I stumbled away, my head ringing. Outside Hippolyta’s room, I was met with Indigo’s dark silhouette, her smell of apples and honey. A nurse with light skin and pale-green scrubs was speaking to her in hushed tones:
“—not make it through the night, so perhaps you and your husband should stay here to say your goodbyes?” The nurse’s smile was efficiently pitiful. “I’ll leave you two to talk.”
When I looked at Indigo, I could still hear her lilting voice.
Oh, Catskins. Why aren’t you dead yet?
And yet my Indigo possessed an inexorable pull, a trick of turning one solid and visible with a single glance. I’ve never pretended at bravery, and so I let all that was weak within me wish that I’d never heard her say those words. That we could return to who we had been two days ago. If I had any magic, I would’ve used it for that very purpose.
But I was a mere mortal.
At first, Indigo smiled at the sight of me. Then her gaze dropped to my dusty pants, my shoes. Her eyes flicked to my hair. She looked as if she’d been set into glass. When she smiled, I saw that some of her lipstick had caught on her canines, turning them bloodstained.
“Where have you been wandering, my darling?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Azure
You know that feeling of a loose tooth? The way your tongue seeks out the carrion tang of your own mouth, the disgust and wonder that a part of you is breaking down, that one day you will hold a shard of yourself... that was what I had become.
As children, Indigo and I learned that teeth were powerful things and the tooth fairy was little more than a common thief.
We were eleven years old, sitting in the kitchens on a bright summer day, eating from a tub of rum raisin ice cream—Tati’s favorite flavor—and since it was the only ice cream left in the fridge at the time, it was ours too. Tati had come down from her studio. I rose on my heels to greet her, opened my mouth, and wiggled my loose canine for her.
“I think it’s going to come out today!” I said. “And I’m going to leave it under my pillow for the tooth fairy!”
“We’ve been pulling on it all day,” added Indigo.
“The tooth fairy is horrifically cheap,” Tati scoffed.
This was not my first loose tooth, but when I’d left the previous ones under my pillow, no one had come for them. No one hadwanted them. I looked down now, my face burning. Tati tipped up my chin. I loved how she always smelled of burning things. I wanted to warm myself on her smile.
“Teeth are memory and therefore precious, and worth far more than a dollar,” she said, smiling and tapping her incisor. “Did you know that once upon a time, the Vikings used to pay children for their teeth? It was said to bring good luck in battle. Other people burned their baby teeth, hoping it would save them from hardship in life.”
Indigo scrunched her face. “Why baby teeth?”
“Because they’re your milk teeth,” said Tati. “They’ve documented you before the world could leave its mark, and above all things, theyremember.”
When Tati said that, my mouth ached in mourning.
“I keep all of Indigo’s baby teeth in a jar,” said Tati.
“You do?” we said at the same time.
Tati smiled and nodded. “Baby teeth make beautiful art. Queen Victoria wore an emerald thistle tooth pendant fixed with one of her children’s teeth. She did the same with a pair of amethyst earrings too. One day, I’ll make something for you both.”
“Me too?” I’d asked, folding my hands in my lap so I did not look too grasping.
“If you’ll let me,” said Tati, and the warmth in her voice was like a furnace on my skin.
When my tooth fell out a few days later, I gave it to Tati. She kissed my forehead and made a big show of placing it in a tiny velvet bag, which went into a gold-filigreed box that lived on the highest shelf of her studio. I’d almost forgotten that moment. I wondered if the tooth had kept the recollection all to itself.
The night I found Indigo and Lyric together, I screamed at her. I locked myself in the bathroom, dragging a duvet off the bed as I went and shoving it into the copper tub. Indigo had bathed an hour earlier, maybe less, and small puddles bled through the blanket. I pictured her soaking in the tub, scrubbing her bronze limbs, rubbing rose oil into her neck while Lyric walked up the stairs. I wondered if our faces blurred together when he was inside her, whether he called her Azure.
In the morning, I stepped out of the copper tub and beheld myself in the mirror. My eyelids were shiny and swollen, my skin cracked from crying. I had forgotten to remove my starling necklace and now clutched it in my hand so tight I could feel the cool edges of its carved wings digging into my palm.
This was not about a boy. This was about theft. The theft of a dream wrought solely for me.
