Dahlia has lived in our universe as an immortal for centuries. She has a soft spot for this universe - all the good and all the bad - and has made the best of an admittedly bad situation. Her universe? It...went through some things, but who cares, w...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"WHAT DO YOU mean, you lost the tickets?" Veena shrieked at me.
A lesser person might have cowered. A lesser person might have wet their pants. As it was, the two humans we were with looked like they wanted to be anywhere but there. I honestly couldn't blame them. I may have felt just a teeny bit the same way.
"I didn't lose them!" I yelled back at my sister. "My bag was stolen!"
"Your naivety amazes me sometimes, Dahlia. It absolutely stupefies me."
"Thank you for managing to be condescending at full volume. My ears appreciate it."
"You know what? I'm so done with you." She threw her hands up for good measure. "I'm going out for a smoke."
She yanked open the door of our motel room and stomped outside, slamming it shut behind her. Yup, Veena was in A Mood. And this was crazy, because it felt like we were regressing to human teenage girls. It was beginning to feel that way all the time. Like I was a kid sister forever trailing after her older, infinitely cooler sister. Veena and I had never been this way when we were in our world, and I didn't know how to stop us from being this way. Maybe it was a side effect of being here.
"Do you see what I have to deal with?" I muttered at Gemma and Cassie, who were digging through piles of clothing on the bed they were sharing.
Gemma and Cassie, two sisters we'd met as they backpacked across Europe two years ago, were from England and didn't seem to ever raise their voices above forty decibels. By contrast, Veena and I were microphones connected to the biggest subwoofers.
"You can't help that someone stole your bag," Cassie, the younger sister, said to me as she picked up a slinky black knee-length number and experimentally held it to her body. Her blonde hair was cropped at her pointy chin, highlighting her heart-shaped face. Tall and slender, she was often thought to be older than her twenty-five years, which often irked her.
"But you have to admit that it does suck that all of our tickets were in there," Gemma grumbled. She pulled her curly brown hair into a ponytail and went to stand in front of the mirror outside the bathroom door, turning from side to side to see how she looked in Cass's purple, strapless dress. "This is Prince, Dahlia. It's not like we can buy tickets at the door like he's – I don't know – Vanilla Ice. They're all sold out."
"You don't think I feel shitty about it?" I said to her. "We came all this way for nothing."
Veena and I had flown in from Paris – although I'd made an earlier trip weeks before to purchase those tickets – while the Hudson sisters had arrived from the UK. "Shitty" was an understatement for how I was feeling right about then, but how was I supposed to know that there would be some dirty thief on the prowl in the women's restroom at the airport? I'd camped for hours just to get my hands on those tickets, and now, they were gone. I hoped the thief ended up with an ear infection.
