Double-Crossed (3 page)

The best part of our stroll was when we stopped to watch a street magician who called himself Marco the Magnificent. After doing a trick where he cut a rope in two and then put it back together, Marco called on Oscar to come up and assist him with his next trick. As Oscar limped up to the front of the crowd, he tugged at his oversize T-shirt, trying to pull it down low so you couldn't see much of his leg. A clubfoot isn't something you can cover up, though, and a couple of superbuff teenagers who had come to the beach to play basketball snickered when he passed by. He didn't even glance at them, just kept walking. If it were me, and I thought everyone was looking at my twisted leg and secretly wondering what was wrong with it, I would never leave my room.

Not Oscar. Marco asked him where he was from, and when he answered El Salvador, a bunch of people in the crowd applauded. Oscar shot them a big grin and said something in Spanish. One of the men hollered, “
Viva
El Salvador,” after which Oscar did his lightning bolt thing and shouted, “
Viva
America!” The whole crowd cheered and Oscar flexed his muscles like the Hulk and took a bow.

“That boy is such a ham,” Alicia said, and although she said it as a criticism, I could tell she loved him like crazy.

“No, Alicia, Oscar is not a ham,” Eddie said. “He is a human.”

There wasn't time to explain to him that Oscar hamming it up with Marco was not the same as the sliced stuff you eat with Swiss cheese on a sandwich. The magic trick was already underway, and Marco was attempting to pull two quarters out of Oscar's ear and one out of his nose. Oscar played along with it, squinching up his cheeks and grunting as if Marco were really making the quarters come out of his face instead of out of his sleeve. When the trick was over, Oscar was feeling so buzzed that he grabbed the microphone and let loose with a couple of superhero voices. At least, I assumed that's what they were. I mean, who else says things like “Avengers, assemble!” and “powers, activate”?

He got a big round of applause, and a lot of people slapped him on the back as he wove his way through the crowd back to us.

“How was I?” he asked Eddie.

“Alicia said you were bacon,” Eddie whispered back to him.

“Ham,” she corrected. Oscar looked confused.

“You did just fine,
mijo
,” Candido said to him. “I think you deserve something to eat.”

We walked to the sausage stand and bought a bag of french fries to split. As we sat on one of the wooden benches, happily munching fries, our legs stretched out in front of us, a little boy carrying a helium balloon that said I
'M THE
M
AN
came up to us. He wasn't more than two years old.

“Look, Mommy,” he said, pointing to Oscar's foot. “That boy has an ouchie.”

The mom looked very embarrassed and picked him up quickly. As she carried him away, I heard her saying, “That's not nice, Hudson.”

I glanced over at Oscar to see if he felt bad, but he didn't seem to. I tried to imagine how I'd feel if people stared at me all the time. I feel self-conscious when I get a zit. Having a clubfoot was like having a five-pound zit with blinking red lights on it. I looked at Oscar smiling and laughing with Alicia and considered how much inner strength it took for him to have such a great outlook on life.

Alicia was talking nonstop to both boys, blabbering on in Spanish, waving her hands around in the air. Every once in a while, she'd turn to me and give me a quick translation. She was trying to explain why a person would juggle chain saws, which is no easy thing to explain in any language, when you think about it. When she stopped for a breath, I took the opportunity to interrupt.

“So what do you think of Venice?” I asked Oscar and Eddie.

“It's like the outdoor market at home,” Oscar said. “Only no mangoes.”

“And with lots more girls in bikinis,” Eddie observed.

“My brother, all he thinks about is girls,” Oscar said to me.

“No, Oscar. I think about soccer, too,” he said, patting his blue-and-white soccer jersey. “Girls first, soccer second, food third, sleep fourth.”

“School last,” Oscar added.

“I'm not smart like you,” Eddie snapped.

“I'm not fast like you,” Oscar snapped back.

