Vivian lantzs second cha.., p.1
Vivian Lantz's Second Chances, page 1
Dedication
To Lorelei.
Meeting you for the first time was the coolest thing ever.
I can’t wait to keep meeting you as you grow.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Kathryn Ormsbee
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
ALLOW ME TO introduce myself. My name is Vivian Lantz, I am four feet, ten inches tall, and I am under a lifelong curse.
I mean it. I’ve been cursed since practically birth, and here’s how: I’ve never had a good first day of school. Not one.
It all began on my first day of pre-K, when I accidentally knocked over an industrial-size tub of rainbow glitter during nap time. The way my dads tell the story, when they picked me up at Green Sprouts Preschool, I was a sparkly forty-pound chunk of toddler, and that was the day that my older brother, Arlo, started calling me Unicorn Barf, or Barficorn for short.
My first days didn’t get better from there. Name a grade, and I’ll fill you in on the deets.
Fourth grade? Stepped on a hornets’ nest at recess.
Second? Hawk Ryman broke my nose by throwing a stapler at my face.
Fifth? My appendix burst in world history.
In kindergarten, Jill Peever cut my bangs with craft scissors, and let me put it this way: she was not a licensed cosmetologist.
Then there was third grade. That was the year my family moved from Chicago to Austin. The whole Texas thing was new to me, but Ms. Fischer, the school’s music director, didn’t get that memo, because who did she pick during opening announcements to come onstage and help the auditorium sing “Deep in the Heart of Texas”?
You guessed it.
I didn’t know a single word of the song, and when we got to the part where everyone claps as loud as they can, four times in row, I jumped off the stage and didn’t stop running till I was locked in a bathroom stall, bawling my eyes out.
If I had a dollar for every time some fifth grade boy charged me in the hallway after that, yelling, “‘The stars at night! Are big and bright!’” I’d be a multimillionaire.
I’m not gonna lie. The rest of my elementary school career was tough. (See Exhibit A, appendix bursting, and Exhibit B, hornets’ nest.) But sixth grade was the start of middle school. It was a chance to make a new name for myself—literally. I decided that I would start going by my middle name, Mare, instead of Vivian. Mare sounded more sophisticated. Intriguing. Fun!
In homeroom, when Mr. Osment read my name off the roll, I told him that I actually went by “Mare.” He gave me a funny look.
“Mayor?” he said, double-checking his clipboard.
“Mare,” I corrected, pronouncing it the right way, so it rhymed with “hair.”
“Mayor,” Mr. Osment repeated wrongly.
The kids around me started to snicker.
Amanda Cravens leaned in and said, “Uh, okay, Vivian. I guess I’ll go by Governor now.”
Then Justin Schmidt shouted, “My name is President!” and the whole class cracked up.
It took a while for Mr. Osment to calm everyone down. Once he had, he turned to me, looking tired and kind of annoyed, and said, “Mayor. Is that right?”
I mumbled, “Just call me Vivian.”
By the time lunch rolled around, I was sitting alone at a table, chewing a fish stick and ruing the day my dads had given me a weirdo middle name that Da claims is an Irish version of Mary but looks like another name for a horse and apparently sounds like an elected city official.
That’s when a girl in a pink sequined dress appeared before me.
“Whoa,” she said. “I love Relevane, too.”
I stared at her, my mouth crammed with food. I didn’t understand. How could this stranger know about my all-consuming love for Relevane, the greatest book series of all time, written by the legendary Q. S. Murray?
Then I saw that she was pointing at my backpack. There was a patch on the zipper pouch, colored green and gold—the colors of the Elystrian Court. The embroidered letters spelled out the Elystrian motto: Ascend in dignity. You’d have to be real fan of the series to understand the reference, and no one at school ever had. Not until this fateful moment.
I blinked at the girl, fried fish going soggy in my mouth. I didn’t recognize her from Travis Elementary. She had golden-brown skin and long brown braided hair. She wore an enamel pin on her dress collar, shaped like two interlocking hearts—the crest of the Elystrian Court.
