Zip (22 page)

“How’s about I just grab you some water?” he said. “And then maybe we can order some pizza or something.”

We don’t have time to order pizza!
Lyssa wanted to scream. But she knew it would do no good, so she just nodded, tight-lipped.

Lenny pulled a glass out of the sink and rinsed it out, filling it halfway up with cloudy-looking water. Lyssa awkwardly set down her backpack, filled with the pieces of her broken scooter, and took the glass from him. When she looked into the glass, she saw there were bits of dirt floating on the surface

Maybe she wasn’t thirsty after all

She perched on top of the milk crate, balancing the
water glass on her knee. Her father sat down on the chair across from her. For a moment neither of them spoke. Lyssa turned her water glass to make the liquid inside swirl.

“I still have the scooter you made for me,” she blurted out after a minute, motioning to the silver pieces sticking out of her backpack

“That thing?” her father asked

“Well, it got a little broken,” Lyssa explained. “Maybe you could help me fix it? Since you made it and all…”

Lenny started laughing. “Sweetheart, I can’t even put together an Ikea coffee table! Your mom built that scooter. She used to come home every night after work and put that thing together. I thought she was crazy, but, well…you know how she can be. She gets those nutty ideas in her head. Got, I mean.”

A hard, tight ball formed in the back of Lyssa’s throat

“No,” she said, slowly. “You built it. Remember? Mom said you knew I’d be an adventurer, just like you.”

“Your mom said that, did she?” Lyssa’s father looked away, fixing his eye on a crack running through the wood paneling on his wall. “Well, she always did have quite an imagination.”

“No,”
Lyssa said, more insistent this time. What was Lenny saying? Her mom didn’t have crazy ideas—she didn’t have “quite an imagination.” She made things
happen—she filled the world with magic. Lyssa could feel the skin on her face turning red, could feel a headache building just behind her eyeballs. “You built me the scooter so it would remind me of you…so when you became famous and traveled around the world—”

“Famous?” Lenny interrupted. He had stopped laughing. Now he just looked sorry. He just shook his head. “Lyssa, where did you get an idea like that?”

“But…” Lyssa reached the end of her sentence, realizing she didn’t know where she expected it to go. She looked down at the pieces of scooter in her bag.

Her mom had been the one who said her dad built the scooter. Her mom had been the one who told her that her dad had left them to become famous, but here he was, sitting alone in a smelly little trailer in New Mexico

Lyssa shifted her eyes to her feet, not wanting to meet this man’s eyes. How was
this
better than living in Texas with the rest of his family, in a big house surrounded by flowers? How was this better than waking up to the smell of Ana’s herbal tea in the morning and kissing Lyssa before she fell asleep at night? If he hadn’t even gotten his dream, then what was the point of leaving in the first place?

It suddenly hit Lyssa: her father wasn’t famous. He hadn’t left to make music. He just left, for no good reason at all

Lenny leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Lyssa could hardly bring herself to look at him

“Listen,” he said. “It seems like you’re a far way from home. Didn’t your mom get married again? You know, before…” He cleared his throat, awkwardly. Apparently he didn’t like talking about what happened to Lyssa’s mom any more than she did. “Maybe you should give your stepdad a call and let him know you’re okay and tell him where you are. What do you say?”

Lyssa’s throat felt dry. She knew that she should object, that she should keep going—she was
so
close to home. But all she had to do was look around the trailer and a feeling of disappointment and loneliness swept over her like a wave. Everything she thought she knew was a lie. If it was magic that led her to her real father, it wasn’t trying to help her. Lyssa didn’t have any way of stopping the wrecking ball. She couldn’t possibly save her home.

Everything she’d thought she knew about her family, about the universe, was just wrong

Maybe it was time to give up

“You look a little nervous, kiddo,” Lenny said, smiling. “You worried your stepdad’s going to be mad? You want me to call for you?”

“Okay,” Lyssa said in a very small voice. “Make the call.”

H
er father—no,
Lenny—
gave her a small smile. He stood up, walking down the cramped hallway and into a room at the very back of the trailer. The room didn’t have a door, but there was a wooden partition that slid, accordion-like, across the hallway. Lenny had to wrestle it closed.

