The Zanna Function

by Daniel Wheatley

  “Oh, I have no doubt. It’s a wonderful idea you all have come up with.” Pops paused to focus on picking up a gumdrop, then added it to his cupcake. “Whatever happened to that nice young man with the shield?” he asked Zanna. “Did he find the woman who gave you all that trouble?”

  “Owin, Pops. His name is Owin.” Zanna scowled as her knife dug into the cupcake, spreading crumbs through her icing. “And no, the Primers haven’t found her. I don’t think they’re looking anymore.”

  “They’re still looking,” Beatrice said. “You just—”

  The doorbell rang.

  “That can’t be him!” Nora shrieked as she dashed into the kitchen, eyes wide with a scrambling fright. “It’s only eleven! He’s not supposed to be here until one! That was the plan!”

  Something warm and gooey crept over Zanna’s hand. She looked down and saw she had squeezed her cupcake to bits. Icing globbed over her thumb and onto the table.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Beatrice said, half to Zanna and half to Nora. She took Zanna’s hands and wiped off the icing with a towel. “They’re just cupcakes. Go on. We’re right here.”

  “Don’t forget this,” Pops said, pressing the frying pan into her hands as she got up from the table. He winked at her, and Zanna just stared at the piece of cast iron for a moment until her brain got around to working again. Owin’s wall of air pressure. She had to unlock it to let her father in.

  “But the decorations!” Nora pleaded. “Libby’s still decorating—”

  “It’s going to be all right,” Beatrice repeated, holding Nora and making her slow her breathing down a little. “Promise.” She flicked her head toward the front door. “Zanna, don’t keep him waiting.”

  Pops got up from the table. “Come on.” He held out his arm for Zanna to take. “Let’s go take a walk.”

  They started down the hallway. “Welcome back,” she muttered to herself, the frying pan clutched to her chest. “Hi. Hello. You’re back. You’re here.”

  She decided on “hello” and tried it a couple more times, just to make sure she still remembered how it worked. But when she opened the door, what came out of her mouth was an unintelligent half-squeak, a bottleneck of indignation and excitement all smashed together. It wasn’t her father on the doorstep. It was Owin and Cedwick.

  “Hello!” Owin said. He wore a navy coat that looked thick enough to brave the Arctic and a knitted brown-and-gold scarf. “Terribly sorry about intruding like this. But I did bring biscuits!” In his hands was a platter crammed with a colorful variety of cookies. “Though I suppose you call them cookies. May we come in? It’s a bit cold out here.”

  Zanna just stared.

  “Well look who it is!” she heard Pops say. “Zanna didn’t tell me she had invited you. Come in and stop heating the entire neighborhood.”

  Cedwick hadn’t moved from his spot off on the side of the porch, hands jammed deep in the pockets of his tailored peacoat. Owin coughed politely. “The barrier, if you don’t mind.”

  Pops chuckled. “Oh, right. I’m too old for these new tricks.” He nudged Zanna playfully, but there was a stern tone to his voice. Visitors were sacred in the Mayfield house. “Let them in, Zanna.”

  The scene was a car wreck, and Zanna could only stand on the sidewalk and watch it happen. She unlocked the barrier of air pressure, and the boys came inside, Owin stamping his feet and handing Pops the platter of cookies. They all shuffled around in the foyer, shedding coats and laughing, and Zanna just kept backing up until the wall was behind her and she couldn’t back up any more.

  “Zanna, why don’t you run and see if we have any tea in the pantry?” Pops said in a slight reproach. She had been quiet for almost a minute, and they were looking at her. Everyone except Cedwick. “And start some water boiling. Our guests are freezing.”

  Her grandfather’s words triggered something, a subroutine of good manners that had been drilled into her since childhood, and she nodded. But before she could take a step toward the kitchen, Libby grabbed her by the arm, hard. “Zanna, you’ve got frosting all over you!” she said, spinning her around so the boys couldn’t see if it was true or not. “Just a minute, boys? We’ll be right back.”