Then they said a few words to each other in Spanish. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but I knew exactly what was going on with them. It's hard when you're twins. You try not to be competitive, but everyone is always comparing you to each other, so it's really hard not to be. Like with Charlie and me. She's thin, I'm not. I'm funny, she's not. She's quick, I'm strong. She's fashionable, I'm sloppy. She's cool, I'm sort of a dork. No matter how hard we try, we are always measuring ourselves against each other. And here were Oscar and Eddie doing the same thing, which wasn't really fair because Oscar was born with a major disadvantage. At least that's how I saw it.

We stayed on the boardwalk for another half hour, just hanging out and talking. Oscar described their house in San Francisco Gotera—two white plaster rooms in the back of a little restaurant their mom ran. At night, Oscar would do his homework in the restaurant while his mom cooked for the customers and his dad took Eddie to play at the soccer field. Then Oscar would take out his colored pencils and spend the rest of the night drawing superheroes. He must have been a very good artist, because he told me he even painted a mural of the Avengers on the wall of the restaurant. When I asked what his town was like, he told me about the big adobe church in the square that was cool in summer and smelled like incense and candle wax. It was where he and Eddie had been baptized, and where his mom went to pray for his leg to heal. He described fun Sunday rides on his dad's motor scooter over the dusty roads to the river, where they'd swim and catch tadpoles. Eddie didn't talk much, but then, it's hard to talk when your tongue is hanging out over every pretty girl who walks by.

We talked until the sky was beginning to fade into the hazy lavender of dusk. I felt like I had known Oscar for much longer than just a couple of hours.

“We should get back to the club now,” Candido said. “It will be dark soon.”

Oscar didn't want to leave, but Eddie was all for it.

“Let's go visit the girls,” he said. “I think Lily, she likes me.”

“You think every girl likes you,” Oscar said.

“That's because it's true.”

Alicia and I exchanged a worried look.

“I'm going to explain how it works here,” she whispered to me, then took Eddie by the arm and walked ahead of us as we headed for the truck. I saw that she was talking to him in a very serious tone. He listened to her, then just laughed and walked on ahead.

“What did you say to him?” I asked as she rejoined Oscar and me.

“I told him that those girls at the beach club are very rich,” she explained. “And that the boys they like come from rich families with fancy cars and big houses.”

“And what did he say?”

“He laughed and said that they hadn't met Eddie Bermudez yet.”

That was a worrisome thought. Eddie didn't know those SF2 kids. They came from an entirely different world, and they didn't exactly welcome outsiders. I could vouch for that from personal experience. They kind of accepted Charlie because she worked so hard at being liked. But the minute I became friends with Alicia, they wrote me off as worthless.

As we headed back to Candido's truck, I watched Oscar and Eddie stop to look at the last of the surfers riding the waves in.

“Is Oscar always so sweet and friendly?” I asked Alicia.

She shook her head. “I've never seen him like this before. He's always funny, but he usually doesn't talk this much. He spends most of his time drawing because he wants to be a comic book artist someday. As you can see, he loves all that stuff.”

“What a cool thing to want to be,” I said.

Alicia was quiet for a minute. When she spoke, she seemed to be carefully selecting her words.

“I think he likes you, Sammie,” she said in a serious tone.

“I like him, too,” I answered. “He's hilarious . . . and obviously really talented.”

She turned to me and took my hand, a worried look on her face. “Oscar has been through a lot. He has a very tender heart.”

“What are you saying, Alicia?”

“I'm just saying be careful,” she said. “He means a lot to me.”

I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but before I could ask she had run off to watch the sunset with her cousins.

Two Parties

Chapter
3

“Hey, look who finally decided to show up,” Ryan said as we walked in from the parking lot and pushed open the gate to the beach club. “What took you so long?”

“We got some fries at Jody's Sausage Stand,” I said.

“What? And you didn't bring any back for your favorite brother?”

“Ryan, you're my
only
brother.”

“Which makes me automatically your favorite. Isn't that right, guys?” he said, giving Oscar and Eddie a punch in the arm.

