Chapter 1
It’s the last day of our junior year at Hamilton High School and my best-friend-almost-sister-Danni and I are sitting side by side at the Spruce Juice counter. Her real name’s Dannielle, but no one calls her that except her mother.
She’s poking her straw around the bottom of her Mega-Mango smoothie, trying to get one last taste.
“Can you believe we’re going to be seniors next year?” Danni says.
“I can’t believe you are,” I say. “I thought you’d never make it.”
Danni throws her wadded up napkin at me.
“Very funny,” she says. “So funny . . . ”
“. . . I forgot to laugh,” I say, finishing the sentence with her.
That gets us both laughing.
“So funny I forgot to laugh” was Danni’s favorite slogan when we were in the fourth grade and we had this teacher, Mr. Westly, who was always making totally lame jokes. Danni’s constant “So funny I forgot to laugh” remarks irritated Westly so much his face would get all red and blotchy, which was funnier than the joke and . . . well . . . even though it doesn’t sound so funny now, it still cracks us up. In fact, we’re laughing so hard the man sitting next to me at the counter picks up his newspaper and moves down to the other end, which makes us laugh even more. Not to be rude or anything, it’s just that we’re both happy about summer. There’ll be lots of days at the beach, and a two week volleyball camp, and . . .
“What’s up?” Jason says, sliding onto the stool the newspaper guy just left.
“The sky,” Danni says — another of her fourth-grade witticisms.
The counter guy asks Jason what he wants and when Jason says he just stopped in to say hi, the guy gives Jason a wave, reminding him of the “no buy, bye-bye” rule.
“No problem,” Jason says, getting off the stool.
“So Autumn,” he says to me, “6:30 tomorrow night?”
“Okay,” I say, avoiding what I know is Danni’s piercing look.
Jason’s barely out the door when she asks, “What’s that about?”
“What?” I say, all innocent.
“6:30 tomorrow night! That!”
“It’s Jason’s birthday.”
“So?”
“So . . . his Dad won a gift certificate for two to this really great restaurant over in Hollywood, and he gave it to Jason for his birthday and . . .”
“You’re going on a date with Jason?”
“It’s not exactly a date,” I tell her.
“Dinner at a really nice restaurant in Hollywood is a date!”
Danni spins off the stool and rushes outside so fast I don’t even know she’s leaving until she’s gone. I hurry after her but she’s already in the car with the doors locked. I pound on the window but she won’t even look at me. She starts the engine and I move away. I don’t think Danni’d run over me. Right now I’m not sure, though.
I watch her drive out of the parking lot and down the street, hoping she’ll come back for me. She doesn’t. It’s not like I’m trying to steal her boyfriend away. He’s just her fantasy boyfriend. And I don’t even like him, except as a friend. I knew she’d be mad, though, which is why I kept hoping she wouldn’t find out.
I could call my dad to come get me, but it’s not quite five o’clock and he works until seven tonight. Or Jason. He’d come get me in a heartbeat, but why complicate matters even more? I take my cell phone from my jeans pocket and call Grams to tell her I’ll be a little late. Then I start walking. It’s nice, once I get started. There’s a light breeze, not much smog, and if I didn’t feel so bad about Danni I might even enjoy it.
Just two blocks away from the shopping center I’m walking in a neighborhood with nice houses and lots of trees. When Dad decided he had enough money to buy a house for us, I wanted him to find one over here. He just laughed.
“I haven’t found that pot of gold yet,” he said.
We’ve been looking on the other side of Hamilton Heights, not far from the high school. That’s cool. All I really care about is that I get my own room, and that the place has more than one bathroom.
I guess I’m thinking about houses because I don’t want to think about Danni.
Jason and Danni and I have been tight since the third grade when he first moved to Hamilton Heights. The three of us ended up doing this cool project on Native Americans, complete with a village built to scale. Really, Jason was the brains behind the project. Ours took first place over all the other third grade projects, which sort of cemented our friendship. That plus our shared interest in those weird supermarket newspaper stories. We had some favorites that we read over and over again. There was the “Danger in Organic Honey” story about a guy up in Alaska who sneezed a swarm of bees out his nose and got so many stings he had to be airlifted to a hospital.
Then there was “LIGHTNING STRIKE SPURS MEMORY OF LIFE AT EDGE OF UNIVERSE” about these four married couples in Nebraska who were kidnapped by space aliens and taken to their planet to be studied as primitive life forms. After a year, the Nebraskans were brought back to their beds in the middle of the night. Their friends and family had been looking all over for them, and so had the police and the FBI. But the funny thing was, they didn’t even know they’d been gone.
“I can’t believe how Johnnie’s just shot up overnight,” one woman said when her surprised thirteen-year-old found her fixing breakfast the morning of their return.
Five years later, one of the guys was struck by lightning. It was like a miracle that he lived, but the really strange thing was that when he was revived he had total recall of everything that had happened in the alien world. Of course no one believed him, not even the others who’d been taken away with him, even though they all knew something weird had happened to them.
The guy who’d regained his memory kept trying so hard to convince people of what had happened that everyone thought he was crazy. Then he got this idea, “like it just came at me from outer space,” he said.
He put one of those invisible electrical boundaries across his backyard and cranked it up to the highest power. Then he told his wife he’d noticed her favorite rose bush was full of aphids. She went rushing out the back door to check her roses, but when she got to the invisible fence she was knocked flat on her butt. Sure enough, though, she remembered being in that other planet world. She didn’t remember as much as her husband, maybe because the shock of the fence wasn’t as strong as the shock of lightning. Anyway, we loved that story. Since it was in Jason’s paper, he was the one who got to use it for our current event assignment.
