Look, but Not Really

“Your family must’ve gotten frozen, too, if you came here to find me,” said the girl. Her voice wobbled a bit, but she forced herself to stand straighter. “Any chance you brought cash just in case? I couldn’t steal my mom’s wallet. It felt wrong.” She sneezed and her eyes widened. “Do you think I might be allergic to magic? Is that a thing—?”

“Stop,” groaned Boo. “Are you a Pandava?”

The girl nodded.

“Answer me!” said Boo.

Aru toed him with her shoe. “She nodded yes….”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re facedown in the grass?”

Boo had collapsed on the front lawn outside of what Aru could only assume was the girl’s house. It was so boring here. Not at all the kind of place where she thought another child of the gods would be. The grass was perfectly suburban. Neat and not so green that it would draw too much attention to itself.

With great effort, Boo rolled over onto his back. Sighing, Aru scooped him up and held him out to the girl. “This is our, um…”

“Enchanted assistant, sidekick, comic relief, et cetera, et cetera,” said Boo. He continued to lie across her palms. “Sometimes the heroes in epics are assisted by eagle kings and clever monkey princes. But it’s been quite some time. The world is rusty at being dazzling, and so…here I am.”

“Heroes got eagle kings and we got a—” started the other girl.

Aru coughed loudly. “We got a being of former renown and illustriousness.”

Illustriousness was a word she’d once heard in a film where people kept addressing a grand empress. Aru assumed that it meant illustrated, because the empress’s face was certainly drawn on (no one had eyebrows like that). But important people didn’t seem to take this as an insult. Even Boo gathered himself on her hands, shook out his feathers, and nodded.

The girl shot Aru an are-you-sure? look. Aru shrugged. Maybe it had been a lie to make the bird rally his energy. Maybe it was the truth. Talking this way came easily to Aru. She had done it all her life: looked at something not so great and told herself all the things that made it great.

“I’m Aru.”

The other girl blinked. “Mini.”

“What?”

“I’m Mini,” the girl repeated.

“I mean, I guess you are short,” said Aru. “But—”

“As in that’s my name.”

“Oh.”

“So…we’re siblings? But not like related-related. Like soul-related.”

Mini seemed way calmer than Aru had been when she’d learned she was a Pandava.

“Something like that?” answered Aru.

“Oh.”

There were so many things Aru wanted to ask. Mini’s parents must have told her about her true identity, because she was—in her own way—prepared. She knew what was happening. She knew that Aru had to be some kind of relation to her because she, too, was a Pandava.

But the situation didn’t sit quite right. It felt as uncomfortable as walking in shoes a size too big.

If Aru was being 100 percent honest with herself (she was the only person she was totally honest with), she felt a sharp pang of disappointment. But what had she expected? Often the amount of amazement she wanted to feel never quite matched reality.

Last year, when she’d heard about the middle school homecoming dance, she had imagined something from a Bollywood movie. Lights glittering. A wind—out of nowhere—making her hair fly, and everyone breaking into a choreographed song and dance at the exact same time. When Aru had walked in, no wind had blown her hair. But someone did sneeze in her face. All the sodas were lukewarm, and all the food was cold. Forget about choreographed dancing (aside from the Cha Cha Slide, which shouldn’t count). The kids who were dancing—to bleeped-out pop hits—were weirdly…enthusiastic. A chaperone had to keep yelling, “Leave enough room between you for Jesus!” By the end of the night it was: “LEAVE ROOM FOR THE HOLY TRINITY!” And to crown it all, the air conditioner drew its last breath halfway through the dance. By the end of it, Aru had felt like she was wading through a steam of post-recess middle school body odor. Which was, to put it bluntly, the worst.

Meeting Mini was better than a middle school dance. But Aru still felt cheated.

She had wanted a sisterly smile that said I’ve known you all my life. Instead, she was faced with an odd stranger and a pigeon whose sanity was slowly unraveling. Maybe it was supposed to be this way, like part of a trial. She was a hero (kinda?), so maybe she just had to be patient and prove that she was worthy of her Pandava role. Only then would the magic happen.

And so Aru fixed Mini with what she hoped was her friendliest, most blinding smile.

Mini took a step back, clutching her EpiPen tighter.

She didn’t look like a reincarnated Pandava any more than Aru did. But Mini was very different from Aru. There was an upswept tilt to her eyes. Her skin was light gold, like watered-down honey. Not like Aru’s chestnut brown. It made sense, though. India was a very big country with about a billion people in it. From state to state, the people were different. They didn’t even speak the same languages.

Boo lifted off Aru’s hands and hovered in front of the girls’ faces. “You’re Mini, she’s Aru. I’m exasperated. Salutations done? Okay. Off to the Otherworld now.”

“Exasperated, how do we get there?” asked Mini.

Boo blinked. “Let’s hope you inherited some talents, since irony evidently eluded you.”

“I have an iron deficiency. Does that count?” offered Mini.

Before Boo could face-plant once more, Aru caught him.

“Don’t we have somewhere to be? The Sleeper is off somewhere freezing people, and if we don’t stop him by the ninth day, all of them…” Aru gulped. It hadn’t seemed so real until she said it out loud. “They’ll stay that way.”

“To the Otherworld!” cried Boo.

It could’ve sounded really epic. Like Batman hollering, To the Batmobile! But it was barely intelligible, because Boo was squawking from inside Aru’s cupped hands. She placed him on a nearby tree.

“I don’t remember how to get there,” said Mini. “I went once, but I got carsick.”

Envy shot through Aru. “You’ve been to the Otherworld?”