I gulped down my food, awestruck.
“I’m so excited about the movie,” the girl said, setting her tray on my table. “But how are they going to cast Torin? No mere mortal is good enough to play him.”
“Torin’s my favorite character,” I said breathlessly.
“Right? He’s so noble. Who gives up their birthright like that?”
“Have you been to BookPeople yet?” I asked. “They’re throwing a party when book five comes out next month. I went to the book four party, and it was so fun. People even dressed up for it.”
“Seriously?” The girl gaped at me. “I have the perfect Sage Miriel costume from last Halloween.”
“We should go together!” I blurted. Then I blushed. I was making plans for a Relevane party, and I hadn’t even introduced myself.
“I’m Vivian,” I told the girl. “Mare” was a thing of the past.
“Cami,” she replied, plopping into the chair beside me. “I moved here last month from El Paso.”
I couldn’t believe my luck. It was my dreaded first day of middle school, and I was making a friend. A friend who loved Relevane! I felt like I’d stumbled into Wistwander Field—this place in the world of Relevane where wayward travelers drift into dreams so vivid they feel like reality.
Bad first days can majorly suck—believe me, I know—but once in a blue moon? They end up leading you to your best friend.
Cami Ruiz and I were inseparable from that day forward. It didn’t matter that we weren’t popular or that we didn’t do the usual school stuff, like band or sports or student council. We had each other, and we had Relevane. We dressed up for the party at BookPeople, and we went to the midnight premiere of the first movie. I even wrote Relevane fan fiction that I shared with Cami—and only Cami.
Our friendship wasn’t all about Relevane, though. Cami helped me name all the creepy porcelain dolls in my family’s vintage shop. I helped her make a homemade hedgehog kite for the ABC Kite Fest. Cami swooned over Ervin Rahbar playing Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid Jr., and I ranted about the injustice of Alex Fernandez—soccer star and goalie of my heart—going to the spring dance with Drea Bernal. We got our ears pierced on the same day, and we promised we’d get our first tattoos together one day, too.
Cami even helped me through my bad first day of seventh grade, when I got food poisoning from expired turkey bacon Da had cooked. Five hours after breakfast, I was projectile vomiting in the Bluebonnet gym during a game of dodgeball. Cami held my hair back as I barfed more bacon chunks in the bathroom, and afterward she gave me two sticks of cool mint gum.
I never thought the day would come when Cami wouldn’t be around. But that was before Mrs. Ruiz got a new job in Orlando and Cami’s family moved away this June.
Summer hasn’t been the same without Cami. No visits to Schlitterbahn Waterpark. No lazy days spent eating mangonadas at the frutería on Braker Lane or laughing at Trixie, my family’s rescue pug, while she does zoomies around the kitchen. Sure, Cami and I still text each other, but it’s not the same as when she lived five minutes way.
The worst part about Cami leaving now? I have to face the first day of eighth grade without her.
Here’s how I see it: eighth grade is the end of the road for me. It’s my last chance before high school to get a new reputation—one that doesn’t involve me puking turkey bacon in the gym. I wasn’t expecting a miracle. I know my first day of eighth grade is bound to be cursed in some way, but I was hoping—desperately hoping—that it would be more good than bad.
That seems impossible now. How am I supposed to have a good day without Cami? She’s the only reason that my last two cursed days were livable.
It’s been bad enough just making it through the summer. I don’t have other friends to hang out with. Even my brother, Arlo, has been busy playing bass for his band, the Neon Spurs. So I’ve spent most of my days alone, taking Trixie on walks, rereading the Relevane books for the three-thousandth time, and helping out at my family’s vintage shop, Be Kind, Rewind.
That’s where I am today, on July twentieth—the eve of my thirteenth birthday and a scorcher of a Wednesday here in Austin, Texas. According the KXAN morning news meteorologist, it’s going to get up to 115 degrees today. Yowch.
