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Minutes later Penn appeared at the window again. She made walking across the clothesline look so easy…

“What’s all of this?” Lyssa asked as Penn dumped the clothes she was carrying onto the floor of the tree house. Lyssa picked up a pair of cat’s-eye sunglasses

“Stuff my sister outgrew,” Penn explained. “Here, put this on—it doesn’t look like you at all.”

Penn handed Lyssa a flowery dress and a pair of combat boots. Lyssa grinned as she took them from her. The dress wasn’t something she normally would wear—but with the boots, it looked kind of cool

“Your name is Gertie,” Penn said. “You’re a foreign exchange student from Berlin.”

“Berlin?” Lyssa pushed the cat’s-eye sunglasses up her nose. “Ve vill eat frankenfurters, den! Und sauerkraut.”

Penn twisted a scarf around her own brown curls, frowning. “What?”

“That was supposed to be a German accent.”

“Oh. It sounded like you accidentally bit your tongue. Now hurry. The performance doesn’t start until five, but people have been lining up all day.”

Lyssa quickly changed into her costume, and Penn decided to try out one of her older sister’s dresses and a pair of rhinestone-covered sunglasses. When they were all ready, Lyssa realized she didn’t feel like herself at all. She felt a little older, a little more confident. Maybe she really was the kind of person who could sing onstage in front of all those people; maybe she
was
her mother’s daughter. The flowery dress and combat boots reminded her of her mom’s stage costumes: all those flowing, gauzy tunics and heavy, leather motorcycle boots. Lyssa smoothed down her brown wig and adjusted the frames of her sunglasses. She was ready.

She and Penn scrambled down from the tree house and hurriedly walked the block and a half to Lyssa’s house. The closer they got, the harder Lyssa’s heart began to beat against her chest

Home. She was finally here

They entered from the garden. Sneaking under the loose fence post, they found themselves suddenly surrounded by sunflowers that stretched above Lyssa like giant, yellow windmills, with petals wavering in the light wind. Lyssa’s heart swelled. This was what she’d been looking for all along

This, right here, was her mother’s magic

She reached a hand out to touch the stems and leaves. They were just as she remembered them. Just down the rocky stone path was the bench that Lyssa and her mom had built themselves. It was rickety, and one of the legs was attached with bubble gum and rubber bands. But Lyssa and her mom had scratched their names into the wood with kitchen knives and, somehow, the bubble gum and rubber bands had held up for years. Lyssa knelt down next to the bench and found their names. They were faded, worn down by wind and rain and storms. But they were still there

“Though we may travel far away,”
her mom had said,
“we leave our roots behind.”

“Lyssa, look,” Penn breathed

Lyssa tore her eyes away from the flowers and her breath caught in her throat. There were protestors
everywhere
—hundreds of them, thousands even, crowded around the house and spilling onto the sidewalk and street out front. Lyssa tried to count them all, but there were just too many people—people she recognized and people she’d never seen before.

Tears pricked at the back of Lyssa’s eyes. These people had come for her home. These people had come for her mom.

The big backyard just beyond the garden was set up to look like a fair. Every few feet there was a different food vendor selling fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, sugar-dipped gumdrops, or chocolate-chip-filled cotton candy. There were rainbow-colored tents and game stands and even a tiny carousel that glinted in the sunlight. Music poured out of the stands—Ana Lee’s recordings. Some of the songs were ones that Lyssa hadn’t heard since before her mom had died

“Wow,” Lyssa breathed. It was like going back in time, like being at the fair again. She almost expected her mom to appear at the Skee-Ball stand to play a quick round before her performance, just like in the old days

“Come on,” Penn said. Lyssa adjusted her sunglasses, suddenly nervous. If she was going to be recognized anywhere, it would be here—in a yard filled with the people
who’d known her and Ana best. She didn’t see any police officers around, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there

Keeping her head down, Lyssa followed Penn through the crowd. She was so busy trying not to step on anyone’s toes that she didn’t notice when she walked right into a pair of blue-uniform-covered legs

“Whoa, there. What’s your hurry, young ladies?”

