I put the lizard and bird on either of my shoulders. Bunty knelt down, and I got up on the tiger’s muscular striped back.
“Let’s go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table …” said Bunty in a deep, poetic voice.
“Um, could we just go like awake people instead?” I asked, wrinkling my nose at the thought.
“Definitively!” laughed Bunty. “Let us vamoose!”
“To New Jersey!” I cried, my fist in the air.
“To New Jersey!” cried the tiger and bird as we leaped through the one small door and out into the ripped fabric of space-time.
The thing about interdimensional travel that I’ve come to realize is that it’s way unpredictable. One minute I was on a tiger’s back with my bird and lizard friends, leaping through a wormhole in space-time, and the next moment, I was alone, freezing my butt off on the top branch of a giant tree in Parsippany. At least I was me-sized again.
When I’d left the Kingdom Beyond, it was blazing summer. I’d entirely forgotten it was February in New Jersey. Which meant, when I landed in the big tree in front of my next-door neighbor Jovi’s house, the branches weren’t just covered in snow, but ice. My teeth were chattering, and within a few seconds, I was soaking wet. My summer salwar kameez from the Kingdom Beyond wasn’t exactly the warmest winter-weather wear.
I teetered there, looking out at the snowy universe around me—Jovi’s house at the bend in the road, and my own house right next door. This had been what my moon mother had said to me, about Lal being in a tree at the bend in the road, and something about my enemy’s enemy being my friend. I sniffled, my teeth chattering, even as I realized this had to be where Lal had been held captive by that shape-shifting ghost. Even if I had no idea where the animals were, the intergalactic wormhole had somehow deposited me in the exact place I needed to be. I gave my ruby-red boots a little tap of appreciation. Okay, but how to get the trapped prince out?
“Lal?” I called. “Lal, are you in here somewhere?”
Nothing. I licked my numb lips and raised my voice. “Lal? Where are you?”
Again, nothing. How was I supposed to know if this was the right tree, and even if it was, if he was in here? “Prince Lalkamal!” I shouted, knocking at the icy trunk with numb fingers. This was silly. I was getting nowhere, plus probably getting pneumonia. I needed some serious guidance. Why had I not asked my moon mother how I was supposed to get Lal out of the tree once I got to Parsippany? Wait, that was right, I had the multiverse’s most useful textbook to guide me!
But when I reached toward my backpack to pull out my copy of Professor K. P. Das’s The Adventurer’s Guide to Rakkhosh, Khokkosh, Bhoot, Petni, Doito, Danav, Daini, and Secret Codes, my bow and quiver got me off-balance. I struggled to right myself, but soon realized my weapons were actually hooked onto a frosty branch. When I tried with a swing to get them free, I slipped right off the branch on which I was sitting!
“Whoa!” I yelled as I crashed down, knocking down snow as I went. I scrambled for a hold as branch after branch whipped past my face, scratching me, and others slammed painfully into my shoulder, leg, chin, and hand.
I would have kept falling too, maybe down into a broken pile of bones on the ground, had the boy not caught me. His warm hand gripped my frozen one, pulling me easily out of my fall and onto the relative safety of the cold tree branch he was sitting on.
“Hey there, girl, slow your roll!” said a voice that sounded so smooth and confident, I wondered for a minute if I’d found Lal. But it wasn’t my old friend at all. It was someone I’d never seen before.
It was a boy of strange handsomeness, with ice-blond hair peeking out from under his ski hat and clear-framed glasses like crystal over blue-blue eyes. He wasn’t just handsome; he was perfect—a sculpture out of a museum. I was reminded of the celebrities Zuzu and I liked to look up on websites like Cute Boys of the Ancient World. (I mean who doesn’t have a sweet tooth for ancient eye candy?)
“Whoareyou?” I mumbled, my lips too numb to form the question right. My cheek prickled where I’d cut myself in a couple of places on branches.
“Hey! Hey! Hold up. You’re bleeding, darlin’!” In a flash, the boy had his bright green scarf off and was dabbing my cheek with it. I realized his matching ski hat had words stitched on it in red letters. The hat read, weirdly enough, Kill the Chaos.
“Thanks,” I said, grateful but a little worried about whether I should be talking to a strange boy like this. Plus, what the heck was he doing sitting in a tree in Jovi’s yard? Then I looked more closely at him. His blond good looks and accent made me wonder if maybe he was a cousin of Jovi’s visiting from Norway or something. Maybe that’s why he looked so comfortable sitting in this frozen tree. It was way cold up in those countries, wasn’t it? Oh, why had Tuni, Bunty, and Tiktiki One disappeared right when I needed backup? “Who’re you?”
“I’m Ned Hogar,” I thought the boy said. “I imagined you’d be getting ready for the wedding.” And then, as if this was any time or place for amateur magic tricks, he did something funny with his hands—making an old-looking coin appear in one gloved palm, then the other.
The wedding? What wedding? I was about to ask him what the heck he was talking about, but just then, my front door opened and I heard Ma’s voice calling to me.
“Kiran!” she must have said, but my ears were so frozen, and I was so muddled, it sounded like she was saying “Karen!”
“I’ve got to go,” I told the sculpture boy, who was looking at me with his ridiculous blue-blue eyes. I felt a tingling across my skin, and I wasn’t sure if it was the force of his cuteness or if I was just about to die of frostbite. “You haven’t seen a boy named Lal, have you? In this tree, I mean? About my height, posh accent, probably wearing red clothes?”
“All I can see in this tree is you, darlin’!” said Ned with a wink that made my stomach do a loop-da-loop. “Be sure now to save me a dance at the wedding reception!”
“What wedding reception?” I asked even as I scooched back on the branch away from him. I snuck a look down, trying to calculate the distance to the ground.
“Well, certainly not ours, you cheeky monkey!” Ned drawled. “Man, you move fast! Let a guy get to know you a little! We just met and already you’re talking marriage!”
“That’s not what I meant!” I was embarrassed, so my words were all uptight. Again, I heard my mother calling out my name. “Look, I better go.”
“And just when we were starting to have fun,” said Ned with a mocking laugh. “We are, you know, already sitting in a tree, all we need to start doing is … How does the rhyme go? Oh, yeah, K-I-S-S-I …”
“Um, no thanks!” I muttered, feeling more and more alarmed by the second.
“It was just a joke!” Ned laughed. “Oh, how sweet, you’re embarrassed!”
This conversation was getting way intense way fast. Before the boy could say anything else, I turned to make a graceful exit by jumping off the branch. Like, you know, a prancing gazelle or something.