Now, Aru tried not to shrink under Poppy’s blue-eyed gaze. “My mom had a top secret mission with the museum. She couldn’t take me.”

That was partly true. Her mom never took her on work trips.

Burton threw down the green penny. “You cheated me. I gave you two bucks!”

“And you got a vintage penny—” started Aru.

Arielle cut her off. “We know you’re lying, Aru Shah. That’s what you are: a liar. And when we go back to school, we’re going to tell everyone—”

Aru’s insides squished. When she’d started at Augustus Day School last month, she’d been hopeful. But that had been short-lived.

Unlike the other students, she didn’t get driven to school in a sleek black car. She didn’t have a home “offshore.” She didn’t have a study room or a sunroom, just a room, and even she knew that her room was really more like a closet with delusions of grandeur.

But what she did have was imagination. Aru had been daydreaming her whole life. Every weekend, while she waited for her mom to come home, she would concoct a story: her mother was a spy, an ousted princess, a sorceress.

Her mom claimed she never wanted to go on business trips, but they were a necessity to keep the museum running. And when she came home and forgot about things—like Aru’s chess games or choir practice—it wasn’t because she didn’t care, but because she was too busy juggling the state of war and peace and art.

So at Augustus Day School, whenever the other kids asked, Aru told tales. Like the ones she told herself. She talked about cities she’d never visited and meals she’d never eaten. If she arrived with scuffed-up shoes, it was because her old pair had been sent to Italy for repair. She’d mastered that delicate condescending eyebrow everyone else had, and she deliberately mispronounced the names of stores where she bought her clothes, like the French Tar-Jay, and the German Vahl-Mahrt. If that failed, she’d just sniff and say, “Trust me, you wouldn’t recognize the brand.”

And in this way, she had fit in.

For a while, the lies had worked. She’d even been invited to spend a weekend at the lake with Poppy and Arielle. But Aru had ruined everything the day she was caught sneaking from the car-pool line. Arielle had asked which car was hers. Aru pointed at one, and Arielle’s smile turned thin. “That’s funny. Because that’s my driver’s car.”

Arielle was giving Aru that same sneer now.

“You told us you have an elephant,” said Poppy.

Aru pointed at the stone elephant behind her. “I do!”

“You said that you rescued it from India!”

“Well, Mom said it was salvaged from a temple, which is fancy talk for rescue—”

“And you said you have a cursed lamp,” said Arielle.

Aru saw the red light on Burton’s phone: steady and unblinking. He was recording her! She panicked. What if the video went online? She had two possible choices: 1) She could hope the universe might take pity on her and allow her to burst into flames before homeroom, or 2) She could change her name, grow a beard, and move away.

Or, to avoid the situation entirely…

She could show them something impossible.

“The cursed lamp is real,” she said. “I can prove it.”

Oops

It was four p.m. when Aru and her three classmates walked together into the Hall of the Gods.

Four p.m. is like a basement. Wholly innocent in theory. But if you really think about a basement, it is cement poured over restless earth. It has smelly, unfinished spaces, and wooden beams that cast too-sharp shadows. It is something that says almost, but not quite. Four p.m. feels that way, too. Almost, but not quite afternoon anymore. Almost, but not quite evening yet. And it is the way of magic and nightmares to choose those almost-but-not-quite moments and wait.

“Where’s your mom, anyway?” asked Poppy.

“In France,” said Aru, trying to hold her chin up. “I couldn’t go with her because I had to take care of the museum.”

“She’s probably lying again,” said Burton.

“She’s definitely lying. That’s the only thing she’s good at,” said Arielle.

Aru wrapped her arms around herself. She was good at lots of things, if only people would notice. She was good at memorizing facts she had heard just once. She was good at chess, too, to the point where she might have gone to the state championship if Poppy and Arielle hadn’t told her Nobody joins chess, Aru. You can’t do that. And so Aru had quit the chess team. She used to be good at tests, too. But now, every time she sat down to take a test, all she could think of was how expensive the school was (it was costing her mom a fortune), and how everyone was judging her shoes, which were popular last year but not this year. Aru wanted to be noticed. But she kept getting noticed for all the wrong reasons.

“I thought you said you had a condo downtown, but this dump was the address in the school directory,” sniffed Arielle. “So you actually live in a museum?”

Yep.

“No? Look around—do you see my room?”

It’s upstairs….

“If you don’t live here, then why are you wearing pajamas?”

“Everyone wears pj’s during the daytime in England,” said Aru.