Even though they had never met before, Eddie and Oscar immediately punched Ryan right back, and the three of them cracked up. I don't know what it is with boys, what makes them think a slug in the arm is an invitation to be best friends. I mean, if someone punches me, I want to punch them back twice as hard.

Ryan threw his arm around Eddie's shoulder.

“Hey, I'm Ryan. And I have to tell you that if I hear one more, ‘That looks adorable on you,' my head just might explode off my neck.”

Oscar looked very concerned.

“What is the problem with his head?” he leaned over and whispered.

“Nothing,” I answered. “Unless you consider missing a brain a problem.”

“Oh, that sounds very serious,” Oscar said, looking suddenly sad. “Your poor brother.”

He clutched his heart. I felt terrible. Obviously, he hadn't gotten my sarcasm.

“Oh no, Oscar,” I hurried to add, remembering Alicia's warning about his tender heart. “He really does have a brain. I was just kidding.”

I looked at Oscar and saw that he was laughing hysterically. He was the one who had played a joke on me!

“Very funny!” I said, and pushed him playfully. (That was a push, not a punch.) I thought he was going to push me back, but he didn't. He put his arm around me instead. That was a total surprise. My dad puts his arm around me when we walk along the boardwalk to get ice cream cones. And Ryan puts his arm around me when he's trying to get me to clear the table on his night. But Oscar was the first boy my age to ever put his arm around me in a serious kind of way. I didn't know if he was trying to be romantic, or if that's just the kind of thing people do in El Salvador when they're being friendly. It made me feel weird and uncomfortable. I could feel myself get all tense around the shoulder area. He must have felt it, too, because he took his arm down right away.

Ryan, who makes friends as easily as fish swim in water, had already buddied up with Eddie.

“We could use some guy energy here,” he was saying to him as we made our way onto the deck. “This is what I've had to listen to for the last two hours.”

Raising his voice about two octaves, he started doing a series of impressions that actually sounded a lot like Lauren, Jillian, Brooke, and Lily.

“How cute is this top!” he squealed.

“OMG, you look totally awesome in that.”

“Is there lip gloss on my teeth?”

“Does this make me look too fat?”

“Does this make me look too skinny?”

Then he dropped the squeaky voices and pretended to be barfing, collapsing in a heap on the wooden deck in front of us. Eddie looked a little startled, but Oscar had already caught on to Ryan's twisted sense of humor.

“You are very funny,” he said. “I hate to leave, but now I am going to take a ride in Tyler's Batman car.”

“You're out of luck, dude,” Ryan said. “He vamoosed. The poor guy went running out of here as soon as he finished taking their pictures. I think if he heard one more “OMG,” his ears would have shriveled up and dropped right off.”

“Where did the girls go?” Eddie asked, looking out onto the beach but seeing only the shadowy outline of my dad on the sand next to the volleyball court, lighting the barbecue.

“They're inside, changing back into their regular clothes.”

“We were, but we decided not to,” Lauren called, strutting out onto the deck from inside the kitchen. “We wanted to wait and show Sammie and Alicia and Eddie our top-model look.”

Boy, that made me mad.

“Excuse me, Lauren,” I blurted out, “but there's another person here, and his name is Oscar.”

“You don't have to get all huffy, Sammie. I see him. I'm not blind.” Then she looked a little startled and glanced at Oscar. “No offense to disabled people.”

Really? Did she just say that? Yes, she actually did.

Lauren was wearing jeans so tight they looked like they were sprayed on and a gold shimmery top the exact color of her gold sandals and huge gold hoop earrings. Even I, who am not a Lauren Wadsworth fan, had to admit she looked unbelievably great. She seemed so glamorous that I was really surprised when she stuck two fingers into her mouth and let out a loud guy-size whistle. Where did
that
come from?

“Top models,” she called. “Report to the runway.”

