The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(77)

Indigo was heavy as I slid her down and arranged the blood-matted hair around her shoulders. I tried to scatter the rose petals on her body, but they were rain crinkled and stuck to my skin, so I wiped my palms down her dress. I folded her hands and closed her eyes, and when I drew back, the small tithing pouch that held the cut strands of my hair was nowhere to be found. The air smelled of Indigo, of apples and salt, and it clung to me.

When all was done, I watched the rain throw diamonds on the glass casket, and then I left. I stumbled on where to go without Indigo. I had wanted an end to us, but I had not wanted this to be the end.

At the gate of the Otherworld, I took off my starling key and locked it behind me. For a while, I stood there, my hand on the iron knob.

I did not understand. I could see, as if through a smoked pane of glass, the things I had yet to feel—the anger that she had left me when I was supposed to have done the leaving, the nauseous shame of my relief that she would never find the backpack and pair of sneakers I had hidden under the basement stairs, the ache that split my heart knowing we would never curl into each other as we read a book, me holding the spine, her turning the pages, a dream of hot chocolate and cakes taking shape at the back of our heads.

I stared through the iron bars at the oak tree, the turret, the sky. The Otherworld had watched and wept and done nothing.

“I thought you loved us,” I said, my voice breaking. “Or maybe I just don’t understand your love.”

A mournful wind shook the trees.

You will.



I didn’t know, yet, where I was going.

I was driven only to be where the Otherworld was not, and so I didn’t notice that the revels had finished. I was dimly aware of the absence of guests, the tipped-over tents. Occasionally, glass crunched beneath my feet. A song whose words I didn’t know played to a threadbare audience who were either too drunk to move or friends of the immobile and intoxicated.

“Indigo! Hey!”

My stomach pinched. I turned around and saw Alia. She had always been friendly to me, not like some of the other girls who were fake nice and then talked about me and Indigo behind our backs. Alia was moving to New York for film school and tonight she looked like she’d raided the school’s stage department. She wore horns in her hair, glitter on her dark arms. When she walked toward me, I kept expecting her to realize I wasn’t Indigo. But her eyes remained bright. “Just wanted to thank you for an amazing party! Kinda wish it hadn’t taken until the end of senior year to get an invite . . . um, where’s Azure?”

I blinked at her. “What?”

“Did she go home already?” asked Alia, rising on tiptoes to look behind me.

I stared at her, confused. Alia’s friends called her up ahead. Two of them had their arms around a boy with his head lolled back. Together, they made slow progress toward the exit.

“He doesn’t look so good,” said Alia, laughing a little. “Anyway, thanks again!”

She turned and fled back toward her friends. I watched her. I almost said: I am Azure. But my own name, even in thought, tasted like acid.



A faint buzzing settled into my skull as I entered the House of Dreams. The House was silent. Even the clocks had stopped. For the first time, the House was mute and distant. I could feel it holding itself apart from me and yet still watching, the way a cat inspects a stranger in its midst.

Wrongness slanted through me. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled as I went up the stairs. Alia’s gaze had been so certain.

As I climbed the stairs, I reached for all the moments Tati had told me she loved me. They lived in a secret chamber in my bones, and now, before her closed bedroom door, I felt them begin to dissolve. Each time she’d let her hand rest on my scalp, drape her arm around my shoulder, let me breathe the scorched scent of her skin. In a few moments, she would recognize me, and she would smile, and I would confess and watch that smile wither. I’d watch her mouth slouch open, hear her voice unhinge into an animal howl that would last until the police cars came and the flashlights caught on Indigo’s teeth and metal circles would clamp down on my wrists.

I opened the door. “Tati?”

She was sitting up in her bed, staring into nothingness. Her eyes were ruined, but her focus sharpened when I entered. She was lucid, and I might’ve fallen to my knees to have this one last conscious moment of her knowing me, loving me, persist a minute longer. Tati sniffed the air, a muscle in her cheek twitched in distaste.

“I can smell your sins on you, child,” she said. “What have you done?”

I went to her, knelt by her bed, and bowed my head. My voice trembled. “Tati, I need to tell you something. It happened when we went to the Otherworld.”

Tati shrank against her pillows, her fists balling the covers. She began to shake, and even though her hand lay inches from mine, I didn’t touch her. I didn’t want to see her revulsion. “There is a heart that has ceased to sing.”

“It was an accident, I swear—”

Tears rolled down Tati’s brown skin. She sobbed for almost a whole minute before clutching her blankets and nodding. “An accident,” she said hoarsely. “I believe you, child. I know you didn’t mean to. You couldn’t have known, could you? You never meant to do anything wrong.”

Tati turned her palm faceup. I couldn’t speak. I used to remember my mother on the sidewalks offering me her hand like that. Offering herself to be a living link, that which would mark me and say I belonged to someone. I grabbed Tati’s hand, pressed my face into it, and I wept. She sighed, her other hand stroking my head.