The zee files, p.1
The Zee Files, page 1
The ZEE FILES
BY TINA WELLS
with Stephanie Smith
Illustrated by Veronica Miller Jamison
For Phoebe. I hope I’ve succeeded in creating characters you will love.
And for my family and friends, without whom none of this would be possible. —T.W.
© 2020 by Tina Wells
Written with Stephanie Smith
Illustrated by Veronica Miller Jamison
Art Direction by Melissa Alam
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wells, Tina, 1980- author. | Smith, Stephanie (Stephanie Danielle), author. | Miller Jamison, Veronica, illustrator.
Title: The Zee files / by Tina Wells ; with Stephanie Smith ; illustrated by Veronica Miller Jamison.
Description: [Berkeley] : West Margin Press, [2020] | Series: The Zee files | Audience: Ages 11-14. | Audience: Grades 7-9. | Summary: California girl Mackenzie “Zee” Blue moves with her family to London and attends The Hollows, a boarding school for the creative arts, but with a distant roommate and challenging classes, plus the most popular boy in school paying attention to her, Zee discovers life across the pond has more than a few surprises in store for her.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020038899 | ISBN 9781513209609 (hardback)
Subjects: CYAC: Boarding schools--Fiction. | Schools--Fiction. | Friendship--Fiction. | London--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.W46846 Ze 2020 | DDC [Fic]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038899
Printed in China
25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5
Published by West Margin Press
WestMarginPress.com
WEST MARGIN PRESS
Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens
Marketing Manager: Alice Wertheimer
Project Specialist: Micaela Clark
Editor: Olivia Ngai
Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger
1
THE “SEE YOU LATER”
“You think they have Umami Burger in London?” Mackenzie Blue Carmichael asked her mother as she surveyed her room. Zee never thought she’d say goodbye to her personal sanctuary/recording studio/research laboratory/headquarters for all things Zee, but here they were, leaving on a jet plane. To London. In just one week.
“I’m not sure, darling,” Mrs. Carmichael replied, handing her phone to Zee.
“Darling?” Zee wondered when all of a sudden her mother turned into the Duchess of Cambridge. “Since when do you say ‘darling’?”
“Since… oh, don’t make fun,” said Mrs. Carmichael. “Now, what I do know is that I made a master list of all of the amazing places to eat, drink, and play when we get there.”
Zee expected to see the Notes app pulled up on her mom’s phone with a list of restaurants, museums, and shops in London. Instead, Mrs. Carmichael had a browser window of Goop.com open to a list written by Gwyneth Paltrow recommending her favorite haunts of the city.
“Is she even British?” Zee asked of the website’s founder.
“Does it matter? She’s been there a hundred times for movies and photo shoots.”
“Ah,” Zee replied. “Makes her an expert.”
Zee slumped on her bed while her mother rolled in two oversized brightly colored suitcases in an attempt to prod her eldest daughter to start packing.
“London,” Zee said with a sigh. “Do they even have palm trees? Does the sun even shine? Why couldn’t Dad get a job closer to home?”
“Because this is a better job,” Mrs. Carmichael said, waving her hand for Zee to give her phone back. Her curly sun-kissed hair was swept back into a high bun and her freckled cheeks were rosy from the effort of packing. “He’s the big boss of a major advertising agency and will be doing most of his work with European companies. Consider it an adventure.”
Mrs. Carmichael stacked Zee’s suitcases close to her bed while Zee got up and opened the closet door to survey her belongings. Several pairs of Veja sneakers (“They use organic cotton and recycled plastic bottles in their shoes,” Zee told her mom when she bought them) customized with rhinestones, patches, and hand-painted designs—all artwork done by Zee herself—lined the bottom of her closet. Her clothes hung snugly on the rack, crammed in after years of collecting old concert T-shirts, vintage dresses, and other costumes for The Beans, the band she was in with her friends, and their gigs in talent shows and local showcases. Bookbags and other totes hung from the side wall on special ceramic hooks Zee designed on a rainy weekend, while caps and other hats perched above the clothes. Stacked on the floor near the shoes sat a number of mismatched boxes filled with years of personal artifacts that Zee now had to open, sort, and repack—or, sigh, throw away—for transport to London.
