When she’d made the bargain, she’d thought only Ben would go away, not that she’d have to go with him. Not that the whole family would go.

“Think about all the takeout we can get,” their mother had said, clearly remembering her favorite restaurants from when she was in art school. “We can have bowls of pho one night and tacos the next and injera with doro wat after that.”

Hazel had made a face. “I don’t want to eat any of those things. I don’t even know what they are.”

“Then think about your brother,” their father had told her, not particularly sternly, ruffling Hazel’s hair fondly as if he thought she was being adorably childish. “Wouldn’t you want him to support you if you were following your dream?”

“My dream is to go back home,” Hazel had said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“You just haven’t found the thing that you’re good at yet,” her mother said, smiling. And that was that.

Hazel knew what she was good at; she just didn’t know how to explain it. That’s not true, she wanted to say. I’m good at killing monsters. But her mother didn’t need to know that, and it would be foolish to say it. Mom might be horrified or scared. Mom might start paying attention to where she went and what she did. Besides, it was a delicious secret. She liked thinking of it almost as much as she’d liked the weight of her blade in her hand.

And if there was another part of her that wished her parents were the kind who might protect her from needing to kill monsters all on her own, at eleven she already knew that was unrealistic. It wasn’t as if her parents didn’t love her; it was just that they forgot things a lot and sometimes those things were important.

Which meant for two years, Ben learned to play different instruments (including wineglasses and a tuba) at the fancy school, while Hazel learned a new skill—how to be an unrepentant flirt.

Hazel wasn’t the best in her classes, nor was she the worst. She might have been good at a sport, but she never bothered to try out for one. Instead, after school, she signed up for self-defense classes at the Y and practiced techniques she learned from YouTube videos of sword fighting. But, at twelve, Hazel discovered something she was weirdly better at than other people—making boys squirm.

She’d look at boys and smile if they caught her looking.

She’d twirl her red curls around her finger and bite her lip.

She’d prop up her boobs with her arm, the desk, or one of the new underwire bras she persuaded Mom to buy for her—all of them silky and brightly colored.

She’d tell people she was doing badly in all her classes—once or twice because it was true and then chronically when it wasn’t.

Flirting didn’t mean anything to her. There was no plan, no goal. It was just a little rush, just a way to be seen in a place where it would be easy to drown in invisibility. She never meant to hurt anyone. She had no idea that was even possible. She was twelve and bored and really didn’t know what she was doing.

While she was flirting, Ben was falling in love for the first time, with a boy named Kerem Aslan. They met every day after school to whisper together over their homework and sneak kisses when they thought no one else was looking. Sometimes Ben would play snippets of a song he was working on, a thing he’d never done with anyone but Hazel before. She still remembered the way she’d seen Ben trace the boy’s name along his arm in water. Aslan, like the lion from Narnia. Kerem looked a little bit like a lion, too, with golden-brown eyes and shaggy black hair.

Hazel and Ben went from having everything in common to having nearly nothing. They went to different schools, had different friends, different stories, different everything. Hazel was miserable, and Ben had never been happier.

But then Kerem’s family found out about the relationship and his parents called to have a horrible awkward talk with Dad and Dad hung up on them. And Ben cried at the kitchen table, head buried in his folded arms, no matter how many times Dad hugged him and told him it was going to be okay.

“It’s not,” he whispered, insisting he would never feel any less miserable than he did in that moment. He insisted his heart was broken forever.

At lunch the next day Ben texted Hazel to say that Kerem had been avoiding him and talking shit to their mutual friends. After her classes were over, Hazel decided to walk to his school instead of going straight home. She knew his last period was a long individual study on the flute. After that, they could go get gelato at the place that poured a shot of espresso over it and maybe Ben would cheer up.

No one stopped her from going in; she slipped past the security guard and headed down the hall to the bench next to the music room. Perched there, she was surprised to see Kerem Aslan of the lion eyes and lion name walking down the hall toward her.

“Hey, little sister,” he said. “You look pretty today.”

Hazel smiled. It was automatic, half a reaction to a compliment and half the familiarity of smiling at him. She’d smiled at him a thousand times before.

“You know I always liked you. Whenever I came over to the apartment, I’d ask if you wanted to come hang out with us, but Ben said that you were busy. He said you had a boyfriend.” Kerem sounded as if he was flirting, but there was something in his face too close to fear for the words to be convincing.

“That’s not true,” Hazel said. She’d seen him and Ben, heads bent together as they whispered and laughed, oblivious to the rest of the world.

“So you don’t have a boyfriend?” Kerem asked. She could tell from his tone that he was misunderstanding her on purpose, but it still flustered her.

“No, I mean—” she began.

And then, with a sideways glance down the hall, he leaned in and kissed her.

It was her first kiss, outside of grandmas and elderly aunts, outside of parents and brothers, despite all the flirting she’d done. His mouth was soft and warm, and while she didn’t kiss him back, she didn’t exactly squirm away.

It wasn’t nice, her hesitation. It lasted only a moment, but it ruined everything.

“Stop it,” she said, shoving him. Some other musical-prodigy kids looked over. A teacher came out of her classroom and asked if everything was okay. Hazel’s voice must have been louder than she’d thought.

But everything wasn’t okay, because Ben was staring at them. Then there was only the sight of her brother’s backpack, the heels of his black Chucks, and the slam of the music room door.

“You did that on purpose,” Hazel accused. “You wanted him to see.”

“I told you I liked you,” Kerem said, raising his eyebrows, but he didn’t sound all that triumphant.

Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking as she waited for Ben outside his classroom, listening to the strains of music that escaped the soundproofing. She wanted to tell her brother what really happened, explain that she hadn’t wanted to be kissed. But she didn’t get the chance, because a few minutes later his music instructor collapsed from a myocardial infarction that nearly killed her. The paramedics came, with Ben and Hazel’s parents arriving soon after. Ben wouldn’t talk to anyone, not then, not on the way home.

He’d played music when he was upset, when he was probably angry, and his instructor’s heart had stopped. Hazel knew he must be blaming himself. Hazel knew he must be blaming the magic, and she knew he must be blaming her.