Disclaimer: Don't sue.
Summary: Three slices of formative Lola cake.
i.
California is a tough sell.
It's not the cost, or even the distance in which they'll find themselves from their only daughter, no, the Martinez's have purely ideological issues with the West Coast that kill all of Lola's most innocuous lead-ins. It has something to do with crime or disease or the fundamental loss of her innocence; she imagines them imagining a cult membership invitation that covers all of the local depravity hot spots and ends with a Kool Aid party in the mountains. That PCA is a relatively inexpensive boarding school in a city responsible for nurturing the dreams of everyone Lola's ever wanted to be makes no difference.
Texas is safer. California is "tacky". They're opening a Lego Land in Houston and who on earth would want to miss that?
The well-meaning "tuts" and solemn nodding point to a certainty in their beliefs that borders on the Evangelical and leave no room for Lola's carefully crafted rebuttals. Her protests are shoved neatly at the end of long speeches about the air quality of Southern California, melodramatic of her birth, and impromptu family meetings wherein Mama and Papa Martinez turn in Oscar-worthy performances, feigning surprise at the sight of the dining room table covered in brochures for every prep school in a fifty mile radius.
Her counter arguments are lost in the careless whirring of the mixer, the grinding sound of the garage door, Dr. Phil's salient life-advice concerning the foils of crack whoredom. Her mother whistles easily over the mixer, as though Lola wasn't just making a valid point about her "small horizons". Her father points to his ears and shakes his head as the garage door descends, even though the enthusiastic hip-shaking\fist-pumping session Lola witnessess through the windows just minutes later suggests his hearing is fine.
By the time Dr. Phil McGraw is giving straight talk to seventh graders addicted to bath salts, the Martinez's, bored with even try to hide their disinterest, turn up the volume as a unit.
ii.
This thing with Chase, Lola tells herself, is not a thing. Doesn't have the necessary qualifiers, the prerequisites to be a "thing" because a thing has-is made up of attributes, qualities that enhance and modify its "thing-ness" and she and Chase… Lola and Chase- not as like, a title or a sequence but as two totally separate, individual "things", they don't have attributes or descriptors or modifiers or anything at all that would make a comparison to any real thing necessary or sane.
See? Not a thing.
If it were a problem (and it isn't. Ever) that would be the fault of its promotion to the status of a thing which it clearly and unequivocally isn't (see logical and not at all vague argument above) with the active participants' knowledge and endorsement of the promotion of this former whatever to a "thing" knowing full well that it is not and never will be A Thing. But there's no problem. No difficulty. No social quagmire that takes the collective power of what Nicole christens one sluggish afternoon in Biology, "The Magnificent Seven" to solve.
Except.
Soon after that day in Biology, Zoey high tails it to England for a fantastic study abroad opportunity not one person silently resents her for taking. Before Nicole can bestow movie-appropriate nicknames based on the best approximation of each character, Zoey is waving goodbye and blowing air kisses and leaving a terrible dent in the dynamic. On the cab ride home, Lola swears everything veers slightly to the left and feels even more disoriented upon reentering her room, which in her short absence, seems...smaller.
Her newborn Magnificent Seven buzz properly euthanized, Nicole sets about tearing her room apart in search of emergency snacks, yelling in triumph when her victory comes in the form of a Ziploc bag of Double Stuffed Oreos hidden under her mattress. Quinn locks herself in her room with the Duplicator demo that's been taking up her week. (The machine will see more of Quinn than her remaining comrades for the better part of a month, before she'll sink into Lola's bunk with an artful yawn and a sleepy opening round of Never Have I Ever.)
Lola and Nicole sit on the latter's carpet watching Ferris Bueller, licking the cream off of their Oreos and trying to ignore the silence lying just beneath the colors of the room. Nicole mouths the dialogue from her favorite scenes and Lola isn't watching so much as muffling her laughter in her comrade's shoulder.
"They all think he's one rad dude," Nicole nods solemnly, and when they get down to the last Oreo she pushes it into Lola's palm without hesitation.
(A week later, Lola spends an entire Saturday morning dying her hair in thick, purple streaks. She sits in the bleachers at basketball games and smiles, wide and believable, at Mrs. Thompson while explaining that she lost her Biology book in a freak "improv class accident".)
iii.
She buys the wig the week before school starts.
It's short and black and makes her look like a thirteen year old Joan Jett\Bride of Frankenstein hybrid. The make-up is from a costume shop in Houston. She strolls into Hot Topic and requests fifteen shirts in the darkest shade of black please. It takes three days to get used to the heels, four to make skull necklaces, five to sample various thrasher albums to find just the right kind of horror surf metal.
Because the previous month is a devoted homage to the world's most nefarious dictators with a special emphasis on reenacting the death scenes of those who were victims homicide\or dead coup, the Martinez parental unit find the temporary tattoos, collection of spiked dog collars, and the eardrum-battering Lord of the Rings-themed Satanic death metal interspersed between long intervals of Lord of the Rings-themed Satanic death metal in Swedish-a delightful change. Having known Lola for a while, they understand that tramping around in her newly purchased combat boots or poking safety pins in every article of clothing she owns is just their nina "getting into character". The monosyllabic answers that meet their earnest inquires about the quality of her day, all the long suffering sighs issued for no other reason than that life is hell and death can't come soon enough, suggests that she is already deep in method and their admiration at such a clean and thorough transformation can't help but shine through.
A child psychologist, Mr. Martinez marvels at the way adolescents use the idea of imitation, of performance to micromanage and externalize their stress. An interior decorator and part time portrait artist, Mrs. Martinez is fascinated\vaguely bemused by the fact that she can look across the dining room table and see Lola, and at the same time, not see her at all.
(Raul Martinez writes three critically acclaimed books about the variety of coping mechanisms found In creative or otherwise accelerated children while Lola is between the ages of four and six. All three volumes revolve around a kindergartner named Prudence, who enjoys dressing up and speaking to her dolls in a host of foreign accents. The trilogy is considered a landmark in child psychology, and Raul Martinez one of the founding fathers of this new era.)
Lola stops smiling on the first day of August.
She orders a handcrafted wee gee board, and carefully begins easing herself into breaking every last house rule. (Breaking the sound barrier here, ignoring curfew there) Free of the arbitrary confines of a bedtime, she's able to stay up late watching séances on You Tube, perfect her pentagram reproduction, and conduct extensive research on the lost art of animal sacrifice.
When she looks in the mirror, it's only to count how many seconds it takes to find herself in the glass.