Stepping out of the closet, Zee looked around her room. The sun shone in through the bay window opposite her four-poster bed, the rays beaming across the window bench and onto her bright-blue bean bag, creating a warm, toasty spot to relax.
Zee’s phone buzzed. The screen showed a notification for a message from her Brookdale bestie, Chloe Lawrence-Johnson.
Chloe
Still on for tonight? I’ll bring snacks.
Zee and Chloe were having one last sleepover before she took off for London next weekend. All summer, Chloe and Zee maximized their remaining time together. They had ice cream at Jeni’s Ice Cream and tacos at Furious Tacos in Venice. They hung out at The Grove and walked the Venice Boardwalk. They rode bikes and met up to write songs and research celebrity deaths (Chloe wanted to be an editor at Vanity Fair when she grew up).
Now, for their last night together, they needed to make a schedule for long-distance phone calls and video sessions so they could stay in touch. It was going to be a long—but fun—night.
• • •
“Ugh. Girl. I mean. Whyyyy… do you have to move so far awayyy?” Chloe asked as she came in the front door of Zee’s house wearing a red tracksuit, her hair in two thick French braids that bounced off her back. She took off her custom Stan Smiths in the entryway and gave Zee a hug.
“I knowww!” Zee said. “London is cold. And do they even recycle there?”
“I’m sure they do, they’re not savages. England has been around centuries longer than the U.S.”
Chloe handed Zee a bag filled with smaller bags that were organized with snacks, crackers, pretzels, popcorn bites, and Zee’s favorite cacao nib–covered caramels. “I brought all of your favorite snacks, and some for the plane ride over,” Chloe explained.
“Ahh, bestie! That’s awesome, thank you!”
The girls walked through the family room, past boxes full of small furniture and appliances that Zee’s mom has already packed to ship over to their new English home. They entered the kitchen where Mrs. Carmichael was hovering over Zee’s eighteen-month-old twin siblings Phoebe and Connor with her phone in hand. The twins were dressed in matching outfits, a strategy that helped Mrs. Carmichael amass 10,000 followers on her Instagram, @twobycarmichael.
“Seriously, Mom, you are doing so much damage to not only these poor children’s egos, but our planet! What’s with you buying the twins so many things that they’ll only fit into once?”
“It’s for the ’gram! Hello, Chloe, my dear. How are you?” Mrs. Carmichael greeted, hugging Zee’s friend.
“Hi, Mrs. Carmichael,” Chloe replied, then turned to the babies in their twin white linen jumpsuits. “Hi, little friends!”
“I’m sure you must be sad to see Zee leave,” Mrs. Carmichael said.
“Of course, but we’re going to keep in touch with as many conference calls and text messages as possible. It’ll be like she never left!”
Zee grabbed two green juices and some strawberries from the refrigerator and shut the door. She walked by the twins playing with a toy truck between them and kissed their little foreheads before leaving the kitchen with Chloe following behind her. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and headed to Zee’s bedroom.
Chloe plopped her bookbag down on Zee’s sheepskin floor rug and took out her iPhone, iPad, laptop, and camera, all the devices one needed to manage the activities of a soccer star/investigative celebrity reporter. Chloe had played with Zee’s band The Beans for two years, but her soccer schedule became more demanding ever since she joined a traveling team, the Galaxy. Now she barely had time for school and her Instagram feed.
“Okay, let’s make sure we have all of our accounts synced,” Chloe said as all screens on the four devices lit up. “Squad?”
“Yes,” Zee replied.
“Zoom?”
“Yes.”
“WhatsApp?”
“Yep!”
