Zip (2 page)

Before Lyssa could say another word, her mom bounced back into the room, golden and glowing.

“What do you think, Lyssa?” she asked. “Ready to sing?”

Lyssa’s anger at her mom dissipated in a wash of nerves. Her insides tied themselves into knots, then tied themselves into double knots. This was it. Penn stood up next to her and squeezed her hand.

“You’re going to be amazing,” Penn whispered.

“Good luck, Lyssa,” Michael said.

Her mom beamed at her. “Come on, let’s go.”

Lyssa followed Ana from the dressing room into the dark chaos of the backstage area. She could do it. She
would
do it. Maybe her mom’s strange magic would extend to her, just this once, and give her the courage to perform.

Just past the dressing room, the stage curtain whooshed open, revealing white lights and the shadowy silhouettes of hundreds of people waiting to watch the show. The announcer’s booming voice echoed across the stage:
“You know and love her…here she is, the amazing Ana Lee!”

Lyssa found she couldn’t move. It felt like ice was creeping up over her toes, freezing the bones in her ankles. Her heart pounded against her chest like a zoo animal trying to escape from its cage. Lyssa opened and closed her mouth, trying to force a squeak, a whisper,
anything
—out. But nothing happened.

The crowd roared and cheered. Ana reached for Lyssa’s hand, but Lyssa pulled it away, shaking her head. She couldn’t do it.

“It’s okay.” Ana leaned down and gave Lyssa’s shoulder a squeeze. “There’s always next time. You’re going to have so many adventures, Lyssa—don’t worry.”

Lyssa nodded, but the words rang through her head like a warning.
There’s always next time.
As Michael and Penn crowded behind her, she felt suddenly certain, for no reason she could name, that there would not be a next time.

She watched her mother walk out onto the stage. Ana Lee shook the homemade maracas. When she began to sing, the entire audience fell under her spell, growing so quiet that Lyssa could have heard a single kernel of popcorn drop to
the ground. Ana Lee sounded wonderful and confident onstage, and as Lyssa listened, she began to feel cold.

She would never sound like that, not if she practiced every single night.

Pushing past Penn and Michael, Lyssa ducked into her mom’s dressing room and yanked the velvet curtain closed. She wanted to be alone.

She crawled into the space between her mom’s dressing table and the wall, curling her body into a ball. She clenched her eyes shut tight and hummed an Athena song, trying to lift her spirits. This time, the trick didn’t seem to work. Lyssa kept humming anyway, louder and louder, until she drowned out the sound of her mother’s magical voice and the cheering audience that she just couldn’t face.

When she opened her eyes again, it had grown dark. Lyssa could no longer hear her mother singing onstage or the distant crowd clapping. Everything was silent.

“Mom?” Lyssa called. She fumbled her way out from behind the dressing table. “Penn?”

No one answered. Shadows stretched long and dark across the floor.

Lyssa took a step forward and a floorboard creaked beneath her bare foot. She crossed the room, pushing aside the velvet curtain that separated her from the stage. But
the stage wasn’t there. Instead, a long, narrow hallway stretched out before her.

“Hello?” she called. Her voice echoed off the walls, and when it bounced back to her, it sounded deeper—like it belonged to a stranger.

Lyssa’s mind flew to Athena. After Athena’s last concert, she had simply disappeared. Was this what had happened to her? Had she woken up one day to find that the stage had vanished? Was that why no one knew where she was?

Something metal gleamed in the darkness. Lyssa got closer and realized it was Zip, her scooter. She wrapped her fingers around the familiar grooves of her scooter’s handlebars and, suddenly, she felt a million times safer. Taking a deep breath, she pushed off.

Strange shadows flitted across her path. She squinted and saw a janitor hunched over a broom at the end of the hallway, sweeping the floor and whistling.

“Excuse me.” Lyssa rolled toward the janitor. He lifted his head and Lyssa realized it wasn’t the janitor at all—it was Melodius, the musician who played his saxophone on the corner of Lyssa’s street. He turned toward Lyssa.

“Hey there, Scooting Star,” he said in a voice that was deep and slow, like chocolate syrup. He let out a rumbling laugh. “What are you still doing here, girl?”

Lyssa put a foot down to stop rolling. “Melodius, do you know where my mom is?”

“She left a while ago. She told me she had a message for you.”

“What message?”