  The other girls fell in at once. Between Nora, Libby, and Beatrice, Zanna was nearly carried upstairs to the guest bathroom. Neither she nor her grandfather used it, and its pristine square towels always smelled a bit like wilted flowers—and made her feel like she was disturbing the tomb of a long-dead Egyptian prince.

  Libby sat Zanna down on the lid of the toilet, and Beatrice shut the door with a decisive click.

  “You said he wasn’t coming,” Nora hissed, anxiety plain on her face. “I didn’t plan for this!”

  “He wasn’t supposed to!” Zanna said. Libby twisted the faucet on full blast, covering their voices with the sound of running water. “He told me he’d rather Splutter his ear again.”

  Libby crossed her arms, looking more like a grizzled cop at an interrogation than a fourteen-year-old girl. “What happened when you went to see him in the nurse’s cottage?” she said. “Tell us everything.”

  Zanna squirmed. “I told you, I went to invite him to my party, and he said no.” The girls were silent, and she collapsed under their quiet weight. “And he said that I’ve been out to get him since the beginning of school.”

  Libby smirked. “He really doesn’t know you, does he?”

  “He also called you a barbaric American.”

  “That’s probably accurate,” Libby conceded. “Doesn’t explain what he’s doing here, though.”

  “Owin brought him,” Beatrice said, as if it was obvious.

  Zanna groaned. “He was there at the nurse’s cottage. He probably thinks Cedwick and I are dating.” She ran her fingers through her short hair. “Or that we should.”

  Libby’s eyebrows waggled suggestively, but she kept her mouth shut. Everyone was silent for a long moment. “So what do you want us to do?” Beatrice finally asked. “Should we throw him out?”

  “I don’t . . .” There was something at the end of that sentence, something monstrous dredged up from inside her—a function she was looking at head-on for the first time. “I don’t want him. But I don’t want him to be alone, either. I just want us to get along.”

  The water was still splashing and gurgling in the porcelain sink, and when no one spoke, Libby reached over and turned it off. It drained away, leaving only a small quartz clock on the counter to tick away in the silence.

  “Okay. New plan,” Nora said sharply. With brisk movements, she pointed at each of them in turn, assigning roles. “Zanna, you explain that this party is for your father. Beatrice can help. Libby, you go finish up the decorations. Get Owin to help you with that. Nobody talks about Self class or real manipulations or the Hemmington family. And nobody talks about Zanna and Cedwick together.” She counted off the forbidden topics on her fingers, her gaze lingering an extra second on Libby. “We are going to have a nice and pleasant party if it kills me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Libby said with a sardonic grin, hopping down from the counter. Zanna looked over at Beatrice, who had been quietly leaning against the door throughout everything, as if it were her job to make sure no one left until the matter had been settled. The small girl had a fierce look to her eyes and just nodded to Zanna, making a little wordless promise between them before she opened the bathroom door.

  As the girls entered the kitchen, Owin and Cedwick looked up from the table. They each held a mug of hot tea, but only Owin’s had been touched. Cedwick just looked glumly into his swirls of milk, ceaselessly stirring. Pops was nowhere to be seen.

  “Ah, hello again,” Owin said. The girls held up in the doorway for a moment until Beatrice took the lead and sat down at the table. Then the others followed, surrounding Zanna like a squad of Secret Service. “I’m quite sorry about this. Cedwick told
me it was a holiday party. I don’t want to impose—”

  “No!” Zanna said. Pops would never forgive her if she chased Owin and Cedwick away. But her voice came out high and squeaky. In an instant, her cheeks were blushing.

  “It’s a welcome-home party,” Beatrice said without missing a beat. “Zanna’s father is a pilot overseas, and he’s coming home today.”

  “Ah,” Owin said. “I suppose that explains the banner in the hallway. Sorry. Had I known, I would have brought a more appropriate gift.”

  “Well then,” Libby said, taking the opportunity. “Come help me finish decorating the living room.”

  “Pressed into service!” Owin laughed. “I suppose that’s only fair. Can I bring my tea?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Libby said as they got up and went into the living room.

