The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(16)

My mother’s arch look crystallized that moment for me. If I could’ve turned it into a pendant and worn it around my neck, I would have. In those days, I would’ve rendered all the glances my mother spared me into jewels and treasured them as such. I thought of the sticker in my clear plastic folder as I stuck out my hand to the girl.

“I’m brave enough,” I said, and took the knife.

I brought it to the heel of my palm and dug in the tip. The girl held out the bowl. My blood ribboned across the surface. Afterward, she put the bowl back under the hydrangea bush, and when she returned, she smiled.

“I’m Indigo.”



Inside that bowl of milk and sugar, our blood entwined. Maybe a blue petal from the hydrangea bush touched the milky surface while our spell cured in the moonlight, and that was all it took for the connection between us to be sealed. Even if I didn’t know what it was, I knew that something had happened, because the next day, I could feel Indigo waiting for me. I sensed her like my own pulse.

It was a Sunday, and my mother and Jupiter were at the movies, so I rode my bike to the House of Dreams, and there she was—sitting on her front steps with a book in her hand, two glasses of apple juice beside her. I was not only expected; I was wanted. The knowledge glowed inside me.

The day after that, Indigo and I walked to school hand in hand. At lunch we sat together, and later that afternoon, we looked for faeries by the stream next to the House. This became the shape of our days. When the bowls of milk and blood didn’t lure the faeries to us, we tried adding honey, and then maple syrup. I even stole one of my mother’s earrings to drop into the bowl, hoping the jewels would sweeten the bargain.

I spent every weekend at Indigo’s house, wearing gowns that didn’t fit, bracelets that slid off my wrists. At night, we poured salt along the windows and woke at midnight to eat sugar from a crystal bowl. I drank from her cup, and she fell asleep in my lap, and when we braided our hair together, we hung pendants in the woven strands.

Time melted our first autumn into glassy winter, and by spring, magic grudgingly revealed itself to us. Now we could see that the knotty root of a tree beside her house was the abandoned dining table of a garden gnome. The thin creek behind the school was the home of a rusalka with dappled hair like a sparrow’s breast.

Back then, I was always looking for the right currency to enter magical realms: a special coin, a rock with a perfect hole at its center, a butterfly wing glittering with dust. Things that could be traced with a fingertip.

Later, I would understand that the entrance to another world craves that which cannot be traced. It wants the mouthy weight of a nickname no longer uttered, the soft-furred throat of the dreams that pad quietly after you from one year to the next. To belong to the Otherworld, you must not belong to yourself.

I know this because it granted me entry. It was not a realm full of sunlight or a place where the moon could be dented with a spoon long enough to reach it. It was the space wrought between me and Indigo, a spectrum of blue where the world reknitted around us as if we were a walking wound burning a hole through its glamour.



A year had passed since I’d held out my hand for Indigo’s knife. We now had matching scars on our palms, pale little divots like the slap of twin fish tails. Today, sunlight lay thick on the trees. The air shimmered, panting from the heat.

Indigo and I sat at the dining-room table, halfheartedly piecing together a puzzle that she told me would become a door to the kingdom of mermaids if we finished it before midnight. I glanced at the clock. It was hardly noon. Midnight was far away.

Around us, the House hummed drowsily. Even after a year, I had not gotten used to this place. It dazzled me, putting on a show of radiance rippling through stained-glass windows. Every room seemed too precious to sit in, let alone steal its air. I loved the heavy velvet curtains, the cabinets full of crystals, the priceless vases and spoons laid out on the formal dining table, where one of the dozen staff members polished them until they shone like pieces of moonlight.

“The House likes you,” Indigo had said the first time I stepped inside.

“How do you know?” I asked, secretly pleased.

She pointed at the elaborately carved front door. “See? It shut all the way on the first try. It doesn’t do that unless it likes you enough to keep you.”

We were stuck inside that day, though not by choice. I yawned, glancing out the window to the backyard, the creek that fed into the river. We had tried swimming in the waters earlier. It was so cold, my toes cramped immediately. The staff must’ve known because halfway up the garden walk someone had left a pair of thick towels. I was still wrapped in mine.

“What are you girls doing inside on a day like this?”

I looked up to see Tati standing in the doorway of the kitchens. Sometimes Indigo would make a kitten-cry and wrap her arms around Tati and call her Tottlepop. Tati loved it when Indigo called her that. She would kiss Indigo on the head, and for a moment they’d look like mother and daughter.

I tried not to watch them when they were like this. My mother never held me. Maybe she wanted to, but whenever she came home from operating the ferry’s ticketing office, Jupiter was always there to gather her up and so there was nothing left for me.

Tati approached us, and Indigo straightened in her seat. When she got all stiff like that and called Tati “the guardian,” Tati’s face closed. But Tati couldn’t see Indigo’s expression at that moment.