“What were they like? Indigo and... Azure?”
Mrs.Revand sighed and folded her pale hands across her belly.
“Beautiful,” she said. “They were walking heartbreak. But mischievous, sweet, always running around outside in their other world. Always playing with their hair, trying out new things... I remember one day Azure just clean chopped it off with no warning! MissHippolyta was so sad. Shelovedlong hair, you know.”
“Why did Azure leave town?” I asked.
Mrs.Revand shook her head. “I have no idea. One day they were two halves of the same soul. The next... separate. I think the last time I saw Azure was at the girls’ graduation party.” Mrs.Revand licked her lips. “Friendships are like that sometimes. Especially with young girls.”
I looked more closely at the housekeeper. Her hair was gray, frizzed. Her face softened with jowls. Her lips wore the creases ofyears. Her eyes, though, were a surprisingly bright shade of blue. I couldn’t picture a time when she was beautiful, but maybe she had been. Perhaps she had also been half of someone’s soul once.
“You and MissHippolyta never tried to get in touch with her?”
“God no. It was her choice to leave, and it’s her choice to reach out,” said Mrs.Revand. She looked beyond me to the dusty carpet, the iron staircase. “Besides, some girls aren’t meant to be found. Memories make their own houses, even more magical than this one, and that’s where girls from the past live.” She touched the wooden handrail. “In those houses, dust can’t touch them. Time never colors their hair silver. Wrinkles never crease their face. They can stay untouched and perfect forever. And that’s how I like it.” She smiled, and I wondered how many times she had thought what she’d just spoken aloud. “In my memories, Indigo and Azure are always happy. Always dancing.”
Chapter Eleven
Azure
You can picture it, can’t you? The moment when time caught up to us, the slant of light in which the familiar turned strange. I studied our faces side by side and felt alackof myself as the first touch of frost crept into our eternal summer.
I never used to notice time passing, but my indifference was one-sided. Time watched us spit our baby teeth into our palms, pull sequined dresses from Tati’s closets, and pretend we were monsters. Time followed us to school every morning and afternoon. It sat on our shoulders while we dreamt of faeries, heard us sigh when we were lulled into sleep, traced where our knees touched across Indigo’s green bed, smelled our bones lengthening in the afternoons, and watched how as the years blurred and softened, so did we.
At fourteen, Indigo was already beautiful in a way that made people uncomfortable. It wasn’t her body. At least, not yet. It was in the sureness of her gaze, the certainty with which she held her chin.
Sometimes when we went swimming in the creek behind her house, Indigo would snap off her bathing suit, lift her arms, andraise her hips off the ground. “Look. I’m starting to change, and I’ve got hair now. See?”
I could only nod. She’d begun to smell different, too, a tang of salt to her skin. Even her sweat smelled fruited, like she was ripening beneath the moonlight. Meanwhile, I was thoroughly invisible. I had asked for this power the moment I tithed my hair, but I hadn’t imagined how methodically it would cloak me. My mother had curled her lip in disgust when she saw my shorn head. Jupiter’s gaze had gone unfocused with disinterest, and if I held my power tightly, I could escape his notice for days at a time. That invisibility coated my skin, my body, my bones.
I tried not to stare at Indigo during those swims. I couldn’t help it though. I wanted the water to lap at new, secret parts of me too. I wanted to emerge from it smelling like something other than pond scrim. But I was as scentless and hairless as a rock.
Every time we dried ourselves and lay down in the grass, I watched for new gaps between us. I waited for her fingers to flinch away from mine, for her eyes to drift sideways while I spoke, for a yawn to be stifled, but all was the same.
Until the day before fall break.
I woke beside Indigo that Friday. Her eyes were bright and her hair—recently cut to match my own collarbone-grazing length—still damp and spreading puddles on my pillow.
“Time to go to school,” she said.
“But you’re not dressed?”
“I’m not going,” said Indigo. “Butyouare.”
She tugged me upright, and I tasted panic on my tongue. “Go to school without you?”
Indigo beamed, nodding. I stared at her. We’d never willingly been apart. I didn’t understand. My clothes bruised as I shrugged them on.
I studied Indigo out the corner of my eye, trying to figure out what I might have done wrong. Had I said something in my sleep? How had I offended? Why was she banishing me?
Indigo finger-combed her damp hair, feet tucked beneath her on the bed. She had changed from her set of night-sky pajamas to a thin shift that turned translucent in the autumn light. The trees outside her bedroom window burned scarlet. I felt that color sear through me as if it were an inferno consuming all that I had known and come to love.
“Go on, Azure,” she said, smiling and pointing her chin to the door.
I walked to the door.
“Wait!” said Indigo, her voice warm and playful. She sprang from the bed, ran to me, and kissed my cheek. “Okay now go. Go, go, go.”
I could barely put my feet on those stairs. Was that her goodbye? A fond kiss? I touched the walls of the House. It was cool and silent, too early for it to be awake and thus as mute as any ordinary structure. The staff bustled around me, and I tried not to cry. What if I never returned?
