“We’re talking about Sesha here!” I tried to say, but my voice was seriously shaky. I’d faced down monsters and fought demons, but seeing my parents act like this, and hearing them say this awful, self-hating stuff about our home dimension, was more frightening than anything I’d ever encountered.
“Time for school now!” said Ma, snapping the wad of gum in her mouth. “Hop to it!”
“No lollygagging!” added Baba. “And don’t worry your pretty little head about the politics over there! Leave that to the grown-ups! There’s a girl!”
“Stiff upper lip! Chin up! Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, Karen, darling!” Ma said.
Hearing that name come out of my mother’s mouth made me see red. “Stop that! My name’s Kiran. Kiranmala! You of all people should know my name!” I shook my aching head, looking from one polyester-blazered parent to the other.
“Oh, that’s so foreign-sounding! So hard to pronounce! Can’t you understand that, Karen?” Baba said super slow and loud, like the way ignorant people sometimes talk to people they assume are from another country.
“If people can learn to pronounce Tchaikovsky or Lothlórien or Parsippany, they can learn to pronounce Kiranmala! And even if they can’t, it’s still my name!” I rubbed my aching temples. Oh, what in the world had happened to my parents while I was gone? They were downright colonized beyond repair!
“Oh, pishposh. I mean, tomato, tomahto,” said Baba. “I don’t have time for this. And look at the time—geez Louise, you’ve already missed the bus, young lady.”
“So chop chop, go dress in some decent clothes, will you?” Ma said, sneering at my kurta. She waved, shooing me up the stairs. “I’m not driving you if you’re wearing that foreign other-dimensional stuff!”
I wanted to argue with her, tell her how beautiful clothes from the Kingdom Beyond were, how good they made me feel about myself, but then I remembered how cold I’d just been out in Jovi’s tree. Okay, maybe there was something to be said for seasonally appropriate clothing. Still, I was furious as I threw on jeans under my light kurta and a fuzzy hoodie over it. But just to show Ma I wasn’t doing it to look less “foreign,” I put on a pair of giant jhumko earrings I’d gotten from the Kingdom Beyond. My parents may have lost all sense of identity and turned into self-hating robots, but I wasn’t going to pretend I was anything other than what I was.
As I headed back downstairs to find both my parents still tapping on their phones, I started to put two and two together. If their clothes and accents weren’t a giveaway that something was up, Ma’s and Baba’s attitudes should have been. Plus their shoes! Those weird, chipper tones! The fact that they’d forgotten how dangerous Sesha was! These weren’t my real parents, or even if they were, they must’ve gotten mixed up in the wrong narrative thread or something. That must be it.
Even as the realization made me feel a little better, I knew that if that was really what was going on, I needed backup. I had to find Bunty and Tuntuni, but more importantly, I had to find Tiktiki One. I needed to send Mati a message and get some help. If I wasn’t in the right narrative, maybe this wasn’t even the right tree in which Lal was imprisoned! Plus, how was I going to get back to the story line I should be in?
Gah. What a mess. The kicker, though, came when I asked my parents if they needed to head to work at the store.
“The store?” Baba wrinkled his nose. “Oh, that nasty old place!”
“Don’t you remember we sold it?” Ma added. “Why, we’re tax accountants now!”
Things only got weirder when I got to school. I wouldn’t have thought anything could be stranger than my parents wearing their shoes in the house and telling me they sold their beloved store to become accountants, but I was wrong. School was a whole new level of weirditude.
My first class of the day was science with Dr. Dixon. Usually, I walked from the bus with my best friend, Zuzu, straight to our lockers, then to class. But because I missed the bus, and my newly uptight parents had dropped me at school, I didn’t see her until I was in the science room. There, she met my wave with a stony stare.
I sat down, feeling off-balance. I’d never seen Zuzu look at me like that in my life. Had I done something to make her mad?
I must have looked upset, because the next thing I knew someone was asking me if I was okay. I turned my head, and was shocked to see it was my next-door neighbor and lifelong enemy, Jovi. Even more shockingly, Jovi was looking at me with a big old friendly grin.
“You okay, girl?” Jovi said again, touching my arm.
“Is there a problem, ladies?” asked Dr. Dixon from the front of the room.
“No, no problem!” I said, turning back around. I heard a little snicker from my right. When I looked, I realized it was Zuzu, looking at me with a snide, superior expression. Exactly the kind of expression I would have expected to see on Jovi’s face.
I slunk down in my seat, trying not to let my upset show as Dr. Dixon went on with his lesson. Ever since I’d come back to New Jersey through that wormhole, everything had been upside down. First, I’d lost my traveling companions. Then there was that weird boy in the tree and my self-hating parents. I’d made zero progress on finding Lal, had no idea what Sesha was up to, and had no one to talk to about it all. And now my best friend and enemy had somehow traded personalities. Enough already! I just needed to catch a break!
That’s when Zuzu unexpectedly solved at least one of my problems. She looked down at my partially open backpack with a sneer. “Is it bring-your-ugly-pet-to-school day or something?” she half whispered.
I looked down to see Tiktiki One winking up at me from my backpack.
“Where have you been, you dumb lizard?” I hissed. “And where are the others?”
I don’t know why I tried. It’s not like the gecko was a huge conversationalist. Sure enough, instead of answering me, the lizard flicked out its tongue, hitting itself in the eye on the recoil.
With Zuzu looking straight at me, I couldn’t exactly take the lizard out of my bag, whisper a message, and pull off its tail. Calling Mati would have to wait. Instead, I tugged the zipper on my backpack most of the way closed, muttering, “Stay in there!”
“You might want to leave it a little open—so your gecko can breathe,” someone murmured from behind me. I thought for a second it might be Naya, who’d been sitting in that seat last time I was in this classroom. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was that perfect-faced boy from the tree—Ned Hogar!
“What’re you doing here?” I blurted, feeling a little weirded out by the force of his cuteness. I mean, Lal was handsome, and Neel had some serious swagger, but Ned was so good-looking it was almost creepy.
“Ungrateful much? I did save your life—or at least save you from breaking a bone in that tree, darlin’.” The blond sculpture boy raised his perfect eyebrows over his perfect eyes. Then he reached out toward me, as if he was going to tuck a stray piece of my hair behind my ear. Instead, he pulled his hand back, revealing a shiny coin he’d apparently just “pulled” from my ear. “You and me, sitting in a tree,” he started up again.