“There’s still time,” she said quietly.
When we got back to the house, I tried giving her the keys, but she folded them in my hand.
“I’ve got a friend picking me up for the Saturday shift tomorrow,” she said. “Why don’t you take the car for the afternoon?”
“Am I allowed to do that?” I asked, my eyes wide even as I felt a pang. My mother had a friend, a friend she laughed with, shared food with—when did that happen?
She shrugged. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Early the next morning, I sat alone in the car. The day was a road, and it belonged to me. Indigo wouldn’t be expectingme until sunset so we could say our goodbye to the Otherworld before we said hello to our new lives.
I was reckless that day. I went to the gas station and bought candy, which Indigo expressly forbade. If we ate sweets, we had honeycomb dipped in chocolate and wrapped in gold leaf, or thick Mexican hot chocolate in blue porcelain cups. Indigo loved beautiful things, but nothing was more tempting to me than the bright packet of little red candies. They smelled like plastic and cinnamon, tasted of the exotic. I got goose bumps as I ate them in the parking lot, fingers splayed against my mouth to keep from losing a single one.
Afterward, I went back inside and bought a bottle of pop and more of the candies. I drove to the movies and snuck into the theater. I walked through a store and tried on sunglasses, imagined a place where I might need them. I recognized people from school and flashed them smiles, which they awkwardly returned. I ate a hot cinnamon bun, drank a smoothie, bought vending-machine chips, and played in an arcade with the quarters I had left before slouching back into the car, glutted on all that I’d consumed. I was vast, a horizon folded into a human, and lost in that vastness, I nearly forgot the hour.
I didn’t have time to shower or change before I went to the House of Dreams. My treachery was a scent, the buttered popcorn clinging to my hair, the smell of cinnamon on my breath. Indigo was waiting for me outside the gates, wrapped in the sable fur coat she’d offered me the day before.
“You’re almost late,” she said, tugging on her starling necklace.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
Indigo sniffed the air. In the half-light, I couldn’t see the whites of her eyes. She licked her lips and held out her hand.
“Time for us to say goodbye,” she said.
Hand in hand, we walked to the Otherworld. With every step, the food in my stomach congealed. I thought I’d be thrown out for good, met with a wall of air, but with every step my starling necklace fluttered against my bare skin—warm, breathing. Before long, it was my hand on the gate, our keys turning in the locks, the gates swinging open, and the smell of apple blossoms embracing us.
“It’s perfect,” Indigo sighed.
It was perfect. And here I was, untouched. The Otherworld had beheld me in all my grime and sin, and still loved me.
“Oh,” I said, my soul sagging in relief.
“I know,” said Indigo, wrapping her arms around me. “But we’ll be back soon.”
I didn’t answer. I was lost in the embrace of something greater. The moment I crossed the threshold, the Otherworld reached for me. The oak groaned and the willow stretched its limbs, the lilies nodded in acknowledgment, and the blossoms sang on the apple trees. I had been prepared to be orphaned by this world. Instead, it welcomed me, and in that second I understood the movement of holy things.
Hallowed ground was not always a fixed, physical place. Some sacred spaces were indivisible, the taking of them an endless communion that ate of your flesh, drank of your blood, and its grisly alchemy fused itself to the very skin of your soul so that no matter where you were, you would never be without it.
Indigo and I were the Otherworld, and the Otherworld was us, and for as long as we lived, it would live too.
I had known the Otherworld would lay me bare, and it did. It plucked out every piece I’d hidden in that dark space, fanned them out like so many cards—the smell of asphalt, the edge of a college brochure, the roads spread out like veins carrying the pulse of vastness—and it asked me this:
If the Otherworld would always be there, then why must we disappear into it so soon?
The question burrowed new space inside me, and Indigo could smell it on my skin. In the weeks that followed, she turned dreamy. She looped wire around my shoulders, hung gossamer gowns from them as if we were sampling wings. In the mornings, she’d gather dew and hand it to me in little quartz glasses so I might be purified. She’d muse about all the things we would do with our power.
“When we’re in the Otherworld, maybe we can restore Tati’s sight,” she’d say. “Poor, silly Tottlepop.”
Two weeks before my birthday, I woke to a pressure on my chest.
“Wake up, Catskins,” whispered Indigo. “Look what happened.”
I rose up on my elbows, wincing at the pinch in my scalp. I lifted one hand, ran my palm down the dozens of braids that had been looped and knotted around the bars of Indigo’s headboard.
“Elf knots,” said Indigo, giggling. “They must have done it in the night. I told you to keep a bowl of cream and blood outside! But you must have forgotten. They’re so good about climbing around unnoticed. They must have knelt on your pillow, braiding every strand with their little brown fingers as punishment. Did you feel anything?”
“No,” I said.
