Inside the card, under the words Have a Spark-a-licious birthday!, was a scrawled message, so unlike Ma’s normally precise handwriting.
Take heart, dear daughter.
We were hoping for the last dozen years that it would not come to pass. But it has happened—the magical spell protecting us all has been broken on this, your twelfth birthday. Forgive us for trying to shield you from the truth. Now there is too little time to explain.
Whatever you do, do not let any rakkhosh into the house. Trust the princes to keep you safe, but more importantly, trust yourself. We leave here some extra rupees and a moving map in case you find them of use.
But I beg you, do not try to find us. It is far too dangerous. We go now to that dark and terrible origin place where all spells meet their end.
(Oh, and make sure to take your gummy vitamins every morning.)
Darling piece of the moon, the first thing you must do is to find—
The note broke off there with a big, ugly inkblot, as if she’d been startled by something into stopping mid-sentence.
I shook the envelope, and out fell a small wad of colorful, unfamiliar bills—the rupees Ma had mentioned. But the other thing in the envelope wasn’t a map at all—just a yellowed piece of blank paper.
That was it. They had always been odd, but now my parents had totally gone off the deep end. I called their cell phones and the phone at the store. When I got only voicemail, I started to really panic. If this was some kind of a bizarre Halloween trick, it wasn’t funny. All that stuff about princes and rakkhosh—what planet did Ma and Baba think we were living on?
I felt myself start to tear up, and bit the inside of my cheek to stop the waterworks from spilling out. Along with dressing and acting in ways that were unnoticeable, it was another of my self-imposed rules for making it through middle school. There was no crying. Not ever. Tears were like a door to a scary room inside myself I’d most definitely rather keep closed.
I took a big breath and tried to calm down. Weeping is for wimps.
I was about to call Zuzu at her parents’ restaurant when the doorbell began to ring nonstop. It was the little kids—dressed as fairies and animals and superheroes—out with their parents before it got dark. In a daze, my head still swirling, I handed out the messy sweets.
“Gee, thanks!” said a little boy dressed as Robin Hood. “This is a lot better than the dentist lady next door. She’s giving out toothbrushes!”
I shut the door with shaking hands, my heart tight in my chest. Dusk was settling onto the neighborhood. Where were my parents? What had happened to them? Why had they told me not to try and find them?
Just then, the doorbell rang again.
Standing on the front porch were the strangest trick-or-treaters I’d ever seen: two boys, about my age, maybe a little older. They looked like brothers. The smiling one was so handsome he almost melted my eyeballs. The other one was taller and broader, and looked a little bored. The funny thing was the way they were both dressed—in flowing shirts and pants in the same sparkling fabrics as Ma’s saris. They were wearing silk turbans and shoes with curling-up toes. Each had what looked like a jewel-encrusted sword tucked into the sash around his waist. The handsome boy’s sash and turban were red, and the taller boy’s were blue.
“Blast you, little brother; she’s probably been eaten already,” the boy in blue was saying as I opened the door. “You just had to stop for that Giant Gulpie, didn’t you?”
“That Giant Gulpie is the only reason we made it here at all,” argued his brother. “You never want to ask for directions, you stubborn rhinoceros.”
But I didn’t have time to make sense of all that, because at that moment, the boy in red looked straight at me with his movie-star eyes.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those boy-crazy goobers whose rooms are wallpapered with posters of floppy-haired boy bands. And I don’t fill my school notebooks with my initials and the initials of some cute boy surrounded by a goofy heart. It’s not that Zuzu and I don’t have a few celebrities whose pictures we like to look up on websites like Cute Boys Do Dental Hygiene Too. (I mean, who doesn’t like to see their favorite TV star flossing his teeth for the cameras?) But until that moment when I opened the front door, I’d never met someone so handsome in real life.
“Are you ready, my lady?” the boy must’ve been asking, but something had gone all wonky with my hearing, so he just sounded like one of the teachers in a Peanuts cartoon—“Waa waa waa waa waa.” Boy, was he good-looking. I felt a shiver, the kind I might describe in a note to Zuzu with little asterisks around it. *shiver*
The boy looked at my dark jeans and black sweatshirt, furrowing his brows. Not that it made him any less pretty. “Brother Neel, I don’t believe the lady is ready.”
Then the other guy—whose name was Neel?—reached out for the tray of sweets in my hand. He popped at least two rasagollas in his mouth, not even worrying about the sticky sauce dripping down his chin. Gross.
“You’re supposed to say ‘trick or treat,’” I said primly, then immediately wanted to kick myself. Two cute boys come to my door and the first thing out of my mouth is, “You’re supposed to say ‘trick or treat’”? How uncool was I?
“It must be like a costume, Lal.” Neel winked while licking syrup off his fingers. “No one wears boring clothes like that for real.”
An uncomfortable heat rushed over my face. “What are you, the fashion police?”
Even though I amazed myself by coming up with a smart answer in time, the tall boy’s statement stung. Here was another rich kid with fancy clothes, I thought, making me feel bad about what I could afford to wear. And what about them—Lal and Neel? Weren’t those the Bengali words for red and blue? And they were dressed according to their names? How fashion forward was that?
When Neel reached out to pick up more sweets, I slapped his hand away. Hard.
“Yo, easy, Prin-cess!” The way he said it, all sarcastic and dragged out, made me think he was making fun of me. Obviously, I was the furthest thing from a princess in his mind.
I felt a pricking behind my eyes and I blinked the moisture away like crazy. Then, as if the atmosphere was reflecting my mood, the air became filled with a putrid, garbage-y smell. What was that?
I turned my back on Neel and his mocking eyes, and appealed to the handsome Lal. “Am I ready? Am I ready for what?” I put my hand on the door.
But the boy in red didn’t answer. Instead, he took out his sword—which suddenly didn’t look like a costume sword at all. It looked shiny. And sharp. Before I could react, he grabbed my wrist and tried to yank me out of the house toward him.
Now, if I wasn’t as streetwise as I am (I’ve been to Manhattan five times and ridden the subway twice), I might have made the mistake of thinking this was some kind of dream come true. But I’m a Jersey girl, and Jersey girls are no dummies. I knew perfectly well that no matter how handsome someone is, you can’t let them start grabbing at you. Seriously, I’ve seen a lot of made-for-TV movies in my time, and those serial killers are always super good-looking.
“Get off me!” I said in my loudest anti-attacker voice. Every muscle and nerve in my body felt taut—ready to fight. I shook him off, and pulled myself back into the house. I weighed the serving tray in my hand, ready to clobber him in his gorgeous head if I needed to.