Sometimes, when Bianca was especially bored, she’d pull up Leila’s secret Instagram account, the one Leila thought no one knew about. Almost all the accounts she followed were crafting, homesteading, or family accounts, all of them with this weird, muted color palette of sad beige.
Who is Leila Mazanderani? Bianca wanted to know. And why is she obsessed with dresses that make everyone look Amish? She thought of her sister, of the way her eyes had flashed red, and how she had seemed too exhausted to even speak. It had felt good caring for her in a way that Bianca hadn’t been able to all these years. Maybe this was the start of something new, a chapter where they might not be besties or anything like that but at least someone they could each rely on. Tonight, she’d spend more time researching how to exorcise djinn out of a loved one.
Her phone buzzed. I KNEW HE WAS A SCUMBAG, the text read. She quickly opened the message.
Bianca gasped. It was a photo of Foster and a girl from the volleyball team, the two of them hiding behind the school’s equipment room as they sucked each other’s faces off, practically dry humping. June must have been grabbing scores and stumbled upon them in the act.
Bianca wondered what she should do with this new information.
If she and Leila hadn’t just had their serious djinn bonding experience, she would have pocketed the information and secretly gloated over her sister. But Bianca could feel the iron weight of her ring on her finger, could feel the thrum of excitement she’d earned after successfully fighting a ghul. She felt closer to her sister in this moment than she had in years. Surely, she owed her the truth?
Besides, Leila deserved better than Foster Hutchins.
Just then, she heard a thump come from Leila’s room. “Gah!” Leila cried, her voice muffled.
“Leila?” Bianca knocked on their shared wall. “You okay?”
“What?” Leila asked. Her voice sounded rough and strained, as if she’d been screaming. Bianca pushed open Leila’s door and stilled.
Her sister looked horrible. Despite the glowing skin and golden-flecked eyes, Leila looked wretched, as if she’d spent the last half hour thrashing in bed. Does she already know? Bianca wondered. Did someone else tell her about Foster?
“What is it?” Leila said gruffly. Bianca was taken aback: Leila might be aloof, but she was never rude.
“Are you okay?” Bianca asked. She was getting worried now. Leila breathed heavily, her eyes wild with panic. What was going on?
“What’s that?” Leila asked, pointing to the photo Bianca had kept up on her phone. Crap, Bianca thought. Maybe now is not the best time to show her.
“Oh, this? Nothing, it’s — ”
Leila snatched the phone out of Bianca’s hand. She didn’t seem like Leila at all. Is she the djinn right now?
Leila stared mutely at the screen in her hand like it was playing a movie that she wasn’t watching. It was clear she was seeing this information for the first time.
Bianca shifted uncomfortably. “Do you… do you want to talk about it?” That’s what sisters say to each other, right?
Leila blinked, as if having forgotten Bianca was there.
“Talk?” Leila sneered, her face doing a one-eighty. Suddenly, all the energy in her face came roaring back, the fire seeping into her skin. Leila never, ever raised her voice, but in this moment, she had clearly reached a breaking point. “After four years of the silent treatment, you suddenly want to talk ?” she spat.
Bianca held up her hands defensively. Maybe Leila was just feeling vulnerable after being cheated on, especially since the information had come from her. Plus, she had just had a supernatural run-in with a djinn this week. Bianca couldn’t blame her for freaking out, but still, this wasn’t her fault.
“Whoa, I’m sorry! I just… I wanted to help.”
“First you ditch me in eighth grade for not being cool enough, and now you want to talk about boy problems?” Leila almost screamed. Flames popped up on her arms, more like welts than fires.
Bianca took a step back, shocked. “What are you talking about? You ditched ME!” She knew she wasn’t being fair. Knew her sister wasn’t entirely herself. But still, those memories were Leila’s, not the djinn’s. Whatever was happening to her must have pushed them to the surface.
Leila scoffed. It was a cruel, caustic sound.
It was Bianca’s turn to get mad now. “You hated that I wanted to listen to weird music and watch random movies and be loud! You HATE that I want to leave this shitty town! You’re the one who got popular and left me!”
They’d finally said it out loud: their reason for the aching chasm between them. Bianca had thought it would feel good to have it out in the open, especially after years of tiptoeing around each other. Instead, she just felt even angrier, the pain of Leila’s indifference and cold shoulder after all these years boiling over.
