Lola and the Boy Next Door

I text Lindsey back with a simple question mark. Please, please, please, I beg the universe. Please be Calliope.

“Is it Max?” Anna asks. “Your parents? Oh God, it’s that guy we kicked out of the theater yesterday, isn’t it? That crazy guy with the giant phone and the bucket of chicken! How did he find your numb—”

“It’s not the guy.” But I can’t explain. Not now, not this.

“Everything’s fine.”

Anna and St. Clair swap identical disbelieving glances.

“It’s Betsy. My dog. Andy says she’s acting sick, but I’m sure it’s prob—” My phone vibrates again, and I nearly drop it in my frantic attempt to read the new text:

calliope. investigation reveals new coach. shes back 4 good.

“Well?” St. Clair asks.

Calliope. Oh, thank God, CALLIOPE. I look up at my friends.

“What?”

“Betsy!” they say together.

“Oh. Yeah.” I give them a relieved smile. “False alarm. She just threw up a shoe.”

“A shoe?” St. Clair asks.

“Dude,” Anna says. “You scared me. Do you need to go home?”

“We can handle closing if you need to go,” St. Clair adds. As if he works here. No doubt he just wants me to leave so that he can tongue his girlfriend.

I stride away, toward the popcorn machine, embarrassed to have made a public display. “Betsy’s fine. But thanks,” I add as my cell vibrates again.

u ok?

Yeah. I saw her this morning.

Y DIDNT U TELL ME???

I was gonna call after work. You didn’t see . . . ?

no. but im on it. call me l8r ned.

Lindsey Lim fancies herself a detective. This is due to her lifelong obsession with mysteries, ever since she received the Nancy Drew Starter Set (Secret of the Old Clock through Secret of Red Gate Farm) for her eighth birthday. Hence, “Ned.” She tried to nickname me Bess, Nancy’s flirty, shop-happy friend, but I wasn’t pleased with that, because Bess is always telling Nancy the situation is too dangerous, and she should give up.

What kind of friend says that?

And I’m definitely not George, Nancy’s other best friend, because George is an athletic tomboy with a pug nose. George would never wear a Marie Antoinette dress—even with platform combat boots—to her winter formal. Which left Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s boyfriend. Ned is actually useful and often assists Nancy during life-threatening situations. I can get down with that. Even if he is a guy.

I picture Lindsey parked in front of her computer. No doubt she went directly to the figure-skating fansites, and that’s how she knows about the new coach. Though I wouldn’t put it past her to have walked up to Calliope herself. Lindsey isn’t easily intimidated, which is why she’ll make a great investigator someday. She’s rational, straightforward, and unflinchingly honest.

In this sense, we balance each other out.

We’ve been best friends since, welll. . . since the Bells stopped being my best friends. When I entered kindergarten, and they realized it was no longer cool to hang out with the neighbor girl who only spent half days at school. But that part of our history isn’t as harsh as it sounds. Because soon I met Lindsey, and we discovered our mutual passions for roly-poly bugs, sea-green crayons, and those Little Debbies shaped like Christmas trees.

Instant friendship. And later, when our classmates began teasing me for wearing tutus or ruby slippers, Lindsey was the one who growled back, “Shove it, fartbreath.”

I’m very loyal to her.

I wonder if she’ll find out anything about the other Bell?

“Pardon?” St. Clair says.

“Huh?” I turn around to find him and Anna giving me another weird look.

“You said something about a bell.” Anna cocks her head. “Are you sure you’re okay?You’ve been really distracted tonight.”

“I’m great! Honestly!” How many times will I have to lie today? I volunteer to clean the fourth-floor bathrooms to stop incriminating myself, but later, when Andy shows up to take me home—my parents don’t like me riding the bus late at night—

he eyes me with the same concern. “You okay, Lola- doodle?” I throw my purse at the floorboard. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

“Maybe because you look like . . .”Andy pauses, his expression shifting to barely masked hope. “Did you and Max break up?”

“Dad!”

He shrugs, but his Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, a dead giveaway that he feels guilty for asking. Maybe there’s hope for Max and my parents after all. Or, at least, Max and Andy. Andy is always the first to soften in difficult situations.

Which, by the way, doesn’t make him “the woman.” Nothing annoys me more than someone assuming one of my dads is lessthan-dad. Yeah, Andy bakes for a living. And he stayed at home to raise me. And he’s decent at talking about feelings. But he also fixes electrical sockets, unclogs kitchen pipes, squashes cockroaches, and changes flat tires. And Nathan may be the resident disciplinarian and a tough lawyer for the ACLU, but he also decorates our house with antiques and gets teary during sitcom weddings.

So neither is “the woman.” They’re both g*y men. Duh.

Besides, it’s not like all women fit into those stereotypes either.

“Is it . . . our neighbors?” Andy’s voice is tentative. He knows if it is about them, I won’t talk.

“It’s nothing, Dad. It was just a long day.”