Lyssa shifted and the old wooden milk crate creaked beneath her weight. Her eyes settled on the red digits of the clock on the microwave. It was almost noon—and the demolition was scheduled for noon today. As she listened to the low rise and fall of Lenny’s voice on the phone in the other room, she watched the numbers on the clock change

11:58. 11:59. 12:00

Something inside Lyssa crumbled. She could almost hear the sound of the wrecking ball swinging into the big white porch that wrapped around her house, knocking down the dogwood tree in the front yard. Lyssa pictured the big tree’s roots being ripped from the earth. It felt like the same wrecking ball had swung into her chest. She hadn’t made it. She had failed

I’m sorry, Mom.

There was a shuffle outside the trailer, then the sound of footsteps. Lyssa stood up, almost knocking over the milk crate. Was someone here for her already? She shifted her eyes over to the far room, where Lenny was still talking on the phone. Wasn’t he even going to come out and say goodbye before they took her away?

A piece of paper slid beneath the front door, and Lyssa heard footsteps again—this time running away. Curious, Lyssa walked over and scooped the paper off the floor

It was a takeout menu for the Lucky Sun Dragon Chinese Restaurant. The pictures of kung pao chicken and crab wontons made Lyssa’s stomach rumble. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a full meal. Lyssa and her mom used to eat pineapple stir-fry all the time—they’d get it so spicy that it burned the tips of their tongues and, for the rest of the night, they could barely talk. Sometimes
her mom would even make little paper puppets using spare chopsticks and napkins and they’d have a puppet show after dinner. Her mom could make the puppets talk without ever moving her lips…

Lyssa felt another pang. She couldn’t think about her mom now. Not after Lyssa had failed her so badly

Something slipped out of the folded menu and dropped onto the toe of her sneaker. She bent down to pick it up

The little blue paper airplane. Its wings were broken and torn, and there was so much dirt smudged over the paper that it hardly looked blue anymore

For a second Lyssa just stared at it, shocked. She checked the back pocket of her jeans, where she thought she’d been keeping the airplane all along, but the pocket was empty. She ran her thumb across the message on the airplane’s wing

There’s no place like home.

Home. Even if her home had been demolished, it was still
hers
—that little piece of land belonged to her mom, belonged to both of them. If her mother’s magic was anywhere in this world, it was in that land, not in some old motel hot tub off the highway, or at the Spiral Jetty, or here. Maybe there was darker magic in the world—but only good magic could come from that little patch of ground in Texas.

Lyssa looked down at the paper airplane and, suddenly, it felt like someone had adjusted the color on a television set. Everything around her looked brighter and felt clearer. This tiny airplane had been through just as much as she had—it too had been lost and forgotten, it’d been through thunderstorms and whirlpools and that fight with Old Marty the cat. But even though it had been nearly destroyed, the plane was still trying to make its way home.

And Lyssa was just sitting here. Waiting for the police to come and take her back to Michael

She had to go home, even if her home was nothing more than a pile of dirt by the time she got there

Lights flashed blue and red through the thin curtains covering the trailer windows. Lyssa stood, brushed away the curtains, and peered outside

There was a police car parked at the curb, and a man with little hair and a lot of stomach eased his way out of the driver’s seat. As he headed toward the trailer, everything about him bounced, from his stomach to his cheeks to the bad, blond toupee

Watching him approach, Lyssa had only one thought: I could outrun
him
.

She swallowed and backed away from the door. Maybe she had missed the Texas Talent Show’s performance and her chance to do anything to stop the demolition, but she
couldn’t give up on reaching Austin or seeing her mom’s garden again. Maybe all the flowers would be covered with rubble, but the garden would still be there, hidden beneath the wreckage
Though we travel far away, we leave our roots behind,
her mom had said. Roots were buried far beneath the ground. They couldn’t be destroyed with a wrecking ball.