She stared at her twin, at her long hair that she curled with old-school fabric scraps every night, at the gingham shirt she wore, at the way her nails were painted blush pink to match her lip gloss. How could I have ever thought we were growing closer?
“You used to like the way I dressed, Bee,” Leila whispered, as if registering Bianca’s disgust with her outfit. “You even used to wear the same clothes as me. And then suddenly, they weren’t good enough.”
Bianca’s heart broke. This was too much. She hadn’t asked for this, hadn’t thought that one afternoon of trying to be a normal sister and do the right thing would become a referendum on Bianca’s behavior for the past four years.
“Good luck with your boyfriend,” was all Bianca said, snatching back her phone.
Then she closed the door, walked into her room, and sobbed silently into her pillow. Even if I figure out how to exorcise the djinn, Bianca thought miserably, my own twin will still hate me.
Bianca woke up the next morning, her first day of winter break, with a strange, wet feeling on her toe. Her eyes were puffy and tight from crying all night, but this feeling on her feet was different.
“Mmmfff,” she said, rolling over, dismissing it as a dream. But her roll was stopped. She couldn’t move her leg. She cracked an eye open, her face painfully swollen.
There, on the edge of her bed, was a plump, scarlet-colored demon sucking on her toes with one extremely long tongue.
She screamed, then morphed the scream into a yelp. If she woke up her parents, would this thing attack them, too?
Bianca tried to kick the demon off her feet, silently and furiously. It was no use; it was like its tongue was cemented to her foot.
“Be gone, you beast!” Bianca whispered angrily. She pushed the iron ring at the monster and felt it pulse with heat. The second the ring got close, the thing unlatched and whimpered.
“But your flesh tastes bessst,” the small man moaned sadly, horns jutting out of his head.
“Did you not hear me? Get the hell out of here!” she whisper-shouted. Then she yanked her ring off her finger and threw it straight at the demon’s red skin.
Pffft, hisss!
Bianca watched, satisfied, as the monster evaporated into steam, leaving a crusty silhouette on her carpet.
“Gross.” Bianca tried not to retch. She hoped she hadn’t woken anyone. If Leila had heard anything through their shared wall, she certainly hadn’t rushed over to help.
Bianca hobbled to their bathroom, careful not to let her slimy toes touch the ground. She stuck her foot under the faucet, where she scrubbed furiously, all the while whispering, “Gross, gross, ack, blergh, yuck!” to herself.
Once she had rubbed each foot raw, she dove back under the covers and got out her laptop. She’d get carpet cleaner when everyone else was awake.
“Palis are a kind of djinn that enjoy sucking on the toes of their victims, slowly devouring them from the feet up.”
“A pali!” she exclaimed. That’s right, she had read about those.
Bianca launched out of her bed and inspected the rug where the pali had been. Whatever jewelry Bianca wore, it clearly hadn’t been strong enough to prevent the djinn from sneaking into her room and attacking her feet. Her ring and necklace sat on the upper half of her body. Would she need to wear something on her feet to protect her lower half too?
She began googling things that could protect her from evil spirits, which led her down an occult rabbit hole. Esfand, a kind of incense she was pretty sure they had somewhere in the house, helped ward away evil spirits; bright red colors and fruits helped, and so did reciting certain du’as from the Quran. Bianca wrote them all down as she began the process of turning her bedroom into a djinn death trap. Should she place wards throughout the rest of the house too?
But then what will happen to Leila? Isn’t she… Doesn’t she have…? If she concentrated on her ring hard enough, she could feel something, some kind of warmth from the room next door. She shivered.
Bianca couldn’t face the fact that her sister now had something in common with the creature who had just licked her foot like a lollipop. It was enough to make her pity Leila, despite their huge blowup yesterday. Maybe her powers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, Bianca realized.
She snapped her laptop shut. She would djinn-proof her room and her parents’, nothing more.
Just then a text message from June buzzed through. You wanna go to the bonfire party tonight? Liam’s begging me to, but I won’t go if you don’t.
She thought for a second. Normally over winter break she would hunker down into a reading spree. But the thought of being at home with Leila after their fight was not appealing.
Count me in, Bianca replied.