kiki was born in nyc. on her mother’s birthday, to be exact. july 5th. she loved skyscrapers and watched them like a hawk through the chain-link fence of her preschool’s rooftop playground. she cried as they receded from her airplane window the day her family moved to palo alto.

northern california was nice. warm. sheltered. but her dreams were dark and twisted. she’d imagine herself lost inside labyrinthine subway stations, abandoned by her mom on concrete, graffitied streets of a fictional new york. she couldn’t sleep with the lights off. she couldn’t sleep alone, curling up at the end of her parents’ king bed each night until she turned 11. her dad bought her a blue-and-white feathered dreamcatcher. he hung it over her bed and told her that’s where the bad dreams could go. and it worked for a while. placebo effect.

around that time, she befriended a girl named avery. they loved to play pretend, building imaginary worlds like sandcastles. they were princesses and sisters, but avery was cursed with metamorphosis, so at times she was also kiki’s pet. a rabbit-and-dog-like creature named wishbone. the two rode dragons around the universe and solved quests handed out by a wise, prophetic owl named serberus.

one thing avery made clear was that this world they had built was real. realer than the one they inhabited. realer than palo alto. that the king and queen of this imaginary kingdom were their true parents. and that all other imaginary worlds crafted by classmates on the playground weren’t the same. those were fake. those were just kids playing pretend.