Kiki Kallira Conquers a Curse

1

"Kiki, why is there a crow on my kitchen table?"

I glared at the crow in question, but he just shrugged his wings unrepentantly.

It was a little unfair that my mother saw a crow in our kitchen and immediately assumed it had something to do with me. On the other hand, she wasn't exactly wrong, so my indignation was probably misplaced.

Both Mum and the crow were staring expectantly at me, but my mind was a little busy Overthinking.

When that happens, my thoughts go something like this: if I tell Mum the truth she might not believe me or she'll think I'm hallucinating, but if I lie to her I'll be stuck lying to her forever and I don't want to do that, but if I tell her the truth she might not believe me or she'll think-

"Kiki," Mum said in a voice that would have made demon kings quake. We could have really used her when Mahishasura, the demon king, was terrorizing my imaginary kingdom a few months ago.

"He's my friend," I blurted out.

Mum blinked. "The crow? Are you telling me you found him, fed him, and now he hangs around all the time hoping for more? If that's the case, Kiki, I really don't see why he has to be indoors. What if he's covered in fleas? Do birds get fleas?"

"Oh, we don't have to worry about that," I said at once, before I could stop myself. "He's magical. He doesn't get parasites or diseases or anything."

Mum stared at me in stunned silence. I winced. Across the kitchen, the crow smacked a wing over his eyes.

"Magical," said Mum. She looked uncertain, like she wasn't sure whether to play along as she used to when I was six or call my doctor and ask if the medication she'd prescribed had any peculiar side effects we should know about.

It had been a long day. I'd had school and Mum had been working, and then we'd had to go straight to the doctor for my monthly "How are things going?" appointment, then to the supermarket, then to the food bank to drop off what we'd bought, and then, finally, back home. So we were both tired, and Pip could really have chosen his timing better, but it was too late to just breeze past it now.

It was time to tell Mum everything.

"Okay," I said, collapsing into one of the chairs at the table. I pointed at the crow. "This is Pip."

"Isn't that what you named your imaginary friend when you were little?" Mum asked, eyeing Pip like she wasn't entirely comfortable with me sitting so close to him.

I nodded. "This is him."

"You mean you've named the crow Pip, too?"

"No, I mean this is that Pip. My Pip."

Mum stared at me. I stared back. She sighed. "Kiki, I would really prefer not to adopt a crow as a pet, but I'm willing to consider it if you're really attached to him. You don't have to make things up."

"But I'm not," I said, wondering if it was going to be possible to convince her. "Mum, I promise. I'm not making this up, and it's not the mela-thingy that Dr. Muzembe gave me to help me sleep, either."

"Melatonin," she corrected me automatically.

I looked at Pip. His black crow eyes twinkled at me, full of mischief. "You could at least wave or something," I said to him, exasperated. "You're the one who came out here instead of hiding in my room like we agreed. The least you can do is help me prove you're not a normal crow!"

With an obliging ruffle of his feathers, Pip raised one wing and waved at Mum.

Mum blinked. "Did he just-"

Perking up, because this was maybe my best way to make Mum believe the impossible, I said, "Pip, hop from one foot to the other."

Pip hopped from one foot to the other. Mum's eyes widened.

"Do that thing you did on my birthday last month."

Pip opened his beak and, puffing his chest out, started to make the most horrible cawing noises. Somewhere in the cacophony, though, was the unmistakable tune of the "Happy Birthday" song.

By this point, Mum's eyes were practically popping right out of her head. She stared at Pip for a full minute before turning back to me. "Okay," she said in the voice of someone who has just been clonked on the head. "Explain."

"You have to promise to stay calm."

"I think that's a bit much to ask, don't you?"

"Fair enough." I bit my lip. Pip hopped onto my shoulder. "So the thing is . . ."

Back in October, the morning after I came out of my sketchbook world and back into the real world, I'd told Mum the truth about my worrying. I had told her how bad it had gotten, how I couldn't sleep because my brain was so noisy, how ugly and frightening and persistent some of my thoughts were-all of it. When I was done, I'd asked for help, and Mum had given it to me. She'd taken me to our doctor, who had put me on a waiting list for children's mental health services. While we waited, Dr. Muzembe had prescribed me melatonin to help me sleep and had suggested a few techniques I could try when things got bad.

Since then, the anxiousness and obsessive thoughts hadn't gone away, and I had been told repeatedly that they probably never would, but I felt like they were easier to cope with. Weirdly enough, just being able to talk about how I was feeling, without feeling ashamed or guilty like I used to, had made me feel a whole lot better. The melatonin helped me sleep at night. And Mum was always there for me.

But I'd never told her about the sketchbook, my made-up kingdom, or Mahishasura. It had been awful keeping such an exciting secret to myself, but what else could I have done? Sprung it on her over dinner one evening? Mother, I created a magical kingdom in my sketchbook, and a demon king from Indian folklore brought it to life, so then I had to travel into my sketchbook kingdom to stop him and save everyone, which I did by using my really cool pencil magic and trapping the demon king in a collapsing palace. This pasta is really yummy, by the way.

