“Fine, fine!” Nidhoggr moaned. He was doubled over, clutching his stomach, but he waved his hands, instructing Yggdrasil to let me go. “Now tell me where the park is!”
“How about you let my friends go too?” I said, studying my cuticles with an air of calm.
“Ohhhhh!” groaned Nidhoggr, clutching his stomach and bending over in two. “You drive a hard bargain, snake princess! Your father would be proud!”
With another wave of his hand, there was a groaning and popping noise, and the tree trunk popped open, depositing a dirty but otherwise okay-looking Jovi and Zuzu.
“What about Lal?” I was starting to feel a little bad about how miserable Nidhoggr looked, but comforted myself with the fact that the “poison” obviously wasn’t “poison” at all, and while he might need to live on the potty for a couple days, the dragon would eventually be fine.
“Oh, all right! All right!” yelped the green and moaning creature boy. With a flick of Ned’s hand, Yggdrasil deposited a very dirty and very confused-looking prince on the frozen ground. Lalkamal looked around, yawning and rubbing his eyes, as if he’d been asleep for a very long time.
“Lal!” I yelled, running over to my friend and helping him to his feet.
“Just Kiran?” Lal looked around wonderingly at the icy landscape. “Where are we?”
“New Jersey—I’ll explain everything!” I promised.
“I did what you asked! I brought him up!” Ned growled, now doubled over in pain. “And now you have to show me the little dragons’ room!”
Obligingly, I pointed in the direction of the public park. As Nidhoggr ran down the street, desperately holding on to the back of his pants, Jovi burst out, “How did you manage that without getting sick yourself?” Her face was streaked with mud, but her eyes were all sparkly with interest.
“We could hear everything from inside the tree,” added Zuzu as she pulled clumps of frozen earth out of her hair.
“I put the Bhuvanprash in both cups,” I explained. “I’ve spent a lifetime building up my immunity. It’s not poison, but boy, it’ll mess your stomach up good if you’re not used to it!”
Zuzu and Jovi laughed, high-fiving me. Lal looked at all three of us in confusion and wonder.
Being trapped in a tree so long had left Lal confused, shaken, and cold. Plus, he had a wicked twisted ankle from when the ghost had originally tripped him, before stealing his identity. So the first thing we did was help him limp up Jovi’s driveway and into her warm mudroom. Jovi threw a blanket over Lal’s shoulders, and Zuzu gave him a big glass of water. Jovi’s black lab Loki tried to get in on the act too by jumping up on Lal and giving him big-tongued licks all over his face.
Even though Lal was out of it, I expected Jovi and Zuzu to be peppering me with questions—about the Kingdom Beyond, about Nidhoggr, about how Lal had been captured in another dimension by a ghost but held in a Norse tree in this dimension. I wasn’t sure about that last one myself, to be honest, but after their recent life-threatening experience, I was certainly expecting Zuzu and Jovi to be demanding some answers. What I couldn’t understand was why they weren’t.
That’s when I noticed that my friends were each giggling and staring at Lal, making up stupid excuses to touch his sleeve or brush the tree dirt from his hair. Their voices were like three octaves higher than usual and I kept trying to signal to them to cut it out, but they both avoided meeting my fury eyeballs. It’s not like I couldn’t understand. Even I was seriously dumbstruck at Lal’s movie-star handsomeness when I first met him, so I guess I got what they were feeling. But they were acting like such total dorks. It was like they were seeing half-naked fat cupids floating around above the prince’s head or something.
“I really like that jacket!” gushed Zuzu, running her finger down Lal’s arm. “Did you, like, get it at the Kingdom Beyond mall? You guys do have malls in your dimension, right?”
“What kind of conditioner do you use? Your hair smells, like, really good,” babbled Jovi, taking a big embarrassing sniff of Lal’s head. “I mean, a little like the inside of a tree trunk, but also really good.”
“Here, rest your leg,” said Zuzu, shoving Lal in the direction of a bench. “Sit here!”
“No, sit on this chair!” Jovi insisted, pulling in a kitchen chair. “It’s much more comfortable.”
“Thank you for all your kind attentions, ladies,” said Lal, who looked exhausted, but still somehow turned on his hundred-watt smile for my friends as they pushed and prodded at him.
