A short chapter. I love that you all are "nit-picking"! It shows that you are thinking as you are reading, and actually coming up with some very good points, which I am trying to address in future chapters. I think it is difficult to make this story seem realistic because they all find themselves in such outrageous situations. (Gazzillonaire, Academy Award Winning actress, artist on a commune, etc.) It's a lot harder to make everything gel when we're no longer within the safe confines of Hillridge. A Writer's Challenge! I'm enjoying this so much.

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Later that evening, Larry sat with David and Liz in a dark restaurant booth, blissfully unhampered by media attention.

"So," Lizzie said. "How are my mom and dad treating you?"

"Oh, they're great!" Larry said. "I'm so glad they wanted to work for me."

"Well, they wanted to keep working," Lizzie said, "Even though they don't have to. It makes them feel useful in their old age, like they're providing a valuable service."

"They are!" Larry exclaimed. "I don't know what I'd do without them. My last housekeeper….brrrr! But your mom is like a second mom to me."

"That's my mom," Lizzie agreed. "She always needs someone to take care of. She loves running your house, you know. It's even more of a challenge, she says, than running the McGuire house when me and Matt were little. And I think she secretly enjoys your opulence."

"Opulence?" her husband questioned with a silly grin.

"Ninth grade vocabulary word!" Lizzie explained. "It means---"

"I know what it means," David said. "And we certainly know that Tudge here knows what it means," he added.

"Opulence, Shmopulence," Larry scoffed. "The great thing is that even though my folks can't be here with me, your folks are giving a nice sense of stability to my life. Every now and then I start to feel a little too big for my britches, but then I take a walk in my garden, through Sam McGuire's 'Gnome Paradise,' and it makes me remember my roots in Hillridge."

"Hillridge was so long ago," David said. "Sometimes it feels like a dream, or like a movie. A movie with subtitles. Doesn't it?"

Larry sat back, sighing. "Sometimes it does feel like that, " he admitted. "Not like a movie. That's your imagery, Mr. Steven Spielberg Jr. It feels like a dream. Some of the memories…of some of the people…it feels just like a dream…"

Lizzie and David looked at each other as they saw their friend slipping into a dream. Lizzie smiled slowly and said, "Lar…who you dreamin' about right now?"

"Oh…nobody," he said, snapping back to reality.

"Larry….Tudgeman…"

"Oh! All right! I guess maybe I'm thinking about Miranda Sanchez. You remember her?"

"Larry! Of course I remember Miranda! How could I ever forget? She was my best friend for years and years, until she went away to college. But why would you be thinking of her?"

"I guess you didn't know," Larry said, "but Miranda and I…had a special relationship."

"Larry!"

"No, nothing bad. Nothing weird," he clarified, hearing the alarm in her voice. "We were just friends. Video game partners. She used to come over my house a lot and we would play video games."

"I know Miranda liked the games," David said. "I would play with her sometimes, but she always easily beat the crap out of me. I guess I wasn't much of a challenge."

"Yeah, well I was a challenge," Larry said. "I really gave her a run for her money. She beat me every now and then, but mostly I was the King."

Lizzie laughed. "Coming from anyone else I would consider that bragging," she observed. "But I had no idea…"

"Yeah, I guessed not," Larry said. "I don't think she told anyone, really. I think she was still kind of caught up in that popularity thing, right up through high school, though not as bad as she had it in middle school. I guess I was kind of an embarrassment to her. I mean, she would say hi when she saw me in the hall, but that was about it. But then on a Friday or a Saturday night, if she didn't have a date, she would show up at my door, and we would play video games till one or two in the morning sometimes."

"Larry, you're kidding!" Lizzie exclaimed. "I never knew any of this. So Miranda had a secret life?"

Larry gave a self-depreciating chuckle. "Some secret life! Playing video games with a computer nerd."

"Gordo! Don't you think that's weird? A little bit funny?"

"Not at all," Gordo said, adjusting his hair under his baseball cap. "I pretty much knew about this already."

