The Chaos of Stars

I blush. No bedrooms. Stupid. I should go back to the museum. I’m not even that hungry. Tyler clearly already has a social life and doesn’t need me. I have no idea how to make friends.

“Rain check?” His eyes flit up and then back down, and relief floods through me. He makes me uncomfortable, and I don’t know why.

“Sure. Later!”

Eyes still on his notebook, he waves at us.

I follow Tyler across the rest of the bridge. “Ry’s great,” she says. “We’ll have to all hang out! You’ll meet Scott, my boyfriend, sooner or later. He’s a total nerd. Not as pretty as Ry, but fortunately for him I’m only mostly shallow.”

I shrug and smile. Doesn’t matter to me whether her boyfriend is as pretty as Ry. I don’t care about Ry. But that doesn’t stop me from obsessively re-creating his eyes in my memory, and trying to figure out if there’s any sort of non-crazy way to take a picture of him.

Just for the color palette.

I try to balance the cow-horn headdress, though my head still isn’t big enough for it and it keeps slipping down over my eyes. I’ll bet when I’m eleven it will fit.

I hold it on, looking at myself in the burnished copper of my mother’s mirror. In the blurred image that stares back at me, I can almost see myself as her, and it makes me feel pretty. I wonder what I’ll be the goddess of when I’m old enough for it. I think I’d like to be the goddess of animals. Maybe then Ubesti would purr more for me.

I stand, walking around the room with my back as straight as I can make it, holding the headdress and staring solemnly ahead.

“What are you doing?” a voice snaps, and I jump, startled into letting go of the headdress, which clatters to the ground.

“I was just—hi, Hathor. I was just . . . umm.” I blush, humiliated. My brother Horus and his wife, Hathor, are visiting, and even though he’s my brother he feels more like an uncle, because he’s old. Hathor is beautiful, but in a different way than Mother. Mother’s beauty is warm and safe. Hathor’s makes me feel small and ugly.

“That’s mine,” she hisses.

“No! I would never take anything of yours! It’s my mother’s.”

“Stupid girl. Your mother is the one who took it in the first place. It was mine. It is mine. I will never forget what Isis took from me.” She leans over and picks it up by the horns, the single polished disc of gold between the horns gleaming dully in the lantern light. “Mine,” she whispers, placing it on her own head, and I stumble back. Seeing it on her head makes me realize how stupid I must have looked, trying to wear it.

“Hathor,” my mother’s voice says, in the angry tone that gives me a headache. I turn around, waiting to get in trouble, but where my mother should be standing in the doorway is nothing but an outline, darkness blacker than night, emptier than the desert sky.

I close my eyes. I don’t want to see it. It shouldn’t be there, and I don’t want it to see me, either.

Chapter 5

Set murdered Osiris. Isis and Nephthys brought Osiris back from the dead, but once dead, he remained god of the underworld.

Set killed Horus. Isis used magic from Thoth to revive him.

Isis poisoned Amun-Re, only healing him once he divulged his true name and gave her and Horus power over him.

Horus used that power to defeat Set and become pharaoh-god of Egypt.

Nephthys wanted a child. Set was unable or unwilling to give her one, so she disguised herself as the more beautiful Isis and seduced Osiris.

Set and Osiris get together once a week to play board games.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I STARE AT SIRUS IN horror. He’s sitting at the table, eyes closed, mouth moving as he whispers to himself. And in front of him, in a notebook, he’s writing glyphs for the names of our parents.

He finishes, then looks at me and shrugs. “Remembering.”

“You still pray? You pray to our parents?” I can’t keep the disgust out of my voice. “You actually worship them. Floods, Sirus, what is wrong with you?”

“I’m not worshipping. I’m remembering.”

“The way Isis forced you to!”

“You would rather I pretend like I have no heritage? Pretend like I came from nowhere, from nothing? A lot of cultures revere their ancestors, Isadora. It’s not worship. It’s respect, and gratitude.”