“Did you say space and time?”
“Yes,” he said. “With hard work and earnest study. As is the way with all knowledge.”
The words I don’t believe you rose in her throat. It was impossible, but then again, so were schools that folded up into soda cans and flying marbles and cars she could stick her hand through.
“You have touched upon the laws of the universe in your prior schooling,” Dr. Mumble said. “And they are laws. Even for us. But just as a friend may be asked for a favor, so too may the universe. If one understands it well enough. We’re here.”
She looked out the window and saw they were pulling into her driveway. “Wait a minute,” Zanna said as the car door opened by itself and she hopped out. “How’d we get here so quickly?”
Dr. Mumble looked down at her. “Just because it looks like a car does not mean it must act like a car. We have been traveling just below the speed of sound. Around 750 miles an hour.”
“750?” The number made her knees go weak.
“Yes. I did not wish to waste time. I have a great number of things to attend to.” Something clinked behind her, and when she spun around, she saw that the car had turned back into a dented soda can, rolling off the driveway into the bushes. “Goodbye, Zanna Mayfield. I hope to see you at school tomorrow.”
He took something from his pocket and lifted his fist over his head. A worm of metal squirmed out from between his fingers and made a ring for him to hold, like he was a commuter on the subway clutching a strap dangling from the ceiling.
Then he shot up like a rocket and was gone.
It took a long time for Zanna to move. Hesitantly, she reached out to the spot where Dr. Mumble had stood and poked it. There was nothing. No dean and no illusion. She walked back to the driveway and found the soda can that had rolled into the bushes. It wasn’t dirty at all, and its paint had been stripped off, but other than that, it looked like the thousands of other soda cans she had seen in her lifetime. Carefully, she turned it over and over, as if some magician had handed it to her and asked her to confirm that this was, indeed, just an ordinary soda can.
In a fit of experimentation, she let go of it, seeing if it would float like it had for Dr. Mumble. But the can just clinked on the driveway. She shook her head, kicking the can across the driveway to the recycling bin.
“Space and time,” she muttered, lifting the lid and chucking the can in with the rest of the recyclables.
“Zanna!”
She turned back to the house. Pops was hurrying across the yard as fast as his stiff old legs could carry him. She yelped and ran to meet him.
“My dear, my dear,” Pops muttered into the soft velvet of her bonnet as she hugged him. “I was so worried.”
“I’m fine,” Zanna said.
“I got this call from your school saying you never showed,” Pops said, beginning to walk back to the house. He kept an arm around her shoulders the entire time. “They asked if you were sick. I said, ‘Ha! My little scamper?’ I told them I saw you get on the bus this morning. Then they had the nerve to ask if it was the right bus. I told them, ‘Just because I’m an old hat doesn’t mean I can’t read anymore.’ Of course it was the right bus. Said St. Pommeroy’s on the side! And then they wouldn’t say any more!”
“I’m fine, Pops,” she said as they entered the kitchen. She threw her backpack on the table and sank into one of the chairs. Pops poured two glasses of lemonade and set one in front of her. “Thanks,” she muttered.
“Well?”
She realized she had drained her lemonade in a single, uninterrupted chug. Sheepishly, she went back to the fridge and poured herself another glass, determined to take this one slower.
“Well what?”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on? Or are you just going to leave your poor old Pops in the dark?”
“No, I—” She fished around for the right words. “It’s weird. I don’t know. You won’t believe it.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and try me, scamper?” he teased.
Zanna sighed, stalling with another sip of her lemonade. “Well, okay. The bus dropped me off at this dingy old school out in the middle of nowhere.” From there, she told him about Eddie, her incompetent teachers, and the fight at lunch. “Principal Thatch had this thing for me to sign,” she said, suddenly remembering and grabbing for her bag. “To decline my enrollment at St. Pommeroy’s.” She found the contract and slid it across the table.
Pops fumbled with the reading glasses around his neck. “But you didn’t sign.”