Melodius bent back over his broom. “She didn’t tell me. You got to find her.”

Lyssa was about to ask, once more, where her mother had gone when she heard a horn honking somewhere in the distance. Melodius grinned.

“I bet that’s her now—you better move, girl. Zip zip.”

The horn honked again and Lyssa jumped back onto her scooter, pushing off. As she flew toward the corner of the hallway, she thought she heard Melodius’s rumbling laugh again, but then the sound became sharper and clearer and she realized it wasn’t laughter at all—it was music. She glanced over her shoulder. Melodius’s broom had disappeared and in its place he was holding his big, brass saxophone. The music twisted into the air as the notes fell into place and became recognizable: “The Scooting Star,” the song Ana Lee had written for Lyssa. Melodius was playing just for her.

Then she was outside. A bright yellow van circled the parking lot, heading for the exit. Her heart leapt in her chest. She recognized that van—it belonged to the Texas Talent Show. Her mom had to be inside.

Lyssa wrapped her fingers tighter around the scooter’s handlebars and kicked off harder. She jumped over the stairs leading down to the sidewalk and zoomed out into the street. Tiny rocks shot out from beneath her spinning wheels as she rolled across the parking lot. Ana Lee peeked out of the van’s back window and stuck out her tongue. Her eyes sparkled.

“Mom,” Lyssa shouted, kicking forward. “Wait!”

Lyssa grabbed the van’s back bumper with one hand, holding tightly to her scooter with the other. The van slowed to go over a speed bump and Lyssa bounced up behind it. But the bumper was wet and slippery beneath her fingers. A fat raindrop fell on Lyssa’s nose and she looked up. The sky was a rolling mass of gray clouds. Thunder roared in the distance, sounding just like Melodius’s saxophone.

“Wait,” Lyssa shouted. The ground beneath her shook; there was a flash of lightning. Her fingers slipped off the bumper and she lost her grip…

Lyssa opened her eyes.

She wasn’t riding Zip across a parking lot on a dark Texas night.

She was lying on her back in the grass, and Mrs. Patel was standing over her, pointing her garden hose straight at Lyssa’s face. Water poured over Lyssa’s cheeks. In the
rays of early morning sunshine, the old woman’s silver hair looked almost blue.

“Oh, dear. Lyssa.” Mrs. Patel switched off the hose and took a step back, her bright orange garden clogs crunching against the grass.

For a moment, Lyssa couldn’t speak. Her dream—part nightmare, part memory—was still so vivid in her head that she could hear the soft strains of Melodius’s music. It had all seemed so real…

But no. She lived in Kirkland, Washington now, not Austin, Texas. Penn was no longer in the gray house down the street. And her mother was very far away.

L
yssa scrambled to her feet. Her shorts and T-shirt clung damply to her arms and legs. The dream rattled around in her head like a lightning bug caught in a jar. She’d had the same dream yesterday and the day before that. For the last six months, it was the
only
dream she’d had.

“Sorry,” Lyssa muttered, not quite able to look Mrs. Patel in the eye. She’d promised her new neighbor that she wouldn’t sleep in her garden anymore, but Mrs. Patelhad the nicest flowers in the neighborhood. They reminded Lyssa of the huge sunflowers—some of them as big as trees—that her mom grew.

Well,
used
to grow. Back in Austin.

Ana had always told her that sleeping under those flowers made her dreams sweeter, which was why Lyssa ended up in Mrs. Patel’s yard in the first place. She’d hoped that sleeping beneath flowers would help her get rid of her nightmare. No such luck.

Mrs. Patel’s eyes softened behind her pink plastic glasses. It was a look Lyssa was getting used to.

“Just try to remember for next time,” Mrs. Patel said.

“My mom says…” Lyssa started. Then she bit down hard on her tongue, trying to keep the words from jumping out of her mouth.

“Lyssa?” Mrs. Patel said. Lyssa blinked.

“I won’t do it again,” she said instead.

Before Mrs. Patel could respond, Lyssa ducked out of her garden and wove around the high white fence that separated their houses, so focused on trying to unpeel her wet clothes from her skin that she almost walked smack into a large oak tree.

She used to slip up and talk about her mom all the time, but it made people uncomfortable, so she’d been trying to stop. It was hard, though. Just last week Michael told a funny joke and Lyssa laughed so hard soy milk shot out of her nose. But when she said she couldn’t wait to tell her mom, Michael got very serious and they had to have a talk. He told her again that her mom was gone—she wasn’t ever coming back.