“TikTok?”
“Yes.”
“Voxer?”
“Yes.”
“Quallmi?”
“Yes.”
“TXT?”
“Yes. Wait.” Zee retyped the password in her phone. She always forgot the login for TXT. “Yes.”
“Mssg?”
“Yes.”
“I think we’re good!” Chloe declared. “We’ll never be out of touch.”
“How do you focus with all of those notifications going off all the time?” Zee teased.
“Years of training,” Chloe said.
Zee took a seat
“Then you’ll just come back,” Chloe said.
“I can’t come back without my mom and dad.”
“You can always come and live with me and my parents. They’d love to have you!”
The two munched on strawberries. Would Chloe and I share a room? Zee thought.
“Did you say goodbye to Landon?” Chloe asked of Zee’s longtime crush and sort-of-boyfriend-not-boyfriend. Zee continued to look down at her popcorn.
“No. Honestly, I don’t want to say goodbye to anyone,” Zee said defiantly. “Not Landon, not you, not my house. This whole thing for me is just ‘see you later.’”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “Much later.”
Zee took a few swigs of her green juice and wiped her mouth. She looked around her room, at photos of her Brookdale friends, and finally at Chloe again. She opened the bag of snacks Chloe brought and popped one of the cacao nib caramels in her mouth.
“I’ll be back for Christmas,” Zee said. “Not that much later.”
After pizza with the family, Chloe and Zee changed into their PJs: Chloe in a pink onesie she bought after seeing Yara Shahidi wear the same one on Instagram, and Zee in an old Beans T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts. “Why buy new pajamas for nighttime when you can just recycle clothes you don’t wear in the daytime?” Zee said with a shrug. They spent all night choreographing Snapchat and TikTok dance videos, some of which they shared, others they reviewed on their phones and laughed at together. Then they watched old movies—“Mean Girls is a classic!” Chloe said—and eventually passed out in front of the TV in the family room.
The next morning Chloe’s mom picked her up after breakfast, since Zee had to start packing and run some errands with her mom. Zee offered Chloe a few mementos from her closet she didn’t think she’d need in London. “I’ll take that denim vest with the peace patch we wore during our ’70s-themed Beans performance off your hands,” Chloe said. Finally, they said their see-you-laters.
“It will be just like you still live close by,” Chloe said.
“Right,” Zee said. She waved then closed her front door before her best friend could see tears well up in the corner of her eyes.
2
HELLO, LONDON!
Zee raised her hand to get the attention of the teacher at the front of the room, but she wouldn’t call on her. That’s rude, Zee thought. She just wanted her to repeat the homework assignment. Then Zee noticed everyone in the class was staring at her. They started to snicker, then sneer, then shake their heads. Zee looked down, mortified. Somehow, sitting in the middle of the classroom in front of the most attractive eighth graders she’d ever seen (was that Noah Centineo toward the front of the room?), she realized she’d left home wearing just her bra, a pair of striped underpants, and striped socks. Zee’s hand shrank from the sky…
“Darling!” Mrs. Carmichael said, patting Zee awake. “Would you like something to drink?”
Zee shook her head, blinking her eyes, and looked at her mother. She patted herself down and saw that not only did she have on clothes, she was covered up by a blanket and still in her seat on the flight from Los Angeles to London.
“Um, sorry. Yes, water is fine, thanks.”
Zee’s nightmare rattled her awake long enough to come back to reality. The flight attendant handed Mrs. Carmichael a small cup of water and a napkin, and Mrs. Carmichael passed them on to Zee. Zee looked over her left shoulder through the crack between the plane and her seat and saw her father reclined in his seat in the row behind watching a movie, his headphones cushioning his ears and the headband cutting across his wavy red hair (“a gift from our Irish ancestors,” he often proudly said). To Zee’s right, the twins were sound asleep in their seats, holding onto one another as if they were still in the womb. Her mother readjusted the blanket covering both of their small bodies.