It’s late morning, and I’m working in the back room. Most days, I’m down to earn a few bucks by he lping out with inventory, but today I’m sweating bullets and thinking how I’d rather be in Q. S. Murray’s Marladia, with its misty, mile-high waterfalls and snowcapped mountains.
“Yo, Barficorn.”
I blink, coming back to reality.
Arlo is holding out a transistor radio—one of Pop’s flea market finds. Judging from the look on Arlo’s face, this isn’t the first time he’s tried to get my attention.
“I said, do you think you could find a spot for this?” Arlo motions toward the shop and adds, “Maybe on that peacock table up front.”
I take the radio.
“Sorry,” I tell Arlo. “Guess I was spacing out.”
“Did you hear that?” Arlo asks our dads. “Barficorn is delirious from the heat. This wouldn’t be happening if we had central AC.”
“Arlo,” Da says tiredly from where he sits at the back-room desk, tapping new entries into a spreadsheet on his laptop. “We’ve been over this. There’s no way we could break even this year with a huge home improvement cost. The window units work fine when it’s not summer.”
“But summer is nine months out of the year,” Arlo mutters.
“That is objectively not true,” says Pop, waving a paisley-printed umbrella in Arlo’s direction.
“It’s a matter of cost-benefit analysis,” says Da. “Maybe you’re too young to understand, but—”
“Here we go.” Arlo throws up his hands. “I’m turning eighteen in three months. I could be forty, and you’d still say I’m too young.”
I leave my dads and Arlo fighting in the back room. This past year, Arlo has been arguing with Dads a lot—Da, especially.
Stepping into the shop, I spot the table that Arlo mentioned. It’s a coffee table with brass feet shaped like peacock tails that Da found last month at an estate sale in Buda. I nudge aside a stack of old Screen Life magazines to make way for the radio, and as I do, something else on the table catches my eye. At first, it looks like a tiny, formless purple blob, but when I pick it up, I see that it’s a spiral of purple construction paper.
I snap to attention, noticing more of the paper spirals on the shop floor. They’re leading away from the peacock table in single file. My heartbeat kicks up. I know a bread crumb trail when I see one.
Straightaway, I put down the radio. I’m on the case.
The trail leads away from the table, winding around a tufted ottoman, and past a plastic penguin figurine. Then the trail of flowers leads up. The spirals are stuck—taped, maybe glued?—along the side of an A-frame bookcase. I follow them to the top shelf, across a row of book spines, and down the bookcase’s opposite side. They circle a yellow umbrella stand twice, and then the trail stops—right at the front door.
Clearly, there’s only one thing to do about that: I unlock the door and fling it open.
There, on the front porch of Be Kind, Rewind, are ten—no, twenty—vases, stuffed with flowers. I recognize the kind of flower right away: they’re hyacinths, and every single one of them has been made from construction paper. Now I get what the purple spirals are: they’re hyacinth blooms, and here there are dozens more of them, glued along green paper stalks, forming paper bouquets. The flowers are all kinds of colors. They’re purple, sure, but also pink, white, red, and orange. And the hyacinths aren’t even the main attraction. They surround a wicker table, and on that table is a wrapped present. I step closer, reading the tag attached to the gift. It says, To Vivian.
I’d know my best friend’s handwriting anywhere.
I grab the present, tearing away the wrapping paper to reveal a book. The cover is a dazzling royal blue, adorned with a gold-foiled border of . . . hyacinths.
Here’s the deal with hyacinths: they are the favorite flower of Sage Miriel, who discovered how to magically speak to their roots in book three of the Relevane series. That’s how she passed secret messages to Torin during his garden walks, when he was under house arrest at the Autumn Palace.