“So there’s a lot I have to tell you all,” I said, hoping it would stop Jovi and Zuzu from making fools of themselves. Quickly I explained how the Raja had disappeared and Neel had been crowned (Lal gasped), how I suspected Sesha was at the bottom of smushing various story lines together (Zuzu and Jovi gasped), and how Stheno and Nidhoggr had therefore escaped from their Greek and Norse stories and appeared in New Jersey (everyone gasped, which made Loki howl). The one thing I didn’t go into, though, was how I was worried that the wormhole might have landed me in the wrong membrane dimension. I didn’t think I could bring myself to explain how my parents were acting, or how, in my real version of reality, Jovi and I were enemies, and Zuzu and I friends.
Lal looked thoughtful as he petted Loki’s head and nose. “Then the first thing we must do, Just Kiran, is to get back home to the Kingdom Beyond. But how? Are there any automated wormhole makers here in New Jersey?”
“Automated wormhole makers?” echoed Zuzu in a goofy voice, still acting like her eyeballs had been replaced by hearts.
“Just Kiran?” asked Jovi, a little less goofily, grinning in my direction.
“It’s a long story,” I mumbled. “But I think I have an idea of who can help get us back to the Kingdom Beyond.”
“Who?” the girls and Lal asked, almost all in unison.
“The smartest scientist in this dimension, of course,” I said. “We’ve got to get to Shady Sadie’s atom-smashing lab. From all the stuff she was saying at the assembly today, about black holes, chaos, the light and dark—I think she was trying to send me a message.”
“Oh, come on,” started Zuzu. She was still petting Lal’s coat sleeve and I wondered if she just didn’t want me to take him away.
“No, really,” I said. “Unless you have any better ideas, I think it’s our best chance.”
“Then let us go! We must not waste any time!” Lal was starting to sound a bit more like himself. Jovi had also heated up a plate of nachos and he was digging in, so that might have had something to do with it. He crunched loudly, mumbling through a cheesy mouth, “I must get back to the Kingdom Beyond! My people need me! Also, what kind of salsa is this? It is very delicious!”
“Jovi, you said her atom-smashing lab was somewhere here in town. That picture Shady Sadie showed us in school looked like a building right near my parents’ store.” I stole a nacho from Lal, earning a dirty look from both my friends.
Jovi furrowed her blond eyebrows. “You mean your parents’ old store, before they sold it.”
“Right.” Yet another thing that was wacko about this dimension. I scratched Loki’s ears while the big dog licked my elbow. “So how are we going to get all the way out to Route 46 from here?” I asked, turning my mind to practical problems. “It’s too far to walk. At least in this cold. Especially with Lal’s twisted ankle.”
“Either of you know how to drive?” Zuzu had the door open to Jovi’s garage and was staring at her parents’ extra car.
I thought about my experience driving the auto rikshaw. And then the fact that I’d crashed and totaled it. “Nidhoggr almost just killed us all. I’d rather not finish the job for him.”
“Never fret, I have the solution.” Jovi was pointing at something in the garage. “How about some nonautomated wheels?”
I looked to see that Jovi was pointing to two incredibly small dirt bikes, obviously the property of her little stepbrothers.
“There aren’t enough for all of us!” I eyed the t
iny dirt bikes with the huge thick rims. “And those seats are so small, there’s no way we can ride double!”
“Well, don’t you have a bike too at your house next door?” Jovi asked. “I trashed mine last year and never got a new one, but you’ve got to still have yours in your shed, right? The one with the big banana seat? That should be big enough to take Lal on too, right?”
“Prince Lal can’t ride alone with his twisted ankle!” Zuzu said, adding hopefully, “Maybe I could take him on your bike!”
“No, I’d be happy to!” volunteered Jovi.
In the end, I rode my own bike, the embarrassingly pink and sparkly Princess Pretty Pants™ one with the crown streamers on the handlebars and the unicorn flippety-floppety inserts on the wheels. It was a little awkward, since the bike was so small, and Lal’s weight on the back of the banana seat didn’t make it very easy to pedal. Still, within a few minutes, we were biking away through our neighborhood, everybody’s knees practically up around our armpits. It had taken a minute to convince Loki to stay at home instead of coming with us, but we’d finally managed.