  A tense silence fell over the kitchen. Nora had covered the topics to avoid—but not really any to use. Zanna racked her brain for conversation, focusing intently on the cupcake she was decorating. Everything she thought of fell into one of Nora’s forbidden categories.

  “Well, aren’t you a cheery bunch!”

  Pops entered the kitchen toting an armful of old plastic bags, and Zanna could have thrown her arms around him. He took in the table at a glance. “So quiet! Make some room. That’s it, now. Took a while to find, but I’ve got a surprise for you all!”

  They moved the cupcakes down to the end as Pops took up a position at the head of the table. He opened the first bag and poured out a collection of pennies, battered instruction cards, golf tees, interlocked rings, and matchsticks, shushing any questions as he began organizing the junk into piles.

  “Now you already know this, so no cheating,” he said, wagging his finger at Zanna. With practiced hands, he laid out the nine matchsticks. “The question is—can you turn these nine matches into ten?”

  Silence returned, but this time it felt different. Almost comfortable. Zanna wiped the sweat from her forehead as nonchalantly as possible, hoping her cheeks had returned to their natural color by now.

  “No one?” Pops said after the minutes had ticked by and the matchsticks were still lying on the table, unchanged. He jangled a handful of wooden nickels. “Come on now, put those brains to work! What about you, young man?”

  He pointed at Cedwick, who was still contemplating his untouched tea, and the bottom fell out of Zanna’s stomach. In a flash, she saw Cedwick willing the graphite cube to move, refusing to admit that he had failed. Beside her, Nora took a silent and anxious breath.

  “I’m completely stumped,” Beatrice said, a little too loudly. “What’s the answer?” But Pops didn’t give it. He just kept watching Cedwick, and the seconds stretched on. Until Cedwick reached out to the matchsticks. Without a word, he rearranged them to spell out TEN.

  “We have a winner!” Pops said, picking out a wooden nickel and sliding it across to Cedwick. “And there’s your prize!”

  Cedwick didn’t say anything, but he turned the wooden nickel over, feeling its rough edge. “I’ve seen that one before,” he mumbled.

  “Oh?” Pops said. Those were magic words to him. “Well then, let’s try something different.”

  Relief washed over Zanna like blissfully cool water. The next hour passed effortlessly as Pops pulled out puzzle after puzzle. Everyone acquired a little pool of wooden nickels, though the girls made sure Cedwick’s remained the biggest. Owin and Libby finished with the decorations, and everyone moved to the living room to ooh and aah over their handiwork. The cupcakes never got finished, but Pops declared they had more than enough, and besides, there were puzzles to do! When Zanna looked up at the clock the next time, it was because someone was ringing the doorbell.

  “I think that’s for you,” Pops said in the quiet pause after the doorbell stopped. Suddenly, Zanna remembered why she had thrown this party in the first place, and her smile faded. Right. Her father.

  But then she caught sight of Cedwick, who was now on his second cup of tea, and it spurred her on. If he could have a good time, then there was hope for her. The plan the girls had made in the bathroom seemed less impossible now. Everyone could get along.

  The frying pan had a good solid weight to it as she picked it up from the counter and took it to the front door. This time she didn’t rehearse what she was going to say. There was too much going on inside her head. Instead, she just took a deep breath, felt the comforting heft of the frying pan and its story in her hands, and opened the front door.

  A man with a dark-brown traveling bag stood on the front porch. He had a shiny, sunburnt face and a pair of sunglasses tucked into the breast pocket of his pilot’s uniform. The shirt he wore was loose at the collar and rumpled, as if he had tugged and pulled at the stiff tie the minute he was free. In his hands was a present wrapped in exotic paper.

  “Hey!” her father shouted. “There’s my girl!”

  He reached out to give her the present, but he stopped at the threshold, held back by the wall of air pressure. A frown creased his reddened face, and he tried again, with no success. “What is this?” he asked after the third time. The joy in his voice disappeared, replaced by a familiar anger. “What’s going on? Zanna? Is this some kind of joke?”

  “I’m going to explain it,” Zanna said. She felt her face beginning to twist into a scowl and fought to keep it level. “I’m going to explain everything. But you have to listen and not interrupt. A lot has happened while you’ve been gone. A whole lot.”

