Zia Erases the World by Bree Barton

Author:Bree Barton [Barton, Bree]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

kilarious |ki-ˈler-ē-əs|

adjective

1 marked by or causing extreme hilarity, followed by an emotional sucker punch to the gut: Zia Angelis is totally kilarious.

From English hilarious, “extremely funny” and kill, “put an end to.”

I was nine when Mom declared a bankrupture, the kind of earthquake where all your money falls through the cracks. We put our stuff in storage and house-sat for a bunch of different families while they were off on their fancy summer vacations.

“Why don’t we stay with Yiayia?” I remember asking. “She has a big house.”

To which Mom replied, “We don’t need a big house, Sunshine Girl. We only need each other.”

She was right. Even without a home, I was happy. We stayed in one upstairs duplex where we could walk onto the downstairs unit’s roof, and we’d bring our shared scoop of ice cream up there to watch the sunset. Another house had a family of silkworms living in a mulberry tree. Mom never missed an opportunity to make a special memory, so she surprised me one morning with mulberry sandwiches and an impromptu tea party.

Sometimes I’d invite Sasha and Jay over, and we’d embark on a Zashay adventure, scouring the house for secret doors or passageways, making up stories about the people who lived there and the lives they led.

I tell Alice how it was weird and confusing, waking up in so many strange beds, but also funny, living amid other people’s stuff. How Mom and I would stumble across their secrets without meaning to. Like the time we were house-sitting for two newlyweds and opened a ton of kitchen drawers looking for a can opener . . . and found a Polaroid picture of them hiking buck naked. Mom blushed extra pink when I asked if that’s why they called it a honeymoon.

I try to make Alice understand how, in a summer of honeymoon pictures and mulberry sandwiches, my gerbil Gerber Baby was a fuzzy brown cuddlebug of happy. We didn’t have Mouseimus yet, which was probably a good thing, seeing as how Mr. Mousie does not like riding in the car. But Baby didn’t mind it. We carried his cage from house to house, and I was a responsible pet parent, cleaning out the old stinky cedar chips, chopping up carrots and lettuce, and letting Baby tickle my face with his squiggly pink nose.

And then I tell Alice about the day it all came to an end. Mom and I were pet-sitting for a family with an excitable black lab puppy. One night we went out for burgers, and while we were gone, the lab knocked the cage off the counter.

I was the one who found Baby. He was lying very still in a panicked trail of cedar chips. He didn’t have a scratch on him, but his eyes were open wide. Mom said he died of fright.

I cried for hours. I didn’t know it was possible to cry that much. Mom held me while I left a blubbery mess of tears and snot on her soft nubby sweater.

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