One by one, the girls came out doing their runway walks. Jillian had on so much eye makeup I was surprised she could even hold her eyelids up. Brooke had gone for the military look in honor of her boyfriend, the General (who, by the way, isn't one, but they call him that anyway because he always wears camouflage pants). She was in cutoff camouflage shorts with high-heeled pumps, which I'm pretty sure are not the best shoe choice if you're in actual battle. As always, Lily looked the most original. She wore a slouchy knit beanie that went halfway down her back and breezy, beachy, striped pants rolled up to the knee.

“You look
muy bonita
,” Eddie said to her. “Which in my language means—”

“I know what it means.” Lily smiled at him. “I've been taking Spanish since sixth grade. I can even sing a song in Spanish.”

She burst into a little chorus of “La Bamba,” and Eddie joined in. If you ask me, this was turning into a major flirt fest.

The last one out was my sister, Charlie, whose smile was so big I thought her face was going to crack. She was wearing a totally glammed-up version of a tennis outfit with platform tennis shoes, white shorts, and a white tube top. She carried her racket in one hand and a wide-brimmed straw hat in the other. It was clear that whoever put that outfit together had never touched a tennis racket in her life. I could tell Lauren had picked out those clothes. After a couple of serves, a tube top like that would be around your ankles, particularly if you were small on the boob front, like Charlie.

Okay, I admit it. Mine are a little bigger. I'm not bragging, just saying that things like that are bound to happen when you weigh twenty pounds more than your twin.

“You guys all look great,” Alicia, who is the sweetest person in the world, said when they were all lined up in front of us. “Can we see the pictures?”

“We won't have them until tomorrow.” Jillian could barely get the words out because she was so occupied trying to adjust one of her false eyelashes that seemed to be crawling like a caterpillar down the side of her face.

“Tyler is photoshopping them,” Brooke went on. “Just to clean up any little imperfections. That's what they do with all cover girls, you know.”

“They don't always do that,” Lily commented, and she should know because she's actually been a model for the Gap catalog.

“You are so wrong, Lily,” Jillian responded in a huffy voice. “I read that in
Popstar Daily
so I know it's true.”

Jillian is obsessed with reality television stars. When the rest of us are doing algebra problems, she's poring over celebrity gossip magazines. Just the other day, I heard her telling Charlie that gossip magazines are a lot more relevant to her life than knowing the value of
x
—which is a stupid letter, anyway.

“Girls, focus,” Lauren said. “The important thing is that Tyler said he thinks some of us have real model potential.” I noticed that she directed her remark to Ryan. “Just think, Ry. This could be the start of my career.”

“I'm more interested in the start of dinner,” my always-starving brother answered. “Hey, Dad,” he bellowed, “how long before we eat?”

“The fire's not hot enough yet,” he called back. “Why don't you kids play some volleyball until the burgers are ready?”

“Oh, I just love beach volleyball,” Lauren said.

Okay, I happen to know that she not only doesn't
love
beach volleyball, she doesn't even
like
it. She never ever plays when Ryan's not there—she just lies there in the sun, rotating herself like a chicken on a spit. But everyone knows that the fastest way to my brother's heart is either through food or sports . . . and since my dad was in charge of the burgers, Lauren picked sports.

“I have an idea,” Lily said. “What if Eddie stays for dinner and volleyball? It could be all of us versus Ryan and Eddie. Girls against guys. That'd be fun.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. She was inviting Eddie right in front of Oscar, without even thinking about how that would make Oscar feel. I knew how he must have felt—left out. The SF2s are experts at making you feel that way. I have the personal experience to prove it.

I glanced at Oscar to see if his face showed anything. He was looking down at the deck as though he'd suddenly developed a major interest in wooden planks.

“What about Oscar?” Eddie said. “He can't play but he can keep score . . . and eat.”

“Yeah, bro. You're welcome to stay,” Ryan said.

I wanted to reach out and hug both of them for doing just what brothers are supposed to do, but their kindness and attention seemed to embarrass Oscar even more.

