Zoe in Wonderland

by Brenda Woods

  To get their attention, I stood in front of the screen and grinned.

  “What’re you so happy about?” Harper asked.

  Jade eyed the bags. “What! Did Nana buy you a bunch of stuff?”

  I nodded.

  “So that’s all it took to make you happy again?” the snox asked.

  “Plus Quincy’s coming home on Saturday for the weekend.”

  “Yay,” Jade said. “Now can you move out of the way before you make us miss the best part?”

  “Yeah,” Harper agreed.

  I had been gone for two whole days and I thought Jade and the snox might have missed me a little, but obviously they hadn’t. Silly Zoe.

  “Where are Mom and Daddy?” At least they’d be glad to see me, right?

  “In their room,” Jade said.

  “Fighting,” Harper added.

  “About what?” I asked.

  Jade glanced up. “Money, what else?”

  Not again.

  I hurried down the hallway to my parents’ room. Their door was closed, but I could hear them.

  “It’s time to stop dreaming, Darrow!” Mom shouted angrily.

  “I’m not dreaming!” Daddy yelled back.

  “It’s a very good offer! The best ever! We could pay off all of the bills and buy a real house!”

  “A real house? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means this one needs a new roof, needs painting, the plumbing is a mess, the kitchen is an embarrassment . . . Do I have to go on? Sometimes it seems like you care more about those trees and plants than you care about us. We’re one step away from foreclosure, Darrow! We could lose everything!”

  “You worry too much, Gabby! I’ll sell some of the mature exotic trees to that landscape architect who’s been needling me. Maybe I’ll get a night job! And if it turns out that we have to sell, I’ve got my eyes on a couple of things . . . another tropical plant nursery, or maybe this time a flower farm. Saw some for sale in Oregon, one in Carlsbad, another in Hawaii, and even one in New Zealand. Always wanted to go to New Zealand.”

  Sell the Wonderland? Weeks ago, he said he’d never sell the Wonderland. New Zealand?

  Mom had the same thought. “New Zealand? I give up,” she said in a quieter voice.

  “It’d be an adventure. Life’s supposed to be an adventure, Gabby!”

  I’d never heard him say that before.

  But Mom didn’t agree. “I don’t want an adventure! I just want a normal life and not to worry about money. You’re not going to get a better offer than the one Bob Lockwood gave you today. We’d be on easy street. I don’t understand what you’re waiting on . . . for us to lose everything?”

  There was about a minute of quiet before Daddy said in a soft voice, “I’m waiting on a sign, Gabby.”

  “You and your signs.”

  What does that mean, I wondered—waiting on a sign?

  I lingered outside their room, motionless, until the hallway grandfather clock ticking beside me and the noise from the TV in the other room were the only sounds. I kept thinking that this is exactly what Quincy said his parents were like before they got divorced.

  Right then, I wished that I hadn’t heard their fight. My worry list kept growing.

  Silently, I counted down from twenty to zero. Then, I knocked.

  “It’s me. Just Zoe. I’m back.”

  “Come in,” Daddy said.

  I turned the knob, cracked the door, and stuck my head inside. They both tried hard to put those happy-to-see-you looks on their faces, but Mom looked tired and Daddy’s eyes had zero happiness.

  “Did you have a good time with Grandpa and Nana?” Mom inquired.

  I stepped inside their room. “Yes,” I replied. The smile I’d come home with had vanished.

  Daddy stood from the chair where he was sitting. “Then why the sad look?”

  I stared at the Reindeer parents and asked three questions. “Are you going to get a divorce . . . what’s foreclosure . . . and what’s a sign?”

  23

  The Trouble/Worry/Problem Zapper

  How long have you been listening?” Daddy inquired. His oh-no look was pasted on his face.

  “Long enough.” I set the shopping bags on the floor.

  Mom faked a smile. “Looks like your nana splurged on you.”

  Does she really think it’s going to be that easy to change the subject? Think again, please.

  “So, are you guys getting a divorce?” I repeated.

  “No!” they replied in unison.

  “What gave you that idea?” Daddy asked.

  “I’m worried because you’re acting just like Quincy’s mom and dad did before they went splitsville.”

  “Splitsville?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah, his mom and dad went splitsville because they were always fighting about money, and now you guys are doing the same thing.”

  Daddy laughed.

  Three Things Adults Should Never Do When Kids Are Being Extremely Serious

  Laugh.

  Try to change the subject.

  Tell you to relax.

  My parents were now guilty of two of the three offenses. I glared at him. “It’s not funny, Daddy.”

  Daddy apologized. “Sorry, Zoe. But we are definitely not getting a divorce.”

  I stared at him and asked, “Promise?”

  He patted my shoulder, then gave it a gentle squeeze. “I promise, Zoe. No divorce. Relax.”

  Relax? Now they were guilty of all three offenses.

  But somehow, the look in his eyes had convinced me he was telling the truth. Going splitsville was off the Zoe worry list. My interrogation of the Reindeer parents continued anyway. “What’s foreclosure mean?”

  This time, Mom did the denying. “It means you’re late on the mortgage payment and the bank could take the house. But we are not in foreclosure yet.”