Yeah, I wouldn't have believed me, either.

But now that Pip had taken matters into his own wings, and had also given me the closest thing to proof I could offer, I could tell her.

So I did.

By the time I was done, Mum had the oddest look on her face. She had looked bemused, appalled, and entertained at different points of my tale, almost like she'd let herself get swept up in what sounded like an awfully fun story, but this expression was something else. I couldn't find a name for it.

"Mum?" I prompted, when she didn't say anything. "Are you okay?"

A tiny smile lifted the corners of her mouth. "It's a funny thing. You know I illustrate and animate other people's stories for work, but there was a time when I used to make up the stories, too. Around the time you were born, I had a sketchbook with my own made-up world."

"Really?"

"It wasn't much like yours, by the sounds of it," she said. "Your dad loved it. I think that's why I stopped after he, well, you know. After." After he died, she meant. Clearing her throat, Mum went on, in a different tone of voice, "And of course, my world wasn't real."

I grimaced. "You don't believe me."

"It's not that I don't believe you," she said. "I mean, considering that"-she gestured somewhat helplessly to Pip-"it's hard not to believe you. But it's also hard to accept that everything you just told me could have actually happened. You're asking me to believe that while I was asleep in my bed, you, my only child and the most important thing in the world to me, were in an entirely different universe, in grave danger, and I might never have seen you again."

I felt my cheeks heat with guilt. Mum had already lost my dad, and now I was telling her that she'd come really close to losing me, too. Maybe this was why the kids in stories never told their parents what they were up to (assuming they had parents, or parents they actually liked, which was by no means a given). As someone who was a little too familiar with what it felt like to worry about the people I loved, I felt terrible for making my mother worry about me.

"But it's over now," I said. "I'm safe. And the gateway between the two worlds is sealed, so I can never go back."

"You don't sound happy about that," she said shrewdly.

I shrugged.

Mum looked at Pip, who had his beak in an open bag of donuts on the counter, and then back at me. "And you're saying all this really happened?"

I could tell she still didn't totally believe me. To be fair, it was a lot to ask of someone.

"You can look through my sketchbook if you like?" I offered.

"I'd love to," she said. She kept blinking, like she was quite sure she was going to wake up from a dream at any moment. Considering I'd fainted-actually, literally fainted-when I first arrived in my made-up universe, I thought she was handling it pretty well. "Why don't I put a pizza in the oven while you fetch it?"

Once dinner was ready, we sat back down at the table and she leafed through my sunshine-yellow sketchbook, forgetting entirely about her half of the pizza. She didn't even notice that Pip kept edging closer and closer to it.

"These are beautiful, Kiki," Mum said, gently running her fingers over one of my early sketches of Ashwini. "There are some things I can teach you, to improve your technique with poses and shading, but no one can teach heart. And your art has so much heart."

I blushed, my mouth too full of pizza to reply. Mum fell silent again as she reached the last fifth or so of the sketchbook, where my actual art stopped and the final pages became a re-creation of my time in the other world. Here, the drawings looked like an animated movie, the colors vivid and almost unreal, the pages almost breathing. Her eyes grew wide, like she could feel the magic that still lingered in the book.

"I think I'm going to need to sleep on this," she said at last. "This is a lot."

"Okay," I said. "We can talk about this whenever you want."

But before she handed back the sketchbook, she said, her eyes searching mine, "This is what got you through all those months, isn't it? Before I realized how bad things were?"

I hated that she blamed herself for not seeing how hideous I'd been feeling. How could she have seen it when I had made a choice to hide it? But I knew better than to argue with her. ("I'm your mother," she'd said the last time I'd tried. "I should have seen it.")

So I just nodded. "That sketchbook saved me."

"Okay," she said, and kissed me on the top of my head.

I helped her with the dishes, took my melatonin, and went to bed. And slept.

It was so nice to be able to sleep!

The next morning, Pip was in a weird mood. As I got dressed for school, I noticed him pecking repeatedly at my sketchbook. The sketchbook, as opposed to the new unmagical sketchbook I'd been doodling in for the past couple of months.

"What are you doing?" I demanded. "Do you want me to open it?"

He gave a caw that sounded like yes.

I huffed and opened the sketchbook, flipping through it until Pip nipped at my hand to stop me. I flicked him irritably on the beak as I withdrew my hand. He'd made me stop at a fully inked, colored drawing of Lej, who was scowling at something or the other. Probably me. It was one of the pages from the "when Kiki was in Mysore" section of the book.

Pip put one foot over the page to make sure it stayed open and fluffed his wings in satisfaction.

"That's what you wanted?" I asked. "You wanted to look at Lej, of all people?"

But as soon as I said it, I knew it was a silly thing to say. Lej and I hadn't exactly been the best of friends, but Pip had grown up with him and had loved him. Maybe he just wanted to see his face again. He'd chosen to leave the Kiki universe at the same time I did so that he could stay with me, and I knew he missed his family.

"Okay," I said more gently, picking up my satchel. "I'll leave it open for you."

But when I got back from school that afternoon, Pip wasn't the only Crow in my bedroom.

Lej was there, too.