We were off! I’d grabbed an old jacket from my house, since I’d left my own winter coat at school. It was a little bit small on my arms, but it was better than wearing Ned-slash-Nidhoggr’s ski jacket. (I didn’t want his dragon cooties!) I was actually feeling kind of like a kid again, the wind whipping by my face, the handlebar streamers flying. I even cring-cringed my rusty Princess Pretty Pants™ bell for good measure.
Jovi and even Zuzu were doing little tricks on and off the curb on their bikes, but it was a lot of effort for me to just keep my little pink bicycle steady and straight down the road. Lal was holding on to my waist and giving me incredibly unhelpful suggestions.
“Watch that ice patch, Just Kiran!” he yelped. “Slow down! Not so sideways, my lady! Not so straight! Ring your bell! Perchance might you have any snacks in that basket?”
“Stop holding on so tight, Lal!” I griped. “I can barely breathe!”
“I have snacks!” Zuzu enthused, tossing Lal a granola bar from her pocket. She was standing up to pedal and looked like she was having a ball.
“Good thing we decided to come with you two!” said Jovi, maneuvering her bike on the other side of me and tossing Lal some gummy bears.
Embarrassingly, Lal lapped up all the attention even as he ate up all the snacks.
We were at the top of a big hill, and before I had time to think about it, my friends were convincing me to stop pedaling and see who could coast down the hill fastest. “Princess Just Kiran, be careful!” Lal yelled as we careened down the icy road. He scattered a bunch of gummy bears into the air in his agitation.
I was reminded of zipping along on a skateboard behind an auto rikshaw with the Pink-Sari Skateboarders what felt like ages ago. Even though I was nervous at first, soon I was whooping and hollering along with Zuzu and Jovi. Even Lal seemed to get over his fear.
“All for one and one for all!” the girls cheered as they started pedaling again at the bottom of the hill. For good measure, they even waved their fencing foils around in the air.
I thought about how much that musketeer rallying cry was like Nidhoggr and Sesha’s favorite: The all is one. Both sayings were talking about how people were connected, but our phrase, as opposed to Sesha’s, didn’t necessarily mean that we had to all be exactly the same to be on the same side.
Lal cheered. “I like your friends, Just Kiran!”
I laughed. “I’m fairly sure they like you too!”
Unfortunately, we were all so giddy from the rush of our adventure that no one really considered the route we were taking from our neighborhood to Smarty-Pants Science Corporation. The way we were going would not only take us in front of my parents’ old convenience store, but around the back of Zuzu’s family’s Greek diner. We were already biking through the adjoining parking lot, the one that goes between the pet grooming place and the Bennigan’s Coat Factory, when the fiercest employee of Mount Olympus Diner spotted us: Zuzu’s grandmother.
Zuzu’s yiayia was well into her eighties, but she still worked every day at the family’s restaurant, making the world’s best spanakopita and baklava, chatting up customers, and basically keeping Zuzu’s entire family on their toes. And our bad luck, she swung open the back door to the diner just as we were skating by.
“Oh no!” breathed Zuzu, but it was too late to turn around.
Yiayia stood there in her head scarf, apron, and orthopedic shoes, a bag of garbage in her hand. She squinted at us for a second, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, and then, in a move worthy of any intergalactic superhero, she threw the garbage bag. The smelly plastic sack hit Zuzu in the legs and knocked her off her bike.
“What kind of babushka’d monster is this?” Lal thundered, taking out his sword and brandishing it around.
“That’s not a monster—that’s Zuzu’s grandma!” I warned, and my friend put his sword away quickly.
In the time it took Zuzu to pick herself and her bike up off the icy ground, Yiayia got to us. You wouldn’t think that someone so old and stout could run so fast, but Yiayia was a marvel. Even more remarkable was when she started yelling. The parking lot was crowded with the lunch rush, but Yiayia didn’t care. With speed I wouldn’t have expected from such an old lady, she caught Jovi by the arm, forcing her off her bike. Then, with her other hand, she caught Zuzu by the ear, twisting hard.
“Ow, Yiayia, stop! Please!” Zuzu begged.
“Kakó korítsi!” yelled her grandmother.
“Madam, please, let go these nice ladies’ ears!” Lal was sputtering. We were the only ones still on our bike.