Mini nodded. “My parents took my brother when he turned thirteen. I had to go, too, because they couldn’t find a babysitter. I think all the parents of Pandavas are supposed to take them to the Otherworld once they show signs of being demigods. Didn’t yours?”

Didn’t yours?

Aru hated that question and every variation of it. She’d heard it all the time growing up.

My mom packed me a sandwich for the field trip. Didn’t yours?

My parents always come to my choir practice. Don’t yours?

Sorry, I can’t stay long after school. My mom is picking me up. Isn’t yours?

No. Hers didn’t, doesn’t, isn’t.

Aru’s expression must have been answer enough. Mini’s face softened.

“I’m sure she meant to and just never got around to it. It’s okay.”

Aru looked at Mini: the flattened mouth and pressed-together eyebrows. Mini pitied her. The realization felt like a mosquito bite. Tiny and needling.

Just enough to irritate.

But it also made Aru wonder. If Mini’s mom had told Mini everything, then did that mean their moms knew each other? Did they talk? If they did, how come Aru didn’t know?

Perched on a myrtle tree, Boo began to preen himself. “Right. So, here’s how to get there: You—”

“We’re not driving?” asked Mini.

Aru frowned. She didn’t know much about magic, but she didn’t think the Otherworld should be within driving distance.

Boo shook his head. “Too dangerous. The Sleeper is looking for you.”

Goose bumps prickled across Aru’s arms. “Why?” she asked. “I thought he just wants to go wake up the Lord of Destruction. What does he want with us?”

“He’ll want your weapons,” said Boo. “The Lord of Destruction is surrounded by a celestial sphere that can only be shattered by an immortal device like those weapons.”

Aru was getting a headache. “Wait, so, we need weapons to protect our weapons from becoming…weapons.”

“But we don’t have any weapons!” said Mini. “Or at least I don’t.” She turned pale. “Am I supposed to have a weapon? Do you have one? Is it too late for me to get one, too? Is there a specific one, like only having number two pencils for standardized tests, or—”

“SILENCE!” shouted Boo. “It is fine that you are unarmed. As for where you shall be retrieving these powerful weapons, I shall leave those instructions to the Council of Guardians. They will be waiting for us in the Otherworld.”

He flew down in front of them. Then he pecked at the ground while walking in a small circle. “The key to getting to the Otherworld is reaching. You must grab hold of something invisible. Imagine it’s a string of hope. All you have to do is find it and tug. Simple.”

“A string of hope?” said Aru. “That’s impossible….”

“If it wasn’t, then everyone would go!” retorted Boo.

Mini pushed her glasses a little higher up her nose, and then reached in front of her. Gingerly, like the air might bite her. Nothing happened.

“It helps to look sideways,” said Boo. “That’s usually where you find most entrances to the Otherworld. You have to look and not look. You have to believe and not believe. It’s an in-between thing.”

Aru tried. She glanced sideways, feeling utterly ridiculous. But then, incredibly, she saw something that looked like a thread of light hanging down in the middle of the empty street. The world was still. All the beautiful houses were at once close and also a millennium away. Aru thought that if she were to reach out, her fingers would meet a thin sheet of glass.

“Once you’ve got ahold of the in-between, close your eyes.”

Mini obeyed, and Aru followed her example. She reached out, not expecting anything, but wanting desperately.

Her fingers found nothing at first, and then…she felt it. Like a current of warmth.

It reminded her of summer. Those all-too-rare days when her mother took her to the lake. Sometimes there would be cold spots in the water. And sometimes there were swirling eddies of warmth, a bit of sun-drenched water ribboning around her.

Or sometimes it was just because someone had peed next to her. That was the worst.

This felt like that (the warmth, not the pee).

She grabbed the current, and something firm nosed into her hand—

A doorknob.

Not quite a doorknob. More like a bit of magic trying its best approximation of a doorknob. It was cold and metallic feeling, but it squirmed and tried to wrest itself from her hand. An indignant squeak followed when Aru gripped the knob a little tighter. All of her thoughts poured into a single command: Let me in.

The doorknob made a harrumph sound.

She pulled.

And where there had once been a bit of road, a shriveled crape myrtle tree, and a slightly wonky-shaped mailbox…now there was a panel of light. Boo’s wings rustled behind her.

The three of them walked through that entrance of light. (Well, Boo didn’t walk, because he had decided to perch on Aru’s head.) Her eyes adjusted slowly. All she could see at first was a cavernous ceiling arching above her. They were in a gigantic cave studded with stars. Tiny lights flew past them.

“Bees!” shrieked Mini.

Aru blinked. They weren’t lights, or bees, but moths. Moths with wings of flame. Every time one darted past her, she heard a whisper of a laugh. The walls were cloaked in shadow. There were no doors leading in or out. They were in a bubble.

Aru examined the strange floor beneath her: off-white and bumpy. Each tile was a different length. In fact, the more she looked at it, the more it looked like…

“Bones!” said a voice in front of them. “Do you like them? Took me ages to collect. They’re really quite comfy to walk on, but mind the teeth. Some of those are incisors.”

Aru stiffened. Mini clawed into her backpack and drew out an inhaler.

The little moths of light began to gather around a shape in the dark. One by one, they fluttered their wings and stayed still, as if they were buttoning up whoever stood in the shadows. The shape grew more distinct.

Now it resembled a crocodile that had rolled around in Christmas-tree lights. Only this crocodile was bright blue and the size of a three-story house. The crocodile was also grinning, either happily or—as Aru’s growing panic was beginning to point out—hungrily.