The legs belonged to a tall man with hair so shiny and blond that the sun bounced off it like a mirror. Lyssa’s eyes wandered down to the badge attached to his chest

A cop

Her mouth went dry and her eyes grew wide behind her own cat’s-eye sunglasses. The cop leaned over and adjusted the frames of his glasses, like that would help him see through Lyssa’s disguise

“Not a lot of children running around here without adult supervision,” the cop said. Lyssa swallowed. She wasn’t sure whether or not that was a question, but she shook her head anyway

“No, sir.”

For a second the police officer was quiet. There was a piece of grass in the corner of his mouth and he chewed on it, lazily

“We’re on the lookout for a girl about your age. Can I ask what you ladies are doing here?”

Though her mouth felt as dry as the desert, Lyssa forced words through her lips

“We’re…we’re reporters. For the school paper. We’re here for a story.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Penn added quickly

“Don’t you need notebooks? Cameras? Recorders?” the cop asked

“Oh, um…” Lyssa said. She shoved a hand into the pocket of her dress, but the only thing she found was a tube of old lipstick that must have belonged to Penn’s sister. She pulled it out and held it up for the officer

“You know how technology is these days,” she said, smiling. “This
is
a recorder.”

“That’s right,” Penn said. She pulled a pack of gum out of her own pocket and waved it in front of the cop. “And, and this is a camera! See.”

She held it up to her face and pretended to take a photograph. Lyssa bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing out loud. The officer frowned. Since Lyssa couldn’t see his eyes behind those glasses, she had no idea whether or not he believed her

“Did I hear someone say
reporter
?”

A short, round man, like a beach ball with arms and legs, shouldered his way past the cop. Despite the fact that he was dressed casually, in a T-shirt and jeans, he also wore
a battered-looking top hat and a monocle, which he fumbled with anxiously

“You’ll
need
to interview me! My name is Henric. I discovered Ana Lee,” the man said. He rocked back and forth between his heels and the balls of his feet.

“You’ll vouch for these girls, Mr. Henric?” the cop asked. Henric nodded his head and waved the cop away

“Yes, yes, yes. Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, waving his hands at the cop dismissively. He wore white gloves that came just to his wrists. There wasn’t a single smudge or speck of dust on them

The cop gave Lyssa and Penn one last look, then stalked back into the crowd

“The stories I could tell you about Ana,” Henric said. He stretched out Lyssa’s mom’s name, so that it sounded like
Aaaahnaaah
.

“What kind of stories?” Lyssa asked. Her ears perked up. He had
discovered
her mom? She held the tube of lipstick up to Henric’s face. For a second, she forgot that it didn’t
actually
record a thing.

“The first time she came out on that stage, she couldn’t utter a single sound,” Henric said, laughing so hard that his big belly shook back and forth. Inexplicably, he switched his monocle from one eye to the other, then straightened his top hat with the tips of his gloved fingers. “That girl
looked like she’d seen a ghost. Eventually she could sing like a bird, but that first time on the stage I thought she’d pass out from fear.”

Lyssa almost dropped the tube of lipstick. Her mom had never told her that she had stage fright, too! In all the stories she told about how she got her start, she made it sound like she was never as comfortable as she was onstage—like she could have been born there

Huh. Knowing that her mom had been scared gave Lyssa a little more courage. Maybe she’d be able perform tonight after all…but her stomach clenched and she had to push the thought away

Henric led Penn and Lyssa around the yard, introducing them to more of Lyssa’s mom’s old friends. There was Carl, a short but thickly muscled man who explained that he’d been the bouncer at the first jazz club Ana Lee ever sang at. He told Lyssa that Ana used to have bubble-gum-pink hair and a piercing in her nose. Despite his small size, he said, he’d been one of the best bouncers in the business.

“I’m a good kicker,” he whispered to Lyssa, winking. Then he showed off a few roundhouse kicks for good measure

Then there was Louise, an energetic old woman with white hair and a big smile. She used to live next door to Ana Lee when she first moved to the city

“She loved my oatmeal butterscotch cookies,” Louise said. Lyssa smiled
She
loved oatmeal butterscotch cookies too.

Lyssa met Careen and Cora, a pair of twins with long, glossy black hair and lips as red as cherries. They used to sing in the chorus with Ana Lee, and they had a bad habit of finishing each other’s sentences

“Men, they loved Ana Lee,” Cora said. “They all wanted to whisk her away to Morocco, or Iceland. But she always said—”

“Not a chance,” Careen cut in. “She had that lovely daughter, you know. She always had to make sure to do what was best for Lyssa.”

