Her 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
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
“What is this?” the man with the Russian accent demanded. He snapped the cigar case shut and crossed the room in three large strides. “This is little girl? Little girl is not to be in cigar store. You know these things, Scarlett.”
The girl sitting next to Lyssa stood and started gathering up the spilled pipes. She wasn’t dressed like the two boys. She was very tall, with broad shoulders and long, curly blond hair held back in places by tiny butterfly clips. She wore high-waisted shorts, a T-shirt with a picture of an old-fashioned bicycle on it, and a heavy fur coat that looked way too warm for late summer in New Mexico. She looked familiar, although Lyssa couldn’t immediately place her face, which was bare of makeup
Then it came to her: If the girl had had a beehive hairdo and sparkly, rhinestone-covered sunglasses, she’d look exactly like the mermaid from the burlesque show.
Like Athena
Had she found Athena at last?
Lyssa pushed away the thought and her excitement She’d thought she’d seen Athena at the grocery store and the market, the burlesque club and in the whirlpool, and she’d been wrong every time. And why on earth would Athena be here, in some cruddy cigar shop?
“Alek, this is my sister, little Ladybug,” Scarlett said, giving Lyssa a wink. “Haven’t you ever heard me talk about my little sister? Come on, Alek. You’ve known my family for years!”
Alek harrumphed, but he seemed to soften a bit. Shrugging, he turned back to the boys, opening the box of cigars again. “You clean up mess, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Scarlett promised
Lyssa knelt down on the ground to help Scarlett gather the pipes
“Thanks,” she whispered once Alek had his back turned
“No sweat, Ladybug,” Scarlett said with a wink
Lyssa swallowed. She couldn’t stop looking at Scarlett and visualizing her onstage, in a bright beam of spotlight. “This might sound kinda weird…but do I know you from somewhere?” she asked finally
Scarlett froze with one hand poised over a pipe. She raised an eyebrow. “You think you’ve seen me somewhere?”
“I—I don’t know,” Lyssa stuttered, and tugged on one of her braids. “You look like…” She lost her nerve. “Like this mermaid I saw at a burlesque show once.”
Now Scarlett’s lips curved into a smile. “What were you doing at a burlesque show?”
“Oh, you know,” Lyssa said, trying to keep her voice casual. “I was just there for the music.”
Scarlett laughed, but there was a glimmer of curiosity in her green eyes, and she didn’t look away from Lyssa
“So what are you doing here?” she asked. “Hiding out? On the lam from the police?”
Lyssa swallowed and shifted her eyes to the ground. Scarlett had no idea how close she was to the truth. And Lyssa couldn’t admit to the truth, could she? The last time she’d trusted someone was Circe. And that hadn’t turned out well at all
Then again, Scarlett had helped her by lying to Alek. Lenny and the policeman couldn’t be far away, and if Lyssa were thrown out of the shop, they’d catch her for sure
The thought made Lyssa’s arms and legs feel heavy, like someone had filled them with sand. She was tired of running, she was tired of lying. She was so tired
“Come on, Ladybug,” Scarlett said gently, sliding the very last pipe into place. “I won’t rat you out.”
“Well,” Lyssa started. “I’m heading to Austin, Texas. There was this protest…”
And she found herself telling the whole story, from the Texas Talent Show, to her mom’s will, to Michael and how he called the police when she went missing. She even admitted that her father and a policeman were roaming the streets of New Mexico right this minute, searching for her
“And it doesn’t even matter anymore,” Lyssa said once she got to the end of her story. “The house has already been destroyed. I missed everything.”
For a second there was complete silence. Then someone sniffled
“This is beautiful tale of adventure,” came a voice from behind Lyssa
She turned around and saw that Alek and the two boys with the strange hair had come closer to listen to her story. Alek wiped a tear from his cheek, and the skinny little mustache twitched above his mouth. The boy wearing purple sunglasses and a motorcycle jacket shook his head
“You aren’t talking about that singer’s house, are you?” he asked. “Ana…something? They were going to do a big show to protest and everything?”
“That’s it,” Lyssa said, nodding, excited. “Ana Lee’s my mom.”
“Whoa,” the other boy said. His curly red hair had so much gel in it that the curls stuck out like coiled copper wire. “I mean, wicked. It was on the news and everything. They were expecting a huge turnout—like, hundreds of people or something? But there was this storm moving in—like crazy lightning and wind and everything. They delayed the demolition and the show till tomorrow.”
“What?”
Lyssa felt her entire body start to hum. It wasn’t gone? Her house, the garden, everything—it was still there?
Suddenly, it felt like everything was moving in fast motion. Lyssa had to move—she had to get to Austin! She hadn’t missed anything at all! Her home was still there. She just hoped and prayed she was right about her mother’s magic; she knew she wasn’t strong enough to stop the demolition on her own
“Is there a bus station nearby?” she asked, tucking the scooter-base skateboard under one arm. “I have to go!”
Scarlett glanced at the two boys and smiled
“I don’t know about a bus station,” she said, looking back at Lyssa. “But I know where to find a bus.”