I didn’t understand half of the Greek scolding Yiayia was giving us, but I certainly understood the word school, which seemed to be coming up a lot. I also understood the words Mama and Papa, and understood from Zuzu’s reaction that Yiayia was about to drag her by the ear to her parents. Never mind our principal had turned out to be a Greek Gorgon and Nidhoggr the Norse dragon snake had not only been masquerading as a Parsippany middle schooler but had also tried to kill us; we were all about to be in some serious trouble with Yiayia.
“Kiran, Lal, get out of here while you can!” Jovi hissed, and I knew she was right. Zuzu’s grandma only had two arms, and while she was including me and Lal just as ferociously as the other two girls in her half-Greek–half-English chewing-out, she didn’t have a physical hold on us. I didn’t want to abandon my friends, but I couldn’t think what else to do.
“Go, Kiran!” Zuzu urged as Yiayia started to drag both girls toward the door.
“O-hee! Kiran!” Yiayia exclaimed as she saw what I was about to do. “Who that boy?”
“Thank you! I love you guys!” I yelled as I pushed off with my ruby-red boot, banking a hard right by the parking lot curb to get away from Yiayia’s grasping arm. I pedaled as hard and fast as I could. “Sorry, Yiayia, but there’s a good explanation for us being out of school! I promise!”
I’m not sure if she understood me, but the old grandma lunged, like she wanted to chase me through the icy lot. I watched helplessly as her orthopedic shoes gave out from under her, and she slipped. Luckily, Zuzu and Jovi caught her under her arms before she fell flat on her face.
“Go stop that snake dude!” Zuzu called as she supported Yiayia, who had begun her multilingual yelling yet again.
“Bye, Lal, come back and see us soon!” added Jovi, almost off-balance from supporting Yiayia’s considerable weight and size.
“Skipping school no good!” shouted Yiayia in my direction. “Kiran, you are a good girl!”
I had no choice. I felt like a total rat, but I zoomed Lal away on my bike before Yiayia somehow grew another two arms to haul us inside.
“Hang on!” I yelled as I flew down the service road behind Route 46, leaving my friends behind me.
A few minutes later, we had made it safely to Smarty-Pants Science Corporation. We got off my ridiculous bike and pushed open the fron
t door. There was no receptionist in the outer offices. Instead, there was a dusty black desk with the company’s logo (a massive exploding supernova), a few totally mismatched office-type chairs, a chipped foosball table, and a miniature Ping-Pong table that looked like it had seen a lot of heated games.
“I guess space scientists like to blow off steam by playing office sports.” I touched a basketball hoop hanging crookedly from one nail.
Lal nodded. “Apparently so, Just Kiran. Although I am more of a cricket fan myself.”
After waiting a few seconds for anyone to show up, Lal hobbled over to the desk and called out a tentative “Hello?” Then we heard it. The telltale dum-dum-DA-dum noise of people playing table tennis nearby. There must be another table somewhere. From the speed they were playing, it sounded like some scientists had a seriously vicious tournament going.
Following the sound, I pushed open the first set of big double doors to our right. The inner office was decorated in the same style as the outer one, with another, much bigger Ping-Pong table, an air hockey table, a water cooler, and a sofa so comfy and worn I was sure it was meant for napping in between sports matches. When I realized who it was involved in the high-intensity table tennis game, I almost fainted from surprise.
“Bunty? Tuni?” I gasped at the sight of my tiger friend with a table tennis racket in their giant teeth and Tuntuni the tiny yellow bird on the opposite side of the table with one in his beak. But what really shocked me was who their doubles partners were.
Playing alongside Tuni was Shady Sadie herself, her bow tie askew, her glasses slipping down from her nose with sweat. She stuck her tongue out and grunted every time she hit the ball, like the famous tennis players do. On the opposite side of the table was Professor Khogen Prasad Das, the elderly author of the Kingdom Beyond textbook The Adventurer’s Guide to Rakkhosh, Khokkosh, Bhoot, Petni, Doito, Danav, Daini, and Secret Codes. He had his dhoti gathered up in one hand and was darting this way and that as he played, diving, jumping, and practically sailing for the ball. He sliced a killer ace, making Sadie slam down her paddle in frustration when she couldn’t return the shot.
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