  But he was not listening. He was testing the wall of air pressure, seeing if he could break through it with his shoulder. “This isn’t funny,” he growled. He had put the present down on the porch to shove at the barrier with both hands. “What is this? What did you do?”

  “I told you, I’m going to explain it! You never listen to me!”

  Her voice was too loud, she realized as the last words escaped her lips. Too loud and too shrill. No doubt everyone had heard her back in the kitchen. They had probably heard her across the street. But it worked, and her father lowered his hands. “Okay,” he said, though his eyes said it was anything but okay. “I’m listening.”

  It was like a ball of steel wool in her stomach. Zanna felt every knot of her father’s function jabbing at her soft insides. Her hands squeezed the frying pan, considering for a second, and then gave it a twist.

  “Come in,” she said quietly. “We need to talk.”

  Her father put his hand out, trying to feel for where the barrier of air pressure had been. When he didn’t find it, he stepped up into the house and looked around, still breathing hard. Zanna didn’t realize how she had backed up when he entered, and now they stood at opposite ends of the foyer, looking at one another.

  She had never made it this far in her scenarios. She had imagined the initial meeting a hundred different ways, but she had never managed to push past it—to when they would stand across from each other, to when she would have to explain everything that had happened since last spring.

  Her father crossed his muscular arms over his chest expectantly. “Well?”

  It felt like swallowing a pill the size of a cannonball. She could spend the next month trying to feel out all the different functions that made him so difficult. What she needed now was something to act on, and on that, everything pointed together.

  She crossed the foyer and buried her face in his chest. “I’ve missed you.”

  Her father didn’t seem to know how to hold her. He tried, first putting his hands on her shoulders and then gingerly embracing her, as if she were a delicate crystal he might smash into pieces. So she wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her face in his unkempt uniform and his musk of diesel and tarmac and flower-scented body wash.

  Women’s body wash.

  She opened her eyes. “Wait—”

  Coils of black iron poured out of her father’s uniform, like he had been hidi
ng a basket of snakes under his shirt, and they were all coming out at once. The metal caught Zanna around the arms and waist and legs and bound her to him, tighter than a spider wrapping its prey in silk, and her mind clutched the truth, a few seconds too late.

  An illusion, hiding the strange woman underneath.

  Then Zanna’s world exploded in shouts and footsteps. Everyone had left the kitchen to meet her father, and now they were running, charging at the man who wasn’t her father, who wasn’t even a man but that mysterious woman.

  As it turns out, Zanna thought grimly, the Primers were right about her being a kidnapper after all.

  Libby and Beatrice tackled the woman to the ground in a disorganized, ungraceful scrum, with Nora throwing herself on top after a moment of panicked deliberation. Bound as she was to the woman by bands and bands of iron, Zanna couldn’t even brace herself as the girls piled on, and she gasped as the weight squeezed the wind out of her. For a second it seemed like the fight was over, the woman pinned beneath three angry girls. Then there was a great whumph and a clap of thunder. Zanna felt the air around her and her captor suddenly shove back, exploding in all directions, and the girls flew like rag dolls. Glass shattered as Beatrice cracked an overhead light with her back. Nora splintered the closet door, and Libby tumbled down the hallway, her knees skidding on the hardwood.

  “Get behind me!” A silver whip that must have been Owin’s shield darted forward and wrapped around the waist of Zanna’s attacker. The boy stood with his legs spread wide, as if bracing against a gale wind. One hand held the other end of his shield-whip as tight-fisted as if he had just lassoed a mad bull. The other pointed toward the ceiling, where he had caught Beatrice on a pillow of air after she’d slammed into the ceiling. He was now lowering her safely to the ground. “Don’t!”

  This last remark had been aimed at Libby. But the girl ignored him as she got back to her feet, charging in again like a linebacker. She made it two steps before snapping up into the air as if she had stepped into a jungle trap that left her dangling by her feet. Except there was no rope—there was just air around her. Blood oozed out of where she had cracked her head.