“No,” Zanna said. “I was going to, though. Maybe. I don’t know, it was just so terrible. But then—” She stopped, unsure about how to explain the next part. “It got really weird.”
As best she could, Zanna described how the school had turned into a pile of soda cans. And then she told him about Dr. Mumble and the strange things he had told her, and how he had taken her home in a car she could put her hand through. “He said I could learn to do those things too,” she said. “At the real St. Pommeroy’s.”
The corners of her grandfather’s mouth quirked into the grin of a much younger man, and his eyebrows did a wiggling dance. “Sounds like magic.”
“I know, but—it’s not,” Zanna said, her hands trying to shape and remember what Dr. Mumble had told her. “The way he described it was almost scientific. All this talk about metallurgical versus optical illusions and the laws of the universe.” She sighed, and her hands flopped uselessly onto the table. “It’s okay; you don’t have to believe me. I don’t believe me.”
Pops took a sip of his lemonade, much slower than Zanna had. “And why shouldn’t I believe in magic? Or science, as you call it?” He wagged a playful finger at her. “I’m just about old enough to say that the only thing I’m certain about is uncertainty. You know how many impossible things I’ve seen pop up since I was your age? All your phones, computers, websites—never thought I’d ever see anything like them.”
“But it was—” Again, she tried to convey it with her hands and failed miserably. “It can’t be real. All of that—it just can’t.”
“Oh?” His eyes twinkled. “Decided that, did you? It just can’t? So where’d you get this contract from? Where’d that bus come from? Who called me asking where you were? How’d you make it home?”
She ran her fingers through her thick hair, no doubt making it stick out angrily. It was the exact opposite of what she needed to hear. If Pops had said no, there was no way a strange man had promised her power over space and time, she would have been happy. She wouldn’t have felt like the world was slipping into madness. “I don’t know.”
“And that’s fine,” Pops said, nudging the contract back toward her. “All I’m saying is keep an open mind. That’s the mark of a true scientist—going where the facts take her, no matter what.”
Zanna stared at her lemonade. Where the facts took her was completely uncharted territory. “I need time to think about it.”
Pops nodded approvingly and then remembered something with a little start. “Oh!” he cried. “I have something for you.”
“They tore your puzzle book in half,” Zanna said as Pops shuffled into the next room. “I’m sorry.”
“Bah,” came his voice, accompanied by the rummaging of papers. “I’ll buy you another one tomorrow.” When he returned to the kitchen, he clutched a red envelope in his hands. “This came for you.”
She guessed as soon as she saw it, but the exotic stamp and handwritten address—Ms. Zanna Mayfield, 808 Three Pines Drive, Seven Corners, VA—confirmed it. The letter was from her father.
As she unfolded the letter, a colorful piece of paper fell out, and she snatched it up. It was a piece of foreign money with a portrait in purple ink of a man with a thin mustache. She handed it off to Pops to look at while she read.
“He says it’s from Singapore,”
she muttered to explain the money. “A two-dollar bill.” Her eyes skipped over the long paragraph about how much he missed her and went to the end. “Oh.”
“What is it?” Pops asked, giving her back the money.
She handed him the letter, and he fumbled for his reading glasses again. “He’s not coming home for a while. Something about the airline. Said they cut a lot of pilots, and he’s got to take their flights.”
It took Pops a lot longer to read the letter. When he finished, he didn’t say anything; he just handed it back to her and rubbed at his whiskery chin. Then he grinned. “Did you hear the story about the three holes?”
Zanna rolled her eyes. “I know, Pops. Well, well, well.” She gathered up the contract and her father’s letter. “Tell me when it’s time for dinner.”