He’d stood in front of our class, his eyes twinkling with the excitement of telling everyone about this great story. But when the teacher saw what newspaper it was from, she told him he couldn’t use it.
“That’s not an appropriate source for a school current event,” she’d said.
“What’s more of a current event than being struck by lightning?” he’d argued. “It’s about what current can do. Get it?”
Jason was given a time out for being disrespectful to the teacher, but at recess everyone gathered around him and he told the whole story. Jason’s really smart, but not in a way that’s usually noticeable. I noticed it on that day, though, because he remembered all of the details from that story.
I guess teachers finally noticed how smart he was, too, because they skipped him from fourth to sixth grade. But even when we were in different grades, the three of us still stayed tight.
I get good grades, but I’m not smart the way Jason is. I work hard for my A’s and he only has to work a little for his A’s. Danni only works a little, too, for her C’s. I study hard before every test, and Danni prays. I once told her that her grades disproved the power of prayer, but she claimed it was just the opposite.
“Without my prayers I’d be failing every single class!” she’d said.
My dad says that with the combination of Jason’s brains, Danni’s exuberance, and my common sense, we form a terrific triumvirate. I don’t know about that. I think our friendship is kind of like that butter substitute, a “Perfect Balance.” At least that’s how it seemed until about a year ago when Danni suddenly decided that Jason was the man of her dreams and things started getting weird.
The three of us had been hanging out at Danni’s house while she babysat her little sister, Hannah. Danni has to babysit pretty often because her mother, Carole, goes to a lot of meetings at their church.
Anyway, we’d been playing Scrabble, or at least trying to. Hannah, who is five, kept poking around in the bag and pulling out the letters for “cat” and “dog,” and “Hannah.” And since there are only two “H”s in the whole game, it took her a long time to find what she wanted. I mean, Scrabble’s not exactly a fast moving game anyway, and with Hannah playing it was so slow you could take a nap between turns. On this day we were reading from an old Weird World whenever it was Hannah’s turn.
“Check this out,” Jason says. “A cow born in Wisconsin with two heads!”
“You’re not supposed to be reading that!” Hannah said.
“Chill out, and take your turn,” Danni said.
“Jesus doesn’t like it,” Hannah said, sullenly.
Jason got up from the floor where we’d been playing and said he was going out for burritos, and did we want any.
“You can’t go yet,” Danni said. “We haven’t even finished the game.”
“I’ll be back before it’s my turn.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Señor Rick’s.”
That got a laugh, since Señor Rick’s is this place clear up in Pasadena, and it would take him at least an hour to get there and back, even if he called our order in ahead of time.
“Trust me, I’ll be back in time for my next turn. If I’m not, let Hannah take my turn for me. Okay, Hannah Banana?”
“Okay. What word do you want me to make?” she said, all serious.
“Do supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or cat. You choose.”
Jason tossed Hannah a nickel for her work, then left.
“He’s such a hottie,” Danni said.
I just looked at her, stunned.
“Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed!”
“Jason Garcia? A hottie?? No way! He’s just Jason!”
Danni grabbed one of Hannah’s “h”s and spelled out “hottie” on the board.
I added “not” in front of “hottie.” Then Danni went on a word frenzy, rearranging the words on the board to spell “dimples” and “fine” and “smile” and “eyes” and “sexy,” until there was nothing left of the game we’d been playing. By the time we heard Jason pull into the driveway the board was filled with Danni’s praises of Jason. She quick jumbled up all of the letters, except for “cat,” which Hannah protected.
“Hey, what happened to the game?” Jason said, putting a bag of burritos on the coffee table.
“They weren’t playing right,” Hannah said.
“Oops. Forgot the drinks,” Jason said, heading back outside.
Danni watched him leave, then connected “butt” to cat.
“I’m telling!” Hannah said, scrunching her eyes up the way she does when she’s angry. “That’s a bad word!”
Danni picked up the letters, laughing.
“I’m telling anyway! And I’m telling you’ve been reading about bad stuff again, too,” Hannah said, grabbing the paper.
“No, you’re not, because if you tell we’re not playing Clue.”
Hannah ran off to get Clue while Danni and I got all the letters into the bag and folded up the Scrabble game.
It wasn’t until later that night, after Jason had gone home and Hannah was asleep, that Danni told me she was seriously crushing on Jason.
“I can’t stop thinking about him,” she’d said. “He’s just so . . . so . . . right.”
“When did you, like, lose your mind?”
“I didn’t lose my mind. I found it. Yesterday, when we were at the mall, and he came out of the game shop with that guy, Carter?”
I nodded my head.
“Well, I just, like, noticed Jason for the first time. Not like a third grader, or a sixth grader, like the old days, but like . . . like a man.”
That totally cracked me up, but by the time I stopped laughing I realized Danni was serious.
“You’ve got to help me,” Danni said.
“How?”
“Just say good things about me whenever you see him, like how cute I am, and how half the guys at Hamilton High think I’m sexy . . . ”
“Half the guys think you’re sexy??? That one guy, Steve, kind of likes you, and that other guy, Austin, sort of hangs around, but that’s hardly half the guys at Hamilton High.”
“Yeah, but Jason doesn’t know that. He’s been in that Catholic boys school since the seventh grade.”
“So you want me to lie to Jason? Our lifelong friend?”
“Not lie, exactly. Just stretch the truth. Guys like girls that other guys like. Just help me out here.”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“I’m desperate! I’ve named my pillow Jason and I’m kissing and cuddling him all night long. You’ve got to help me get the real thing,” she said.