“What about Michael?” Lyssa piped up. She knew she was supposed to keep quiet, but she couldn’t help herself

“Michael!” Careen smiled, looking at Cora. “Do you remember when she met Michael, Cora?”

“Oh, yes! He showed up at the Talent Show on that bright green Vespa he’d rebuilt himself. She fell head over heels. She called us right up,” Cora said. “She was so excited…”

Lyssa chewed on her lower lip. She remembered that Vespa. Michael had taken her on ride after ride around the parking lot on it. He had traded it in and bought a Prius after he started dating her mom

“‘Wouldn’t he be a great father,’ that’s what she said on the phone,” Careen continued, shaking Lyssa from her memories. The woman beamed down at Lyssa. “Ana was so excited to have found a man who loved her daughter.”

As Lyssa and Penn walked away from the twins, Lyssa felt a hard rock forming in her gut. She’d never thought about it that way before—that maybe her mom had fallen for Michael because he was the kind of guy who came over with a laptop just so that Lyssa could watch Athena clips. All Lyssa had focused on was how much things had changed—how they’d had to move to Kirkland and how she’d have to go to school and eat different foods and live in a different type of house. She never really thought about the good changes. Like all of the bike rides Michael took her on, and how he was always bringing home new peanut butter foods (peanut butter broccoli! fried peanut butter bananas!). And he’d taken the time to install that music software into her computer so that she could record all those demo CDs.

Lyssa reached into her pocket and her fingers curled around the tiny airplane. She pulled it out and—for the first time—she noticed that there was a message written on the other wing too

The winds of change are coming.

“Change,” Lyssa whispered aloud

In that moment, she finally understood. Things had changed. Home had changed

Home could be a place, but home could be a person, too. It could be a moment, a memory, or a feeling. This house, this garden, it would always be Lyssa’s home. But Michael could be her home, too. If she let him

T
he garden was filling up. If it had felt crowded before, now it was like a pillow so stuffed with feathers it was bursting at the seams. Everywhere Lyssa looked, she saw people huddled together, munching on fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, laughing, and playing the carnival games.

Penn leaned over and said something that Lyssa couldn’t hear over the roar of the people talking all around them. It sounded like “my scream luck,” which didn’t make any sense

“What?” Lyssa asked. Penn cupped a hand around her mouth

“Ice cream truck,” she yelled, pointing just past the
house. Lyssa gave Penn a thumbs-up and led the way, winding through the people and slowly making her way to the front yard

The front yard didn’t have quite as wild a garden as the back did, but there was the big, wild dogwood tree growing just next to the white porch that wrapped around the front of the house. There were daisies scattered across the grass. It looked like someone had taken flower seeds and thrown them every which way, paying no attention to where they landed. Which, Lyssa knew, was exactly how her mom had planted the flowers

She turned to ask Penn where she’d seen the ice cream truck—but Penn wasn’t behind her. Lyssa was hemmed in on all sides by strangers

Nervous now, Lyssa decided that she needed to make her way to higher ground. She stopped next to the front porch and hoisted herself up onto the old, wooden banister—just like she used to do when she wanted to see a storm approaching from miles away. Her hands and feet instinctively found the worn-down grooves in the wood where she’d pulled herself up a million times before.

The first thing Lyssa saw after crawling onto the banister was a fat, gray cat with jade-green eyes. It was sitting on a porch swing that swayed slightly, back and forth, as though the cat was making it move through sheer force of will.

“Grandma,” Lyssa called. She wanted to throw her arms around the big gray cat but had to keep perfectly still so as not to lose her balance on the porch banister

The cat narrowed one eye, as though to ask,
“What took you so long?”

“I had a long way to travel,” Lyssa explained. The cat shrugged and bent down to lick her paw. Lyssa looked past the cat, to where the big, gnarly tree was growing next to the porch. There were already people sitting on its large branches. Lyssa considered joining them to stage the sit-in so that the construction company couldn’t knock the house down, and pray that her mom would send a miracle to save their home. But she couldn’t keep her eyes from traveling from the tree to the porch beneath it: the stage.