to be the girl’s mother. “This is why you’re not allowed in parks. Maeve, my goodness, when your father learns that you…”

But Aru couldn’t hear the rest of the scolding, because the two of them turned and hurried away down an aisle marked LAUNDRY SUPPLIES.

“All these…Otherworldly people…come here? To a Costco?” asked Mini.

Boo winked. “Who says it looks like a Costco to them? Who says they are even in the United States? The world has many faces, children. It’s only showing you one at a time. Now hurry. Time will move even faster here, and you still need armor and the second key.”

“And a snack?” added Aru hopefully.

“Yes, fine, one snack.”