“That's okay,” he said. “I'm not that hungry.”

“Good, then it's settled,” Lauren said, quickly seizing the opportunity to exclude him. I could hear the relief in her voice. “Eddie, get your game face on. We'll go inside and change and meet you guys on the beach in five minutes.”

The girls ran inside, and Ryan and Eddie went out onto the beach to warm up. I could see right away that Eddie was going to be a great player. He could jump really high, his hands were quick, and he had the graceful moves of a natural athlete. My heart ached for Oscar. I wondered how many moments like this he had suffered, watching his star brother do everything he wanted to do but couldn't. Alicia reached out and took his hand.

“Soon you'll have the surgery,” she said. “And then you'll be able to run and play like everyone else.”

Oscar nodded and forced a smile.

“I have a thought,” I said when I couldn't stand the silence any longer. “Let's hang out together and do something else. Something really fun.”

“Great idea, Sammie,” Alicia said. “I know that Sara invited a couple of the Truth Tellers over for a pizza and movie night. I'll call her. I'm sure it's fine if we come.”

“What's a Truth Teller?” Oscar asked.

“It's a club at school that Sammie and I and Sara Berlin and a bunch of other kids belong to,” Alicia explained. “We all get together to tell the truth about how we feel.”

Oscar looked perplexed. “Why do you need a club to tell the truth?”

“We do performances and stuff, based on our true feelings,” I tried to explain. “We even performed at a city council meeting and got a standing ovation.”

Alicia said something to Oscar in Spanish. I assumed she was telling him more about the Truth Tellers, although from the look on his face, he didn't seem too clear on the concept. I could relate. My dad still doesn't get the concept of Truth Tellers, and he's forty-five and not from El Salvador.

“I'm going inside to call Sara,” Alicia said. “Be back in a sec.”

Oscar and I sat down on a couple of the wooden deck chairs. He looked out at the sand, watching Ryan and Eddie jump in the air and practice spiking the ball over the net.

“Eddie can jump really high, like a frog,” he said.

“More like a flea,” I answered. “Did you know that fleas can jump one hundred times their body size?”

“I will tell that to my dog when I get home,” Oscar said, and we both burst out laughing.

That smile, it was good to see it back.

“Hey, youngsters,” a booming voice called out. I turned around to see Tom Ballard pushing open the gate, followed by his son, Spencer. The Ballards are Sporty Forty members, and although Charlie doesn't talk about it much, I know she really likes Spencer, which is okay with me, because of all the SF2 guys, I think he's the nicest. And that cute dimple on his cheek doesn't hurt, either.

“Hello, Mr. Ballard,” I said, getting to my feet to shake his hand. I don't always shake hands with grown-ups, but Mr. Ballard is on the Santa Monica City Council, and since he's always campaigning for re-election, he is a major handshaker. Every time I see him, he grabs my hand and pumps it so hard I feel like I should be spitting up water.

“Nice to see you, young lady,” he said, grabbing my hand with his firm grip and starting to pump. “Which one of Rick's girls are you again?”

“That's Sammie, Dad,” Spencer said.

“One day I'll learn to tell you two apart,” Mr. Ballard said with his big, friendly laugh.

“It's not that hard, Dad.”

I wondered what Spencer meant by that. Did he mean that you could tell it was me from my vibrant personality and enormous personal charm? Or did he mean that you could tell it was me because I'm fatter than Charlie?

I'm hoping for the first, guys, but I'm betting it's the second.

“Who's your good-looking pal?” Mr. Ballard asked, as Oscar rose to his feet.

“This is Oscar Bermudez,” I said. “He's from El Salvador.”

Mr. Ballard grabbed Oscar's hand and shook it vigorously.

“Welcome to our shores,” Mr. Ballard said. “What brings you here?”

“An American doctor came to my town,” Oscar said. “He says he can fix my foot, so he helped me come to Los Angeles to have an operation.”