But Orman had already taken root in my heart and was under my arm, begging to be reread—begging me to forget the dripping faucet and empty driveway and football games and to run away to a world with problems much greater and more fantastical than my own.

Come away, come away, it whispered.

I went gladly.

The story follows two sisters, Emmeline and Ainsley, as they discover a hidden realm, adjacent to our world, full of old prophecies and whispering forests. Emmeline has always been the quieter, meeker of the sisters, but when a drop of her blood soaks into the forest floor, the Old Laws bind her as ruler of the realm, making outgoing, take-charge Ainsley incredibly jealous.

Things only get worse when Ainsley finds out that she, not Emmeline, is the ruler that has been foretold in Orman for centuries, and their rivalry rages, with an entire world hanging in the balance.

But just as the tension between them is about to snap, they’re yanked back into the modern world, with televisions and air-conditioning and green vans that leave and never come back. The Old Laws, it turns out, do not take kindly to outsiders—even prophesied outsiders—staying in Orman forever.

The story ends with Emmeline and Ainsley on the carpet of their bedroom floor, staring at each other in fury and confusion, not knowing why or how they have been exiled from Orman—or if they will ever return.

A few months later, on an uncharacteristically cold Texas night in December, I gave the book to Jenna. It was the same night she told me her parents had begun to make dinner reservations for four without thinking.

“Welcome to the family,” she deadpanned, like it wasn’t the best thing in the world. “You, too, are now required to spend your free time sitting through Dad’s corny jokes and Mom’s complaints about work between bites of overly salted chips and salsa.”

After my emotions quieted to somewhere between elation at being engulfed into a complete and whole family and despair that my own would not miss me, I took The Forest Between the Sea and the Sky from my backpack and set it on the pillow beside her.

“Read this,” I said. “It’s perfect.”

“Nothing’s perfect,” Jenna said.

“This is.”

Jenna stayed up reading long after I pretended to fall asleep. In the hazy quiet, I fretted that the book would not grip her like it had me, and then where would we be? Would she think it was too childish? Would she think I was too childish and not want to be friends anymore?

But if there was someone I should have trusted, it was Jenna.

“Ainsley,” she told me without preamble when I opened my eyes the next morning. “I side with Ainsley. You?”