Forgotten Lyrics

5. Ameliorate

Lydia always slept better at home. Maybe it was because she didn’t have a roommate snoring loudly, but Lydia liked to think it was because of how safe she felt here.

Nothing ever seemed to touch her grandma’s house, despite its supernatural contents (or more likely because of them). But no place in the world felt safer. She could sleep soundlessly and wonderfully all night long.

Or at least usually she could.

“Lydia, get up,” Delia announced as she slammed open her bedroom door.

“Why? What? Is there a fire?” Lydia sat up in her bed and squinted at the bright light spilling around her grandma from the hallway.

“No, there’s no fire,” Delia said. “We just need to be up.”

“Why? What for?” Lydia looked over at the alarm clock next to her bed. “It’s, like, two in the morning. Why do we need to be up?”

“Just wake up and meet me downstairs in five minutes,” Delia said, then she disappeared.

Lydia yawned and looked over at the blue troll doll standing on her dresser, the jewel in its stomach glinting from the hall light. It smiled brightly, as if it didn’t know that she’d just been awoken from this really great dream about a cute guy in her English class.

“You’re entirely too happy about this,” Lydia told the doll, then got up out of bed.

She went to the bathroom and smoothed out her black hair, which somehow had gotten so messy from sleep that it stuck up all over the place almost as bad as the troll doll’s did.

Delia had instructed her to wake up, but hadn’t told her if she needed to be dressed for this mystery occasion, so Lydia decided to pass on the clothes and went in her plaid pajama pants and T-shirt.

When she came downstairs, she discovered Delia sitting at the dining table drinking a cup of coffee. She wore the same U2 shirt from earlier but paired with a pair of pajama shorts for bed, so Lydia wasn’t completely off base in her attire.

“There’s a pot of coffee in the kitchen if you want some,” Delia said.

“Do I have time for a cup?” Lydia asked.

Delia shrugged. “Maybe.”

“What’s going on?” Lydia asked. “Why are we awake?”

“I just had a sense that we should be,” Delia said. “You know how my senses are.”

Lydia had spent her whole life hearing about Delia’s senses and following up on hunches. Most of the time they turned out be right. Delia hadn’t ever really explained what they were, other than some type of feeling, and Lydia guessed that her grandma had some kind of mild psychic abilities.

“I don’t know, Nana,” Lydia said as she glanced around. “It seems like your senses might be wrong this time.”