Baja Zuma

Chapter 6

DANI'S P.O.V.

I was seated in the Starbucks at a big shopping center in Thousand Oaks, over the hilltop from where we lived, taking a break from the flirting we sisters were doing on this Valentine's Day. Lisa was especially over-the-top with it, chatting up every cute guy she saw walking to or from his car in the parking lot. She would fan her face with her hand when one was especially attractive in her estimation. She was holding her hand-printed sign reading TAKEN OR NOT, UR STILL HOT.

I smiled down at the eighth note musical symbol the barista had carved with her spoon in the foam on my espresso. We had spoken a number of times when I had been here before, and she obviously remembered I was in the music business.

My phone deetled. It was a text from my friend Nessa. Over the next couple minutes my phone display blossomed with bubbles of text back and forth between us.

😎Long time no text.

👅Preach it. I'm having a swag coffee in Starbucks. My sisters are still out there shouting at people in cars and holding up their Valentine's Day signs, and talking to guys walking by. I can see Lisa out the window right now prancing around in her little pink dress. She is going to bag herself a bae today, I swear.

😎Does she have a chaperone? LOL

👅Alex is performing that function for us.

😎How are things going with the band?

👅Not all that great. Long story short, we are fed up with the four-hour round-trip to the studio, and also with our producer. He told one of my sisters last time we were recording there, "You sing like an old man." Can you believe it? HE is the old man!

😎Comes the revolution, make sure that creep is the first to be dealt with. You ought to leave California altogether. Look for greener pastures.

👅Yes, in our recent band meetings we have been discussing doing just that. We have a city in mind, but I'm supposed to keep it secret until we make the move. Yo, I've got some coffee-drinking to do before it goes cold. Talk to you soon, comrade. Workers of the world, unite!

After I finished my espresso I joined my sisters outdoors. We carried our Valentine's Day signs and fussed over strangers—especially the ones carrying freshly-purchased holiday flowers back to their vehicle—until the three fair-skinned sisters, Amy, Christina and I, were turning lobster-red. We piled into our big SUV for Katherine to drive us home.

In the back seat, after singing a few goofy vocal parts in the Louis Armstrong impersonation I had been perfecting, I got into an argument with Lauren over whether the "t" in "often" is silent. She went French on me with, "Tais-toi, rat mangeur de fromage." I was trying to figure out what sort of insult that was—I knew "rat" meant the same thing in French and English—when our vehicle wobbled on the road, tossing me against my seat belt. I yelled, "Knock it off with the wild driving, Kath."

"I'm not doing that," Katherine told me. "It's the steering going bad. Or a tire just blew out." Katherine braked to a stop on the road, but the undulations continued for a few more seconds.

I saw wisps of brown dust here and there on the hillside around us, over rivulets of loose gravel streaming downhill. "Earthquake?" I asked.

"That's gotta be it," Christina said.

Our environs soon returned to normal, and when Katherine slowly eased the vehicle forward and nothing odd happened, we felt assured that the problem had not been some mechanical failure. A couple minutes later Katherine had us back at our property, where we could see the rest of the family who had stayed home today were outside the house looking it over.

Dad told us, "We just had quite an earthquake rattle the house. Did you feel it on the road?"

We told him we had indeed felt it, and asked if there was any damage to the house.

Dad said, "Come in and see for yourself."

I didn't see anything out of the ordinary until we got to the room we used for homeschooling lessons. The shelf of homeschool books was mostly empty, the books fallen in a heap on the floor. A fancy glass see-through wall clock lay shattered on the floor. Monopoly pieces poked up through floury plaster on a table from a game my brothers had been playing, the gameboard itself completely obscured. A chunk of the ceiling in this room had collapsed, exposing wooden slats, a kind of ceiling skeleton glaring down on us. The plaster dust hanging in the air made me cough.