Bea shook her head. And for some reason, perhaps because I could see that now she was as distressed at imparting this twist of information as Scarlet was at receiving it, I knew she was telling the truth.
“We’ll stop dreaming so often. We’ll stop believing in anything else, except what we can see, what we can touch on Earth. We’ll start to think Everwhere was just a childish dream.”
“No,” Liyana pleaded. “That’s not true.”
Bea said nothing, and in her silence my sisters finally saw she wasn’t teasing, wasn’t saying something to shock or disturb us. Otherwise she’d goad and gloat, but Bea’s smile had gone as she realized she valued this place, and her sisters, as much as we all did.
In that moment I saw Bea’s beating heart, the one she pretended she didn’t have, the one she tried to make us believe was impenetrable but was actually no different from our own exposed and tender eight-year-old hearts. In the next moment, Bea reclaimed her sly smile and seemed to be sucking on her next sentence like sweets she wouldn’t share, not until we begged. No surprises for guessing who did.
“What?” Liyana asked. “What is it?”
Bea licked her lips—an especially delicious sweet. “We will come back,” she said, stretching the gaps between each word for dramatic effect. “When we turn eighteen.”
“Eighteen?” We all echoed this word, even me.
“But why? Why so long?” Liyana said, as if further begging could get Bea to change the facts, to reduce the wait.
“Are you sure?” Scarlet broke the silence, a note of desperation in her voice I’d not heard before. “Are you sure it’s eighteen?”
This was so far from being tomorrow, or next week, that it seemed an eternity.
“I don’t know,” Bea admitted, this now seeming the most painful admission of all. “It’s a coming-of-age thing.”
“A what?” Liyana said.
“It’s . . .” Bea trailed off, unwilling to reveal the limits of her omniscience. “Mamá explained, I can’t exactly remember right now. Anyway, that’s not the point—”
“Then what is the point?” Scarlet spat, clearly still grasping at the dwindling possibility that Bea was lying.
“The point is that we’ll see each other again.”
“But how do you know? You said”—Liyana was accusing—“You said this place was infinite. So how will we find each other again after five years? It was only luck we found each other in the first place.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Bea laughed, delighted to have regained her superior position. “Did you really think that?” She looked to Scarlet and me. “Did you all think so too?”
Not one of us—Scarlet, Ana, or I—either confirmed or denied it. But Bea could tell.
“Oh, that’s hilarious,” she said, still giggling. “I can’t believe you all thought that. How utterly—”
“Stop it.” Scarlet waved her fire stick for emphasis. “Just explain.”
Bea sat up a little straighter. “I bet I can guess your birthdays.”
“All of us?” Liyana asked.
Bea nodded.
“Go on then,” Scarlet said.
Bea gave a slight sniff. “Halloween.”
I glanced at my sisters to see them staring at her open-mouthed, just as I was.
Bea waited like an actor taking her third bow, expecting another round of applause. But we were too shocked even for interrogation.
“We were born on the same day,” she explained, as if we were babies like Teddy, “at the same hour, the same minute.”
Liyana frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Even I don’t know the exact minute I was born,” Scarlet said. “So, how can you?”
Bea shrugged. “It’s true. Ask your mamás, if you don’t believe me. That’s why we found each other. There are hundreds of Sisters Grimm here right now, maybe thousands—”
“Sisters Grimm?” I echoed, struck by the words. It sounded so concrete, so real. An inescapable fate.
“Yeah,” Bea said, dismissing my interruption. “But we’re drawn to the ones born the same time as us. That’s why we met now and that’s how we’ll find each other again.”
We stared at her, still sceptical. Bea folded her arms, sat back, and regarded us with a triumphant grin. She had outdone herself.
Goldie
Bea might know a lot, but she didn’t know everything. True, I was born on Halloween, but that wasn’t the whole truth. I was born on the bridge across two days—my feet emerging a moment before midnight on the thirty-first of October and my head a moment after, just as the clock ticked into November. Two diametrical days: All Hallows’