Lyssa had nodded and said she understood, but secretly, deep down, she didn’t believe him. Not entirely. She knew her mom better than anybody. Ana Lee was magic. She’d find her way back.

Lyssa sat down on the cold porch steps and closed her eyes, remembering the day after her grandma Pat’s funeral. Her mom had made coffee for a stray cat.

It was a cold day, but Ana had left the window open and chilly morning air poured into their kitchen like icy water from a faucet. A huge gray cat crouched on the window ledge near the sink, its tiny pink tongue licking coffee from a clay mug. Lyssa’s mom was at the kitchen table, drinking her daily cup of herbal tea and reading the horoscopes out loud from the newspaper.

“Your grandma Pat is a Sagittarius,” Ana had explained when Lyssa slid into the chair across from her. Lyssa looked over at the cat sitting on the window ledge. It
did
have her grandmother’s jade-green eyes—the same eyes that Lyssa and her mom both shared. “She came back as a cat to keep me company because she knew how much I missed her.”

After that, Lyssa helped her mom make coffee every morning. They put in milk but no sugar, as per Grandma Pat’s preferences, then poured it into her special clay mug and left it beside the open window. While the cat drank her coffee, Lyssa’s mom read their horoscopes out loud,
always reading the entry for Sagittarius first so that the grandmother-cat knew what adventures were in her future.

Lyssa pushed the memory away. She opened her eyes and looked out at her new backyard, which was neat and perfectly trimmed. She stuck the end of her braid in her mouth and chewed at the tips of her hair. But she didn’t use homemade organic shampoo anymore, so instead of tasting like avocados, now her braids just tasted like soap. Lyssa pulled her braid out of her mouth and pressed her lips closed. She was trying not to chew on her hair anymore anyway. No one would want to be friends with the girl who ate her own hair.

The back door creaked open and Michael stumbled onto the porch.

“Oh, there you are,” he said. He held a backpack the size of a baby elephant in one arm and wrestled his bike out the door with the other. There were so many gadgets attached to it—GPS, mobile phone, calculator—that it looked more like a rocket ship than a bicycle.

“I was looking all over for you. I grabbed your new shoes.”

He placed the sneakers next to Lyssa. They were pink and glittery…as if a unicorn had thrown up on them.

“I’m allergic,” Lyssa said, wrinkling her nose and scooting away from the shoes—wondering if they actually
might cause her to break out in hives. Michael raised an eyebrow.

“We talked about lying, Lyssa. Remember?”

Lyssa looked at her knees. This didn’t
feel
like a lie. The sneakers made her feet itch, as though she’d just walked through a batch of poison ivy. That was the same thing as being allergic. But Michael said it wasn’t safe for her to go barefoot like she often had in Austin.

“Ready for our ride?” Michael asked, patting the handlebars of his bicycle. He was no longer just the new sound guy at the Texas Talent Show or the guy who came around with his laptop so that they could watch Athena videos on YouTube. Over the last year, Lyssa had learned he could eat pizza any day of the week (he’d bought a fancy pizza oven for the kitchen) and hated the taste of coffee. He liked to hang glide and water-ski (he rigged his water skis to be more aerodynamic) but wasn’t very good at soccer. And he was obsessed with computers and gadgets. If it was digital, Michael owned it, built it, or bought it and made it better.

He and her mom were married in the hospital a few weeks before
it
happened. In the middle of everything else, moving in with Michael hadn’t seemed so bad. Now that her mom was gone, though, it felt uncomfortable. Like wearing too-small clothes. It was because of Michael that she’d had to move, that she no longer lived in a house with
a beautiful, tangled garden, that she could no longer sleep under the sunflowers her mother planted or walk down the street to Penn’s house when she was feeling lonely. Six months ago Michael announced that they were moving to Kirkland, Washington, where his sister, Nora, lived. He thought Lyssa needed to have a female role model now that…now that things had changed.

After they’d moved to Washington, Lyssa had gotten the Nightmare for the first time. The beginning of her dream was always more like a memory: everything was exactly like it had been the night she’d gotten stage fright and refused to sing.

But after Lyssa hid in the dressing room, the dream changed. And never, not once in all the months she’d been dreaming, had she managed to reach the van and find out what her mother had been meaning to tell her.