Chapter 4
The next morning, I woke to the sound of a dog barking. Not fully awake, I nestled further into my pillow without opening my eyes. The barking continued, but I chose to ignore it until there was a knock on the window.
Was someone outside?
No way, I decided. Not when there was a giant thorny bush to crawl through.
Another impatient rap sounded on the pane, and I groaned.
Go away, I thought, but the knocking continued, so I turned over in bed and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Last night, I hadn’t fallen asleep until the early-morning hours. Thoughts of Alec had kept me up and—Holy mother!
I shot up in bed as everything came rushing back to me.
I, Felicity Ann Lyon, had hung out with an actual member of the world’s most famous boy band.
I glanced at my bookshelf, and proof that I hadn’t dreamed the encounter was sitting right on top of the copy of Endless Origami:1,000 Step-by-Step Designs that Rose had given me.
There was another knock, and it sounded angry enough to shatter the glass. I spotted Asha crouched outside in the bushes. She motioned for me to unlock the latch.
“God, you sleep like the dead. I rang the doorbell for literally ten minutes,” she complained, after I dragged myself across the room and pushed open the window. “I’m pretty sure your neighbor thought I was trying to break in.”
She passed her dog through the opening for me to take.
I’d always been a canine lover, but Lord Pugton was an exception.
The wrinkly nine-year-old pug farted so often I was starting to wonder if Asha only fed him refried beans.
He peed in my shoe during a sleepover once, and every time he looked at me, I was convinced he was giving me the stink eye.
In fact, his bulgy little eyes were focused on me now, sharp and suspicious, as I reached out and took him from Asha.
“I’m watching you,” I whispered when I released him on the floor. Lord Pugton made a mad dash toward my bed. He disappeared underneath it, most likely to hunt for another shoe to destroy as part of his reign of terror.
Asha hoisted herself onto the sill and climbed into my room. “Holy amazeballs,” she said, wiping her brow as she straightened up. “It’s like Canada in here. I’m moving in until this heat wave is over.”
I quickly shut the window so none of the heat could seep in. “Battle of the AC still waging?”
“Ugh,” she groaned. “It’s in full swing. My dad is relentless.”
Asha’s parents had been fighting about the electric bill since the start of the heat wave.
Her father was a frugal-living penny-pincher who deserved his own show on TLC.
He reused everything from coffee grinds to dental floss, and one time when we went to the movies, Mr. Van de Berg dug through the trash for a large popcorn tub so he could get the free refill.
His biggest money-saving trick? No air-conditioning.
Normally Mrs. Van de Berg put up with her husband’s strange antics, but she refused to melt to death in her own house—which, she’d complained, was currently hotter than summertime in Mumbai.
“You know you’re welcome to stay, but before you even think about sitting on my bed,” I said and handed her a towel, “you need a shower. Pronto.”
From under my bed, Lord Pugton grunted as if in agreement.
Asha was glistening from her daily run. I never understood how anyone could enjoy running.
There were those awful feelings of burning lungs and Jell-O legs, but Asha had fallen in love with cross-country during our freshman year and had been racking up miles ever since.
It was two miles from my house to hers. While that was a piece of cake for Asha, I often wondered how Lord Pugton handled the distance.
This heat was deadly, and she was absolutely insane for running in it.
“Thanks.” She took the towel and wiped the sweat off her face. “I feel like I jumped in a pond. A scummy, disgusting pond. I have so much boob sweat that someone could do laps in my cleavage.”
“Asha,” I said, “someone could go swimming in your cleavage regardless of the sweat.”
Drown in it even. My best friend was curvy in a Marilyn Monroe sort of way, all bust and butt with a waist so small it was like she was born wearing a corset.
I’d always been a little jealous of her for it, starting in the third grade when she pulled aside the collar of her shirt and showed me the pink strap of her first training bra.
When I’d gotten home from school that day, I’d begged my mom to let me get one too, but she’d laughed and said, “All in good time.” But that time never came.
While Asha blew through cup sizes, shedding bras like leaves in autumn, I was stuck with the chest of a little boy.
Nowadays, most of the guys on our high school wrestling team had bigger boobs than me.
Asha grinned and shimmied at me before disappearing down the hall.
A minute later, the water pipes groaned when she turned on the shower.