In her room, she spread out all the things she’d collected from her day and just looked at them for a long, quiet minute. Then she began to organize. Her father’s letter went in a shoebox with all his other letters, and the money went into a book he had given her for a birthday long ago, back when he still made appearances for her birthday. Its pages were full of colorful bills collected from countries across the globe. The two halves of her puzzle book she slid into a tight spot on her shelf, hoping the books on either side would keep them together. The contract went back in her backpack. But she had nowhere to put the pen.
She took it to her desk and turned on the lamp to look at it in a better light. It was machined from a single piece of silver metal, with a simple oval of gold where her finger would hold it. The nib looked fancy and ornate, and she took out a piece of notebook paper to see how it wrote. But there was no ink in it. Confused, she pressed a little harder, and suddenly, an intense, stabbing pain shot through her finger. With a yelp, she dropped the pen and sucked her finger. A dot of blood welled up on the tip of her thumb. Carefully, she rolled the pen over, trying to find where it had jabbed her, but there was nothing. It was as smooth as before.
In the lightest grip she could manage, Zanna picked up the pen and tried again. This time, it wrote smoothly and beautifully, and its ink was a deep red that made Zanna a little queasy.
Before she could contemplate why she had a pen that apparently wrote in blood, she heard Pops call her name from downstairs, and it made her sit up straight in alarm. Dinner wasn’t for a while. And it was a question: “Zanna?”
She took the steps as fast as her legs could manage and burst into the kitchen. “What?” Then she saw it—what could only be described as a poorly drawn stick figure about the size of a small child was waiting outside on the porch. It waved one crooked hand in a friendly manner and knocked on the sliding glass door.
Pops stared at it in the same way someone would stare at a talking dog: a little afraid but also intensely curious. He abandoned the onions he had been chopping up for dinner and shuffled over to the door. The stick figure was made out of bent coat hangers and carried a metal toolbox, the kind a plumber would bring to fix up the pipes.
“What is it?” Zanna asked.
“Was hoping you’d tell me,” Pops said. The stick figure tipped its ill-defined hat to him. “Looks like he’s got a delivery. Should I let him in?”
She pinched herself, but the stick figure was still there, adding more impossible facts to an already impossible day. Best to go along with it. “Um, sure.”
Pops unlocked the sliding door, and the stick figure sauntered inside, setting its toolbox down on the kitchen table. It unlocked with a crisp snap, revealing a geometrically folded letter and a large iron key. To Zanna Mayfield, a tag on the key read.
Zanna summoned up her courage and reached inside the toolbox, withdrawing the letter and key. Its delivery complete, the stick figure tipped its hat again and went out the way it had come in. She watched as it walked out into the backyard until it was clear of the house and then shot up into the air, just as Dr. Mumble’s marbles had done that afternoon. Then she unfolded the letter.
Ms. Zanna Mayfield,
Greetings from St. Pommeroy’s School for Gifted Children! We are looking forward to meeting you tomorrow. We hope our dean hasn’t frightened you away from attending our school. He may seem like quite the sourpuss on the outside, but he’s quite sweet and chewy on the inside.
We understand that you had a little adventure today. Rest assured, we’re looking into this matter quite seriously. In the meantime, the other teachers and I have put together a small gift for you. This key should be able to dispel most simple optical illusions. Hold it out and turn, as you would with any key in a lock. If you are indeed faced with an illusion, it should disappear at once. And apologies for the messenger. Dr. Cheever fancies himself quite the artist.
Yours truly,
Dr. Maru Fitzie
“I see what you mean now,” Pops said with a low whistle. He went to the sliding door and checked the sky, scratching his head and smearing bits of diced onion through his white hair. “Amazing.”
Zanna looked at the key in her hands. It was iron and scratched and probably a hundred years old. She held it out and gave it an experimental turn, just as the letter had instructed. Nothing happened. The kitchen remained just as it was.
“I guess your kitchen’s not an illusion,” she said, trying the key again with the same results.
“Well, I certainly hope not,” Pops said with a huff. He returned to the kitchen counter, shaking his head and muttering something about newfangled gadgets.