Zee sipped some water and opened a small bag of mini pretzels as she gazed out the window, longing for other thoughts to calm her anxiety about moving. She thought about her friends at Brookdale Academy. Her BFF Ally Stern was someone she talked to every day until Ally left California to move to Paris with her journalist parents. Ally and Chloe were Zee’s closest friends—Zee’s known Ally since they were in kindergarten and only met Chloe about a year ago, though they all bonded so easily it seemed like they’ve been friends since they were little too. Friendships like that don’t come around every day.
Then there was Landon Beck, who also went to Brookdale. They were friends, but last year deeper feelings started to run between them. But when Landon attempted to kiss her, things got weird, and Zee realized she didn’t want that type of relationship with him. The two didn’t speak much around the end of last year. Things felt—what did he say in his last note to Zee?—unfinished with poor Landon.
One person she was happy to think about was Jasper Chapman. Jasper had moved from London to California at the beginning of sixth grade but then went back to London at the end of seventh grade to be closer to his family. Jasper, a musician and music engineer, produced his own music, and he and Zee grew close over their common interests. Zee’s parents found out where Jasper was attending school from his family and enrolled Zee in the same school, just so she would have at least one mate in her new environment. Zee was thrilled to learn she would be going to school with Jasper in London. “When you arrive,” he told her, “I’ll show you all the really fun, non-touristy spots.”
The Carmichaels were just a few hours into their flight to London, but Zee missed her California pals already. She thought wistfully about the way things were: their comfortable school, their tree-lined block in their subdivision, her three-speed bicycle that she rode to school and to the smoothie shop around the corner. Her mind forgot about her nightmare of arriving at school naked as she stared at the clouds outside turning pink as the sun set over the land 36,000 feet below. Zee’s eyes grew heavy, then her head drifted over to one side. She fell back asleep, hoping to find happier times of a London future in her dreams.
• • •
“We’re home!” Mr. Carmichael announced as they pulled up to a three-story home in Notting Hill, the stylish London neighborhood with classically designed townhomes, sleek boutiques, and trendy restaurants. Zee was in the back row of an SUV with her mother, her head resting on the window ledge. Zee’s stomach rumbled a bit, and she thought about the last non-airplane food meal she ate.
The family spilled out of the car onto the sidewalk and looked up and down their tree-lined street before turning toward their new home. The house looked inviting, with a wrought iron and wood door and tidy shrubs in the windowsills, like a home out of an episode of Fixer Upper: London Edition. The stairs leading up to the front door were tucked behind a metal gate and a patch of grass that was only big enough to spread out a picnic blanket. Zee wondered if that was all the green space the house had.
“There’s more grass in the garden,” Mr. Carmichael said. “C’mon, let’s check out your new home.”
Mr. Carmichael went ahead to open the front door and waved to the rest of the family to follow him inside. As they did, the moving truck packed with their belongings from the California home pulled up right behind the SUV.
“Oh, how delightful,” Mrs. Carmichael said as she walked in slowly, her phone filming in one hand to give her IG followers a first look at the house before the movers and boxes got in the way.
Since Mrs. Carmichael was now a social influencer, she wanted their U.K. home to be well lit and have enviable features, like a palm tree–wallpapered wall, a garden in the back, and a large kitchen with an island. The interior of their home was surprisingly spacious for a London townhouse enhanced by high ceilings and an all-white interior. The living room led into a big kitchen with a skylight, and from there sliding glass doors opened out to the garden, a beautifully groomed space big enough for a small swing set for the twins, a picnic table, and a barbecue.
Upstairs Zee found four bedrooms and three bathrooms. The main bedroom was located over to one side of the home with a bathroom connected to it. Further down the hallway were another two bedrooms with a bathroom in the middle. One would be for the twins, the other for Zee. The third floor included one last bedroom and an office or playroom, depending on what Mrs. Carmichael wanted to do with the space.