  All I heard was yet.

  I had one last question for Daddy. “What did you mean by ‘waiting for a sign’?”

  Daddy gazed into my eyes. “Some clue that’ll tell you what to do. Something that’ll happen that leads you in the right direction. Like a sudden answer to a mystery . . . understand?”

  I didn’t but I nodded.

  “One other thing . . . I really don’t want to leave the Wonderland, and I sure don’t want to move to New Zealand. Do they even speak English there?”

  “Yes, they do.” Then Mom sighed. “So you heard everything?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Daddy picked nervously at his nails. “Don’t say anything to Harper or Jade; we don’t need them worrying too.”

  “I promise.” I was just about to leave when I remembered. “Quincy’s coming for the weekend,” I blurted.

  Daddy cracked a real smile, and Mom hugged me and said that was good news. “G’night,” we all seemed to say at the same time.

  Down the hallway in the family room I heard Jade and Harper laughing at something on the TV. They certainly weren’t worrying about anything.

  But even though my questions had sort of been answered, I still couldn’t stop worrying. Where would we live if the bank took the Wonderland? And I still didn’t understand what waiting on a sign meant.

  Why did there have to be so many problems and troubles and worries?

  Zoe was a super-geek tech-genius—the creator of the TROUBLE/WORRY/PROBLEM ZAPPER app—an app that could be downloaded to your phone that allowed anyone to type in their problem, press delete, and presto-change-o—problem gone. The only thing it couldn’t delete was annoying people, because deleting people, no matter how annoying they are, is a crime. Almost everyone on Earth had downloaded the app, making Zoe G. Reindeer a gazillionaire. Her three-story house in the Malibu Hills had a panoramic view of the ocean.

&
nbsp; Tonight, no lights from Mrs. Warner’s candles next door danced on my walls and none of her old-time jazz music played. The Moon was having one of its days off, so there was total darkness, and the only sounds were the noises inside my mind that even Imaginary Zoe couldn’t make go away.

  24

  A New Friend

  As I headed to my table in the cafeteria, I heard Zena warn her puppets, “You know she’ll rat you out if you say anything to her, so don’t.”

  Was Zena right? Was I going to be a rat every time someone bullied me? Would I run to Mr. Summer, the way he’d instructed me to, and squeal?

  When I’d told Quincy what had happened, he’d said, “Sometimes you have to be a rat, Zoe.”

  What did I have to lose by being a rat, anyway? Quincy was my only friend.

  Except maybe not. Adam was wearing a green-and-blue plaid shirt when he sat down at lunch across from me again.

  “You live in that Wonderland plant place, huh?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Must be interesting,” Adam said.

  I decided to try very hard not to be shy. I took a deep breath. “Sometimes,” I answered, then spouted off nervously. “There’s all sorts of stuff, even endangered plants. My dad’s a horticulturist. Which is a fancy way to say he knows a lot about plants and trees and flowers.” I wondered if he was going to keep asking questions, but when he didn’t, I asked one of mine. “Where’d you go to school last year?”

  “In Rome,” he replied.

  “Italy?”

  Adam nodded.

  “Were you born there?”

  “No, I was born in Rhode Island, but because of my dad’s work, we usually move every two years. So far, we’ve lived in Sweden; Japan; Washington, DC; Rome . . . and now here. My sister claims we’re like animals that migrate, except we don’t ever come back to the same place . . . at least not yet. My mom calls us nomads.”

  I was sitting across from a worldwide voyager, and instantly I felt like a very boring girl with a life story so dull, it would make you yawn a thousand times—the farthest I’d ever been from Pasadena was the Grand Canyon.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “My mom and sister hate moving so much, but I like it because every place is a new adventure. My favorite so far is Japan. It was the coolest.”

  Adventure? Recently, lots of people were using that word—first Ben Rakotomalala, then Daddy, and now Adam.

  “Can you speak Japanese?” I asked.

  “A little, but after a while you start to forget. Good thing I have lots of pictures of all the places I’ve been to. I could show you, if you wanna see.”

  “Okay. Or you could e-mail some of them to me too,” I told him.

  “Cool.”

  I scribbled my e-mail address on some notebook paper and handed it to him.

  “Want mine?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  Questions buzzed around me like flies at a picnic. Is he just being nice? Will he really e-mail me pictures? Does this mean I actually have a new friend? I hoped I’d have the answers I wanted soon.

  25

  Inside Mrs. Warner’s House

  The star of day was hard at work heating everything up, so I walked home on streets that had shady trees. Instead of being green the way they usually are in the fall, the foothills ahead of me were dry and brown from not having enough rain. By the time I turned the corner to the Wonderland, I was sweating and thirsty.

  Mrs. Warner wasn’t outside when I passed her house, but her front door was wide open and smoke was coming out. I ran to her door.

  “Mrs. Warner!” I yelled. “You in there?” No reply. “Mrs. Warner!”

  “Didn’t your parents teach you not to scream?”

  I whipped around. Mrs. Warner was standing behind me. She must have been in her backyard. I pointed inside her house. “There’s smoke!”