Zanna set the key aside and read the letter again, reassuring herself that it was real and that it had been delivered by a figure made out of coat hangers.
“You saw it, right?” she asked after Pops had resumed chopping the onions. “I’m not crazy?”
He set the knife aside. “You tell me. I’ve made my decision. Not every day a—” He gestured helplessly toward the porch, unable to properly describe what he had seen. “A whatever that was comes knocking at your door.”
“I guess,” Zanna said. She twisted the key again and looked back to the letter, wondering if there was some other part of the instructions she had overlooked. Pops was right, as always. Maybe she couldn’t prove everything that Dr. Mumble had said to her in the car that afternoon, but something was out there.
“So what do you say?” Pops asked. He scraped the onions into a waiting skillet and stirred them around with a pat of butter, his eyebrows waggling.
Zanna tried the key one last time. “I’m going to school tomorrow,” she said. “Whatever is going on, I’m going to figure it out. And if this whole thing is true, then so be it. But I can’t stand not knowing.”
“That’s my girl,” he said with a grin.
She stayed up late that night, trying to mend the torn puzzle book and preparing her uniform for the next day with a clean blouse, skirt, and socks. Nothing she tried with the key seemed to do anything, and eventually, she just put it aside. Then she turned off the lamp and snuggled into bed, dreaming of metallurgical illusions and flying teachers.
Chapter Three
“Zanna.”
Her eyes snapped open. The bedroom was dark and empty, her alarm clock showing 3:43 in the morning. But she swore someone had just spoken her name aloud.
“Zanna.”
Terror gripped her and yanked her up in a shot, all her drowsiness gone. There was a voice. A woman’s voice. She drew the covers tight around her and tried not to breathe.
“Are you awake?”
Zanna bit down hard on her tongue, but it was no dream. Someone was in the room with her. Weapons she could use to defend herself with darted through her mind. There were some heavy books on her shelf, her backpack at the foot of her bed, maybe one of the pens on her desk . . . She could scream for Pops, but he was too old to help. Maybe she should just run for the door while she still could.
“You’re awake.” With a click, the lamp on her desk turned on. But there was somet
hing wrong with how its light spilled across the room. It fell on Zanna and the bed as it always had, but the other side of the room was just as dark as before, as if there were a curtain separating the two halves.
“What do you want?” Zanna whispered. “Who are you?”
“Come on now,” the darkness said. “You can figure out that much, right?”
She peered into the dark, but she couldn’t distinguish anything on the other side of her room. Her mind cast back to the afternoon. “You’re one of those,” she said. “Like Dr. Mumble.”
“Scientists,” the darkness said. “And?”
Zanna moved the bits of the puzzle around in her head. “You’re either one of my professors,” she said cautiously, “or you’re the one who made that fake school today.”
“Clever as ever.” A polite round of applause came from behind the shadowy curtain. “So can you figure out what I want?”
Again, Zanna moved the pieces around. The contract Principal Thatch had wanted her to sign. She looked down at the backpack at the foot of her bed. “You wanted me to sign that contract.”
“I wanted to save you from St. Pommeroy’s,” the darkness corrected her. “It’s no place for a girl like you.”
A blaze of stubbornness flared through Zanna. “Well, too bad. I’m going, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
“Nothing?”
Suddenly, the air around her was sucked away, and Zanna’s chest burst with suffocating pain. She thrashed wildly, screaming silently without air in her lungs, and then it was over, as suddenly as it had started. Sweet, dark air returned, and she gulped it down, panting at her brush with death.
“Air pressure,” the darkness said. “Such a touchy thing. But maybe you’d prefer something chemical? Carbon monoxide? Hydrogen cyanide? Or a more classical option?”
Something black and made of iron lanced out of the darkness, quivering with a keen sharpness at Zanna’s throat. She pressed herself as far back against her headboard as possible, but she could still feel the tip against her skin.
The Zanna Function Page 3