While I waited for her to return, I changed out of my pajamas—a Harry Potter T-shirt that read My Patronus Is Pizza and a pair of baggy flannel pants that had seen better days—and attempted to make my bed.
As I was arranging my pillows, Big Blue, my stuffed brachiosaur that I’d had since I was little, fell on the floor.
Lord Pugton shot out from the dark space below the bed, snatched Big Blue between his slobbery jaws, and escaped before I could save my favorite stuffed animal.
“Get back here, you little shit!” I dropped to my knees and crouched over so I could peer under the bed.
Two reflective eyes stared back at me. Even when I lay down on my stomach and stretched out my arm, Asha’s dog was parked an inch beyond my fingertips.
“If you don’t come out right now,” I warned him, “I’m going to kill you.
Seriously. I’ll make an ugly little hat from your pelt and everything. ”
“Who are you talking to?”
I straightened up quickly, smacking my head on the bed frame in the process. Asha was standing in the doorway wrapped in a towel, her long, dark hair dripping down her back.
“To that demon you call a dog.” I rubbed the lump already forming on the top of my skull. “He stole Big Blue.”
She laughed and walked over to my dresser.
The bottom drawer was hers, and she rifled through it before pulling out athletic shorts and a fresh T-shirt.
“He’s doing you a favor then,” she said, but after tugging on her clothes, she called Lord Pugton out from his lair and rescued Big Blue from the clutches of evil.
Blue’s long neck was soggy where it had been chewed, but it was nothing a trip to the laundry room couldn’t fix.
“So,” Asha said, plopping down on the end of my bed. Her fingers wrestled her thick hair into a braid. “You totally left me hanging last night.”
“I did?”
“Um, hello? You can’t send me a vague, yet equally intriguing text and never respond. That’s cruel.”
“You messaged me back? I don’t think I got anything.” In fact, I remembered staring at my ceiling unable to fall asleep, waiting for Asha to respond. I’d needed to tell someone, to unload the excitement that had built inside my chest, but I never heard the telltale buzz of an incoming text.
Stretching out across my mattress, I reached for my phone on the nightstand. “Crap,” I said when the screen refused to light up. “It’s dead. I must’ve forgotten to plug it in. Sorry, Asha.”
“It’s fine. Just tell me what happened. Otherwise, I’m going to die. My gravestone is going to read, ‘The Suspense Actually Killed Her.’”
“Okay, okay! So after you went to get us drinks…”
I told her everything. From Alec spilling his soda on me to listening to music in the garden. Everything, that was, except for Alec’s real name. I saved that bit for my grand finale.
“He offered you a ride home?” she asked when she thought I was finished filling her in. My best friend was a hopeless romantic, and she heaved a long sigh, just like she did every time we finished watching The Notebook. “God, that’s the cutest.”
“That’s not even the best part.”
“There’s more?” The dreamy look in her eyes cleared, and she sat up straighter. “Don’t tell me! Aaron has a twin brother I can date, doesn’t he?”
“Nope,” I said slowly, enjoying Asha squirming in anticipation. “Better.”
“What’s better than two cute boys?”
I leaned in and paused. Exciting things always happened to Asha.
She was some kind of magnet for luck, like the time she accidentally dialed a radio station during the middle of a contest and won a weekend getaway to New York City.
Or there was the time the van ran out of gas, and who came along to give her a lift to the nearest station?
Eddie Marks, soccer captain extraordinaire and man of my dreams. But this experience was all mine, and I was going to savor the moment.
“Come on, spill!” she begged, bouncing up and down on my mattress so that she nearly fell off.
I laughed. “All right, all right!” I said.
And then I told her the truth, Alec’s name gushing from my lips in an excited whisper.
Asha’s eyebrows furrowed into a V. “Aaron knows Alec Williams? Like from the Heartbreakers?”
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “Aaron is Alec Williams.”
***
At first, Asha didn’t believe me. It took more than five minutes to convince her that Aaron No-Last-Name was a bona fide member of the Heartbreakers, and when she finally accepted my story as truth, she was upset I didn’t get a picture of the two of us.
Apparently I needed proof. As if I’d lie about something this monumental.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t ask for one,” she whined.
“Because,” I responded, chewing on my fingernail. I was struggling to explain myself. “That would have ruined everything.”
“But it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Asha stared at me as if I’d lost it, and maybe I had…