  Mrs. Warner’s eyes got wide with fright. “Help me get the hose!”

  “We should call the fire department,” I told her.

  Mrs. Warner ignored me. She yanked her green hose and toddled inside.

  “Mrs. Warner! Come back!”

  But she didn’t listen. “Turn on the water!” she hollered.

  I dropped my backpack, turned on the water, and was about to zoom home to tell my daddy when Mrs. Warner reappeared, coughing.

  “It’s out. Just a little nothing. One of my candles must have tipped over. You can turn off the hose.”

  “We should still call the fire department,” I said, “just in case.”

  “It’s out, I told you! I do not need the fire department nosing around in my business.”

  “Okay, then I’ll go get my daddy.”

  “And I don’t need your daddy either. You want to do something to be of use . . . come inside and help me clean up the mess,” she demanded.

  Finally, a chance to go inside Mrs. Warner’s house.

  What if the fire isn’t really out? I worried. Never go inside a burning house, Daddy always said. His warning screamed in my ears. But I peeked inside and could see the spot in the living room where the small fire had been. The floor and everything around it was water-soaked. Smoke hovered like fog.

  “Help me open the windows!” Mrs. Warner commanded.

  I stepped inside.

  She unlocked a window and lifted it open. “Lucky for me you passed by when you did. You’re an angel. I think that’ll be my name for you from now on . . . Zoe Angel.”

  Zoe Angel? That sounded awesome. Much better than Zoe Reindeer.

  I helped Mrs. Warner open window after window, and by the time we were finished, the smoke had been sucked outside. We picked up the burned, soaked stuff, mostly papers, and carted it out to the trash.

  Once we were back indoors and I was able to take a good look around, I thought, Daddy was right—there was way too much stuff piled around: old newspapers, magazines, junk mail. Like going through a maze, I made my way from the living room to the kitchen, where maps and old calendars plastered the walls. Ceramic creatures and stuffed animals, mostly teddy bears, were perched here and there, but the kitchen itself was what Mom calls “spotlessly clean.”

  Shelves filled with books lined both sides of the hallway, making it a very narrow passageway.

  “Have you read all of these books?”

  “Some of them twice,” Mrs. Warner replied. “Nothing better than a book and a little music that takes you back to happier times.”

  In the bedroom, lit candles inside colored glass containers still flickered, and beside them an old record player sat. A shelf was filled with vinyl records that nearly reached the ceiling.

  “Maybe you should blow out all the candles,” I warned her.

  “Nonsense!” Mrs. Warner barked. “And not a word of this to a soul. They’ll put me in the old-people orphanage for certain. I don’t ever want to leave my house. Promise me you won’t say a word, little angel.”

  “Don’t you have any children you could go live with?” I asked.

  Mrs. Warner plopped down on the bed.

  “Had a daughter, but she died when she was about your age,” she replied.

  “What happened?”

  “Tornado. Back in Missouri, where we lived. Took her and her daddy just like in that movie The Wizard of Oz. Some things are hard to watch. Some things never leave your mind . . . no matter how hard you try to force them away from your memory.” Mrs. Warner lifted a framed picture from her nightstand and patted the bed. “Sit down.”

  I sat down beside her, and together, we looked at the photograph.

  “This is her. Name was Lily. My girl was real pretty, don’t you think? Pretty like you.” Mrs. Warner smiled.

  Pretty? Me?

  Mrs. Warner slipped her arm around me and hugged me to her side. Then she glanced at the glimmerin
g candles and said, “She would always light candles at dinnertime, my Lily, even in the summer. Promise me—not a word to a soul about this. I will be careful. In all my years . . . never had a fire before. Promise me, Zoe Angel,” she repeated.

  I knew I shouldn’t make the promise, but I felt very sorry for Mrs. Warner. I didn’t want her to have to go to the old-people orphanage.

  “I promise.”

  Since the thing with the police, Jade and Harper hadn’t been like bee stings most of the time, and when they did start up, one glance from Daddy or Mom was all it took. And because of that, dinnertime had become slightly less gruesome.

  At the table that night, Jade blabbed on and on about herself, sucking up five hundred percent of the attention, loving every minute all eyes were on her. I studied her like she was a bug under a microscope.

  How many times, over and over and over, had I wished I were a Jade look-alike? But tonight, for the first time ever, probably because Adam had called me not-ugly and today Mrs. Warner had called me pretty, I stared at my sister without feeling that way. Jade looks like Jade and I—big feet, unruly hair, and all—look like me.

  Jade seemed to have finished talking and I was about to, without mentioning the fire, tell them about going inside Mrs. Warner’s house and Lily and the tornado, but Harper took over and started jabbering about science stuff. Like old leggings, dinner got stretched out. After a while, I didn’t hear them anymore.

  Instead, I pictured Lily’s old, stained photo and imagined Lily and her daddy getting sucked up by the tornado. I gazed outside and wished Mrs. Warner could forget that extremely sad thing. Now I knew why she lit the candles. But at least she had the photograph—the photograph that made her smile.

  “Zoe?” Mom said.

  “Huh?”

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I replied. “Can we light candles at dinner sometimes?” I asked her.