The classroom seemed defined for once, all its edges articulated—the chalkboard decorated in crimped, painted cardboard, the square arrangement of sixteen blue plastic chairs, the sun-warmed smell of chalk mixed with my classmates’ sweat andhair products. And underneath it all: the sour, unripened scent of youth.
Our teacher hadn’t arrived yet, leaving me with twelve pairs of eyes that had never beheld me so closely until now. I stepped back, as if to melt into the wall behind me, when one of them, a boy named Barrett with a gentle voice and a constantly red face, spoke:
“What’s it like inside there?”
The eleven other students shifted in their seats, blinking away only for a moment before resuming their staring.
“What?”
“The House,” he said, licking his lips. “You’re always inside the Casteñada house.”
“Is it actually haunted?” asked a girl. It took me a moment to find her name: Anna. She had lank blond hair and small, hooded eyes that flicked over my outfit: a pair of red velvet pants and a lacy black sweater cinched at the wrists with a high neck. A slow, vicious heat climbed my skin. The clothes belonged to Indigo, and Anna knew it. She smirked.
“Are we all really supposed to wear masks?” asked Emmanuel. His skin was the color of black marble, and he had the hands of a grown man at fifteen. “Like Halloween masks?”
My heart stammered. I didn’t like their focus. I didn’t like feeling pinned by their eyes. I thought of Jupiter across a room, some poison in his gaze paralyzing my muscles, and I could not find air.
“Are you guys related?” asked another.
I opened my mouth, then balked. How could I explain that we were two halves of the same soul? But I didn’t have to. Indigo stood in the doorway. She looked at the girl who had asked, and a corner of her mouth tilted up.
“Something like that,” said Indigo in her low, honeyed voice.
I exhaled, she caught my hand, and we transformed. I could not tell you where that magic came from, whether it was some unseen element insinuating itself into our atoms or if I served as mirror and moon to Indigo’s incandescence. All I knew was that together we were lustrous.
The classroom fell silent. I felt the tiniest thrill to see their lips part, their eyes unfocus. But then the teacher stepped inside, and the spell we’d cast upon them broke.
In the days leading up to Indigo’s party, I thought the House would be happy. Usually, it loved decorations. It always appeared grander, more elegant with the presence of flowers and wreaths, garlands and lights. Plus, it was constantly fussed over in preparation. Mrs.Revand arrived early and left late, directing the maids to scrub and polish every inch of the interior. I watched from the staircase as she ordered slabs of ice sent to the basement, snapped at boys wheeling ropes of fairy lights to string them across the grounds, signed for deliveries of carts of orchids and violets.
But the House was sullen. A sourness crept into the wood, and no matter how many candles were lit, the staff wrinkled their noses whenever they stepped past the threshold. Carpets newly flattened bunched, rolling ankles at every hour of the day. Curtains unraveled from their hooks, painting shadows over the walls and turning the rooms hunched and small.
“It’ll be over soon,” I said to the House, patting its topmost stair. “It’s only one party.”
It did not seem convinced.
The week of the event, Indigo and I hid in the Otherworld for as long as we could, emerging only to eat and sleep and attendschool. Tati was to blame, but still I felt sorry for her. Tati needed our thoughts on decorations, wanted our measurements taken for dresses. She made us taste cake samples and Indigo write thank-you cards in advance. She wanted us—as I overheard her saying one evening when I was supposed to be in the bath—“to take this seriously.”
“I hate her,” Indigo said, her words dropping like stones. The party was two days away, and the House was still shrugging off any attempt at festivity. Today it had loosened a whole string of lights from two of its pillars.
“You don’t mean that,” I said, thinking of Tati’s hopeful smile and her bruised mood from each of Indigo’s refusals.
A couple of days earlier Tati had shown me a sketch of a mask she was commissioning just for me. It was made of blue satin and sprinkled with small blue rhinestones. Light and playful. I touched the drawing, imagining the satin’s watery smoothness against my skin, and smiled up at her.
“I’m so glad you like it, sweetheart,” she said.
She opened her arms to me, and I hugged her tight. I could tell from the way she held me that she was imagining Indigo, soft and sweet. I tried not to mind. I kept all that warmth for myself and daydreamed about the jeweled mask.
I loved that mask in a way that made my teeth ache from the guilt. I wished I could be more like Indigo. I wished I didn’t notice every gleaming stone set into the bathroom mosaics, all the polished silver laid out on the mahogany table, each marble surface anointed with golden bowls of rare fruits and exquisite truffles. It’s true we shared one soul, but I was the one who had to return to Jupiter’s house, who had to venture between light and dark, and whose eyes needed time to adjust.
The evening before the event, what had once been frosty between Indigo and Tati iced over and snapped. Since the tables were covered in decorations, we had to eat dinner in the formal dining room, the Camera Secretum. It was Indigo’s favorite place, and my least favorite, in the House. The translation of its name was the Room of Secrets, though it only ever gave me nightmares.
Lined with the skulls of animals on one side and the heads of taxidermied beasts on the other, it was where Indigo’s grandfather displayed his hunting trophies. Indigo said it was the best place for dreaming. While I read in the library, Indigo hid in the Room of Secrets, sketching pictures of what we would look like when our true, fae spirit made itself known. She never let me see her work.
“Until I’m finished, it’s a secret even from me,” she would say.
Which was probably why she loved the Camera Secretum so much in the first place. Tati once told us that Indigo’s grandfather had insisted on conducting every business meeting within the walls of that room.
“Only the dead know how to keep secrets,” Tati told us with a dramatic wink.
