Page 40 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

“You don’t get it,” PK said. “Think of a goddess. A beautiful, terrifying, thunderbolt-wielding goddess. You don’t want a deity to chitchat with you. You want them to challenge you. Open new worlds to you.”

“And Babette does that? Even though she treats you like . . .” Mandy waved at his phone.

“She does that, and more.” PK’s eyes were shining. “Much more.”

He shot a glance up the hillside. “You were the first investor in CareFree. You deserve a first look.”

PK motioned for Mandy to follow him up to an alcove in the cliff wall where he had made camp the night before. He had staked a sheet into a makeshift canopy, shielding his campsite from the sun, or prying eyes, or both. He reached into a crack between vertical flakes of shale and pulled out a soft-pack cooler, the word “Babette” sprayed across it in silver.

He unzipped the cooler and pulled out a small cylindrical container. It was like the others: matte-white, unlabeled. Mandy felt a little zing of excitement as he handed it over.

“Here,” he said. “A taste of CareFree. A new world of liberation.”

She unscrewed the cap, revealing an airy cream with a subtle scent of eucalyptus. It was bright white with a purple halo around the edges, as if it had been beamed down from another planet.

“I recommend waiting until evening to try it out,” PK said. “The first time, the effects can be . . . dazzling. Especially in this heat.”

“Am I going to forget my own name?”

“Not your name. Just your worries. Temporarily. Which might be more pleasant after we’ve spent all day barreling down that river.”

Mandy took one more whiff. Then she reluctantly handed the container back to him. “Can you keep this safe in your cooler until later?”

“Of course.”

He turned to put away the cooler, then froze.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

His back was still to her.

“Shhh.” His voice was abrupt, urgent. “There’s a—in my—don’t—”

His body blocked her view. She couldn’t see it. But she could hear it. It sounded less like a rattle than a shushing, like the ill-fated rain stick project she never repeated after the boys turned their instruments into exploding lightsabers.

PK was inching backward, one hand on his cooler, his torso flexing away from his sleeping area as if conjuring a magical force field between himself and a giant, writhing snake.

The snake was creeping out of the seam in the rock behind PK’s sleeping area. Its head was patterned in rose-colored diamonds, its body a dark line splitting the synthetic yellow sleeping bag in half. It seemed big. Was it big? What was the standard? She tried to remember if there was any correlation between the size of the rattle and the venomous threat posed, if you were supposed to move or not move, scream or not scream. The snake danced in a hypnotic spiral, coiling and uncoiling, its tiny black eyes boring into her, tongue flickering.

“Should we yell?” she whispered.

PK reached back and grabbed for her hand. “Maybe we should pray.”

They took one coordinated half step back, then another. Their bodies fused into a single unit of shuffling fear. His hamstrings, tight muscled ropes, shook the koalas on his shorts out of their tiny trees.

The snake’s coils slid and folded over each other, its glinting scales swirling so fast the patterns started to blur. It was much bigger than she’d initially thought.

“Is it just me, or is it pink?” she whispered.

“Matches your sunburn.”

Mandy risked a quick glance at his tanned face. “We can’t all have little elves who slather us with Babette FeatherLite SPF Perfection every morning.”

PK gave Mandy’s hand a tiny squeeze. “If we survive this, we’re going to be friends.”

It was at that very moment he tripped backward, pulling Mandy with him to the ground. She had just enough time to see the rattler match their sudden movements with its own, accelerating from a slither to a dizzying, terrifying blur.

“SNAAAAAAAAAKE!” she screamed.