"How did you know?"

"Larry told me. Years ago."

"Miranda never told me!" Lizzie pouted.

"Well, it's like I said," Larry reminded. "I think she was embarrassed by me."

Lizzie looked at Larry sadly. The poor guy! "Did you like her much?" Lizzie asked perceptively. "Did you have a crush on her?"

Even on this, his 30th birthday, almost fifteen years after the fact, Larry found himself blushing at the question.

"Oh, Larry!" Lizzie said, completely understanding. "Why didn't you ever say anything to her?"

"How could I?" Larry insisted. "I told you! This is the third time I'm saying it now: she was embarrassed by me. She would have never gone out with me."

"I bet she would now," Lizzie said encouragingly.

"Sure," Larry said, making a face. "Everybody wants a piece of me now."

"Miranda wouldn't be like that," Lizzie said. "She's very much changed, you know. She's not into popularity now. And she's not into money."

"Unlike you," David teased, earning a slap on the shoulder from his movie star wife.

"She sort of…dropped out of society," Lizzie exclaimed. "Last I heard she was living in an artists' commune in Mexico somewhere. She paints, she sings, she grows her own vegetables."

"An earth mother? A hippie?" Larry questioned with a smile.

"Not at all impressed by material possessions," Lizzie confirmed.

"Which is why I think the two of you lost touch after a while," Gordo said. "Nothing in common anymore."

He got another slap on the shoulder. "That's not true!" Lizzie exclaimed. "Miranda and I would have plenty to talk about. If I could find her."

"Why can't you find her?" Larry wondered.

"Oh, I had her address…a long time ago. But I lost it. And living on an artists' commune, all naturey and stuff, she doesn't even have a telephone, never mind an email address."

"So no idea where she is?"

"In Mexico, that's all I know."

"That's probably enough," Gordo suggested. "How many artists' communes can there be in Mexico? I bet a private eye could find her. Hey! I bet Matt could find her!"

"Why would you want Matt to find her?" Larry asked, almost in alarm. "What would be the sense in that?"

"Tudge!" David said, enthusiastically. "You've got to find her! She's your Rosebud."

"My Rosebud?"

"You know. Like in the movie, Citizen Kane. You do know the movie Citizen Kane? The classic film by Orson Welles. Citizen Kane?"

"I tried to watch it once," Larry said. "Boring as hell. But I remember hearing about the Rosebud reference. I think I may have seen it on the Simpsons or some such thing. Something important from your past that's been lost…"

"Is that Miranda?" Lizzie asked gently.

Larry sat back and sighed. "She's probably married, anyway," he reasoned. "At least I'm sure she's found herself some hippie- type guy with a long beard who spends all day in an old barn converted into an artist's studio, creating abstract scultures out of scrap metal and discarded kitchen appliances…"

"Or not," Gordo said forcefully, looking directly at his friend. "Dude! You at least have to find out!"

"Listen!" Lizzie said, suddenly enthused. "For your birthday, David and I were going to take you on a cruise to Alaska."

"Cool!" Larry exclaimed.

"And we still want to do that. But now, I think, we want to do something else too. Right, honey?" Lizzie asked.

David nodded. "If you don't hire Matt to go find Miranda, we're going to do it for you. Hell, I'd like to see Miranda again, anyway."

"Me, too," Lizzie said.

"Okay, okay," Larry agreed. "I get your point. But I don't want you to do this for me. I think I need to do this for myself, you know? Give me a day or two to think about it. And give me Matt's phone number, Liz. I'll call him."

"You promise?" Lizzie asked, taking a pen out of her purse and writing a phone number on a clean napkin.

"Yeah, I guess I've got to now," Larry said, "or you two will never let me hear the end of it, will you?"

Lizzie grinned as she passed the phone number to Larry. "Of course not," she said. "That's what friends are for."

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Coming up next, "Triple M Madness": Miranda, Matt and Mexico!