“Lyssa?” Lenny called

Lyssa ducked behind a chair as he forced the partition back open and walked into the room

“Lyssa, I called Michael and get this—he’s in Utah looking around for you right now! Someone spotted you along the way and called in a tip. He told me to call the police to come pick you up…”

Lyssa picked up her backpack, searching the room for an escape route. There was an open window on the other side of the trailer. Someone knocked on the trailer door and the floorboards creaked as Lenny stepped forward and pulled it open

“Thanks for getting here so quickly,” Lenny said, stepping aside to let the policeman through the door

While he was distracted, Lyssa raced across the room. She pushed her backpack through the window and pulled herself up onto the sill. Holy cow—it was
a lot
smaller than it looked from across the room. Lyssa wriggled and pulled,
but her bottom half wouldn’t budge. She was stuck tighter than a hand in a pickle jar.

She wanted to scream. She’d gotten all the way across the country—escaped monsters and thunderstorms, bad friends and surprise whirlpools—and the cops were finally going to catch her stuck in a trailer window

Just when Lyssa was certain she was done for, Lenny slammed the trailer door. The sudden jolt helped Lyssa wriggle loose. She toppled out of the window and landed in a prickly bush growing in the alley next to the trailer. Sharp burrs and twigs dug into her arms and legs, leaving angry red marks on her skin. She clenched her mouth shut to keep from crying out. She leapt to her feet and pulled the base of her scooter out of her bag. Dropping it to the sidewalk, she jumped on, hitching her backpack over her shoulders. The base wobbled at first, but Lyssa gritted her teeth and kicked off, riding it down the street like a skateboard.

The policeman stumbled out of the front of the trailer just as Lyssa rounded the corner

“Hey!” he shouted. “Wait!”

Lyssa nearly tumbled off her makeshift skateboard. She needed something—a distraction. She fumbled in her backpack, and her fingers curled around fabric. When she withdrew her hand, she realized she was holding the pink-and-green rhinestone bra she’d stolen for Circe

“Stop!” the officer called again. He was getting closer. Lyssa twisted around to face him, pulled one strap of the bra back—like a slingshot—and fired. The bra whizzed through the air and flew at his face. The wind whipped it up over his eyes like a blindfold. The officer stumbled backward, giving Lyssa just enough time to push off and gain speed down the sidewalk. As she tore around the corner, she thought she heard Lenny call her name, but she didn’t stop to check.

“We need a place to hide,” she said to Zip, or what remained of it. She was heartened to hear a squeak of agreement. Zip too was still fighting

The block Lyssa had turned down was crowded with tiny boutiques and restaurants, but she rolled past them without stopping. Her father and the policeman would check inside places like that for sure. She needed to hide somewhere no one would think to look for her

On the next street there was a tiny smoke shop wedged between a deli and a dry cleaner. The smoke shop’s windows were dark, and when the door opened, a smell like unlit matches and heavily oiled wood wafted out

Lyssa coughed, waving her hand in front of her face. Her mom always said that smoke made your lungs shrivel up and turn black until they were tiny, wrinkly raisins. And Lyssa hated raisins, even when they were baked into cookies. She certainly didn’t want them inside her body.

Still…the smoke shop would be the last place anyone would ever think to look for her. She slowed her skateboard and hopped off. Taking a deep breath of fresh, clean air, she pulled the door open and snuck inside. Her eyes watered. Breathing the air inside the smoke shop felt like trying to inhale cotton. Stinky, dirty cotton

The shop’s countertops were all heavy and dark, and they shone like someone just rubbed them down with baby oil. Smoke floated near the ceiling in miniature gray clouds. At one end of the shop, a man with a heavy Russian accent and a skinny little mustache held a box filled with cigars, motioning wildly with one hand as he spoke. Two men—or maybe they were still just boys—stood in front of him, wearing tight jeans and brightly colored eyeglasses. They had the craziest hair Lyssa had ever seen: it was gelled up on the sides in strange waves and crests

Lyssa crouched behind a display of old-fashioned wooden pipes, watching the boys lift cigars out of the box and sniff them. Lyssa wrinkled her nose and fought the urge to cough. She was so focused on the strange-looking people that she didn’t even notice there was someone sitting cross-legged on the floor only inches away

“Hey there, ladybug.”

The voice shocked Lyssa so much that she leapt up, biting back a scream. She whirled around, smacking the
pipe display with her backpack. The display rocked back and forth, then tumbled over and crashed to the floor. Pipes rolled across the dark wooden floorboards of the shop