We ride home in silence. I’m shivering as I climb out of the car, but it’s not because of the temperature drop. I stare at the lavender Victorian. At the bedroom window across from my own. There’s no light on. The cold gripping my heart loosens, but it doesn’t let go. I have to see inside that room. Adrenaline surges through me, and I jolt up the stairs, into the house, and up another flight of stairs.

“Hey!” Nathan calls after me. “No hug for your dear old pop?” Andy talks to him in a low voice. Now that I’m at my bedroom door, I’m afraid to go in. Which is absurd. I’m a brave person.

Why should one window scare me? But I pause to make sure Nathan isn’t coming up. Whatever waits for me on the other side, I don’t want interruptions.

He isn’t coming. Andy must have told him to leave me alone.

Good.

I open my door with false confidence. I reach for the light switch but change my mind and decide to enter Lindsey Lim style. I creep forward in the shadows. The rows of pastel houses in this city are so close that the other window, the one that lines up perfectly with my own, is mere feet away. I peer through the darkness and search for habitation.

There aren’t any curtains on the window. I squint, but as far as I can tell, the bedroom is . . . empty. There’s nothing in there. I look to the right, into Calliope’s room. Boxes. I look down, into their kitchen. Boxes. I look straight ahead again.

No twin.

NO TWIN.

My entire body exhales. I flick on my light and then my stereo

—Max’s band, of course—and turn it up. Loud. I sling off my ballet slippers, tossing them onto the shoe mountain that blocks my closet, and yank off my wig. I shake out my real hair and throw down my work vest. The stupid short-sleeved, collared shirt they make me wear and the ugly boring black pants follow the vest to the floor. My red silk Chinese pajama bottoms come back on, and I add the matching top. I feel like myself again.

I glance at the empty window.

Oh, yes. I definitely feel like myself again.

Amphetamine blasts from my speakers, and I dance over to my phone. I’ll call Lindsey first. And then Max, so that I can apologize for being such a space case at the Tea Garden. Maybe he’s even free tomorrow morning. I don’t have to work until two, so we could go to brunch on our own terms. Or maybe we could say we’re going to brunch, but we can really go to his apartment.

My eyes close, and I jump and thrash to the pounding drums. I spin in circles and laugh and throw my body. Max’s voice is pissed off. His lyrics taunt. The energy of his guitar builds and builds, and the bass thrums through me like blood. I am invincible.

And then I open my eyes.

Cricket Bell grins. “Hi, Lola.”

Chapter four

He’s sitting in his window. Literally sitting in it. His butt is on the windowsill, and his legs—impossibly long and slender—are dangling against the side of his house, two stories above the ground. And his hands are folded in his lap as if spying on his unsuspecting female neighbor was the most natural thing in the world.

I stare, helpless and dumbfounded, and he bursts into laughter.

His body rocks with it, and he throws back his head and claps his hands.

Cricket Bell laughs at me. And claps.

“I called your name.” He tries to stop smiling, but his mouth only opens wider with delight. I can practically count his teeth.

“I called it a dozen times, but your music was too loud, so I was waiting it out. You’re a good dancer.”

Mortification strips me of the ability to engage in intelligent conversation.

“I’m sorry.” His grin hasn’t disappeared, but he visibly squirms.

“I only wanted to say hello.”

He swings his legs back inside of his bedroom in one fluid motion. There’s a lightness to the way he lands on his feet, a certain grace, that’s

instantly recognizable. It washes me in a familiar aching shame.

And then he stretches, and I’m stunned anew.

“Cricket, you’re . . . tall.”

Which is, quite possibly, the stupidest thing I could say to him.

Cricket Bell was always taller than most boys, but in the last two years, he’s added half a foot. At least. His slender body—

once skinny and awkward, despite his graceful movements—

has also changed. He’s filled out, though just slightly. The edge has been removed. But pointing out that someone is tall is like pointing out the weather when it’s raining. Both obvious and irritating.

“It’s the hair,” he says with a straight face. “Gravity has always been my nemesis.”

And his dark hair is tall. It’s floppy, but . . . inverted floppy. I’m not sure how it’s possible without serious quantities of mousse or gel, but even when he was a kid, Cricket’s hair stood straight up. It gives him the air of a mad scientist, which actually isn’t that far off. His hair is one of the things I always liked about him.

Until I didn’t like him at all, that is.

He waits for me to reply, and when I don’t, he clears his throat.

“But you’re taller, too. Of course. I mean, it’s been a long time.

So obviously you are. Taller.”

We take each other in. My mind spins as it tries to connect the Cricket of the present with the Cricket of the past. He’s grown up and grown into his body, but it’s still him. The same boy I fell in love with in the ninth grade. My feelings had been building since our childhood, but that year, the year he turned sixteen, was the year everything changed.

I blame it on his pants.

Cricket Bell had always been . . . nice. And he was cute, and he was intelligent, and he was older, and it was only natural that I would develop feelings for him. But the day everything fell into place was the same day I discovered that he’d become interested in his appearance. Not in an egotistical way. Simply in a “maybe baggy shorts and giant sneakers aren’t the most attractive look for a guy like me” way.