Once, when we were in sixth grade, Cami and I tried to pass our own messages through a dandelion patch in Cami’s backyard. It didn’t work, but we made a pact that day. We vowed that if either of us ever encountered magic in the real world, we’d tell each other. We called our pact Code Unicorn. There haven’t been any Code Unicorns yet, but it did turn into a joke. Like, “I wanna make out with Alex Fernandez, but that’d take a Code Unicorn.” As for hyacinths? They’re still special to me and Cami. We’ve drawn them on just about everything: class notes and bookmarks and each other’s shoulders. They’re our thing.
Cami made these paper hyacinths by hand. She found this hyacinth journal. And she must’ve done all of this weeks ago, before she left for Florida. She planned this whole thing in advance. Best. Friend. Ever.
As I rest my fingertips on the journal, a zap of energy tingles up my spine. I catch my breath, and I swear that for a split second, the gold hyacinths seem to move—petals blooming outward, stems budging upward. I blink, and the movement stops. I must’ve been seeing things. All the same, the tingling remains, prickling up the hairs on my arms.
Eagerly, I open the book and flip through its blank, lined pages. It’s a place for jotting down all my thoughts and stories. This journal and the hyacinth trail that led me here—it’s the perfect birthday gift.
So why do I suddenly feel like my intestines have turned to mush?
Tears prick my eyes as the truth hits me: it is the perfect gift, but Cami’s not here to give it to me.
“Happy early birthday!”
I whirl around. Dads and Arlo have snuck up behind me and stand in the doorway. Arlo is wearing a goofy smirk. Dads exchange a knowing glance, and that’s when it all comes together: Arlo was the one who suggested I put the radio on the peacock table. He was in on this. Everyone was. They even surprised me a day early, when I wouldn’t be expecting a birthday present. So I can’t cry now.
“This is the coolest,” I say, mustering a smile.
“It’s not over yet.” Arlo holds out something: my phone.
I grab it from him as he says, “Looks like you got a text.”
The message is from Cami: Hope you love Part One of your present! I found it at the shop, of all places. Now on to Part Two.
My head swims. Part Two?
Right then, a second text message comes through. It’s a link. I click it, and an internet tab pops open. I recognize the logo at the top of the page: MeetNGreet. It’s this app where you can pay for celebrities to record personalized videos. Last year at school, Amberleigh Allen got one from Thea Gardner, who’s in the big Netflix show Silver Bloods, and kids were talking about it for days.
One thing I know about MeetNGreet is that it’s pricey. Amberleigh said her parents spent three hundred dollars on Thea’s one-minute message. So I don’t get why I’m on MeetNGreet now. Not until Q. S. Murray’s face appears on my screen.
“Wh-what?” I stammer.
It’s a message from Q. S. Murray.
For me.
Q. S. Murray is notoriously hard to get a hold of. She doesn’t have social media or a public email; she doesn’t go on book tours, and she didn’t even show up for the Relevane movie premiere. She is basically a hermit who comes out of her cave once every two years with a new Relevane book. So, seeing Q. S. Murray on my screen is impossible.
But then the impossible happens. The message starts to play.
“Hey there, Vivian! This is Quincy Murray, calling from my office in Boston to wish you a very happy thirteenth—”
For a second, I lose my hearing. My ears seal up, and I feel like I’m being transported through the hollowed tree portal Torin discovers in Willowlight Pass. But then I’m back in the real world, where Q. S. Murray is talking. To me. Panicked, I pause the video and look up at Dads and Arlo with wide eyes.
“It was Cami’s idea,” Pop offers. “We all pitched in to make it happen.”
I nod vaguely and wheeze, “I—I think I need some space.”
Arlo snorts, chucking me on the shoulder and saying, “Okay, weirdo.”
He trots back into the shop.
Pop tells me, “We get it. She’s your hero. You want to savor the moment.”
I nod in a rapturous daze.
“Happy early birthday, kid,” Da says.
He and Pop sling their arms around each other and head inside, closing the door.
Now it’s just me and Q. S.
I sink down, sitting on the top step of the porch. Then I rewind the message and press play.
