Soria Girl

Driving around the old neighborhood gave me a headache - the good kind, however. Kids flashed across the lawns like lightning – so much smaller than I’d remembered, they must’ve been elementary schoolers. God. I’d barely been here thirty seconds and I already felt weirded out.

As we rounded the corner of the street I’d once ridden bikes up and down more times than I could count, I bit my lip and expected the worst. I anticipated our house being burnt to the ground, or cheetahs eating our lawn, or just something…I always felt like my old house was haunted. Although, the ghost stories my neighbor used to tell me didn’t help much.

The house was fine, and it was exactly like I’d remembered it. Little, light blue, and with a tree at the end of the driveway.

My legs cramped the instant I’d slipped out of the passenger’s side of Dad’s truck. My butt was numb. Actually, pretty much all of my body parts were.

Until –

“Soria!”

When I’d whirled around to see who had jumped me, all I saw was a flash of dark skin and bright eyes, and it all came to me as if I was waking up from some sort of dream.

It was Aliyah Spencer. My neighbor who idolized me, twelve years old as of that day.

“What…Aliyah?!” I gasped as she broke away with a huge grin plastered to her face.

She nodded enthusiastically and yelled at the top of her lungs, “CRASH! GET YOUR BUTT OVER HERE!”

“I’m comin’!” a huskier voice growled.

And of course, emerging from the lawn adjacent to ours was Crash Spencer. (Don’t ask me what his real name is. Really.) He was Aliyah’s twin brother. The only real difference between them was the fact that he could shut up every once in a while.

The smile on my face was making my cheeks cramp up. It hurt so good.

“Hey,” he mumbled, lifting his hand to wave. I gave him a hi-five and backed up to get a good look at them. Before, they were at least a foot shorter and Crash had, like, no hair. It was surreal how I was standing in front of the two kids that made Santa Monica so memorable for me. If I didn’t know any better I would’ve slapped myself.

Aliyah was still as hyper as before and led me to next door, which was their house. Crash followed behind us quietly as she yanked my arm along. “Oh my God! Your dad called our house last week and said you were moving back, and I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, we’re moving back!’ and…” she’d rambled, going on excitedly about stuff I still found a little too unreal to comprehend.

Eventually, she understood my daze and snapped me out of it by shaking me by the shoulder. “Now tell me, Sor – what’d you do for the past year?”

Not surprisingly, my mind instantly shot to Plaster Caster.

“I was in a band,” I explained, blushing a little.

She smiled and snapped her fingers. “Oh yeah! You played the guitar, right?”

I nodded and Crash finally spoke. “Cool, I play drums now,” he said in a low voice. Aliyah grinned and patted his back while I tried to process what he just said.

“Nah, he pretends,” she whispered to me, but he heard anyway. Crash smacked her arm, which started a sibling slap fight.

“You meet anyone cool?” she asked. My mind shot to Ren and the guys suddenly.

“Yeah,” I replied, “these three guys – my bandmates, I mean.”

Aliyah chuckled, saying, “All guys?”

I felt my face turn red. “Yep.”

“Any of them cute?”

I shrugged. “Well…maybe.” Wait, what?

She smiled again, dancing a little. “Ooh! Which one?”

I beamed and looked at the floor. The mental image of Ren saying goodbye was playing over in my head, making me a little sad. He was pretty cute…the others, though? I used to have the hots for Luke until “that” whole shebang happened, and then I couldn’t look at him like that. Brendan was a little too rough around the edges for my eyes, too. I tried not to think about it ever again since it was just weird.

I remembered Aliyah needed an answer. “My best friend,” I mumbled, and the Spencer twins grinned at each other.

“You got a picture?” she interrogated. I shook my head, recalling that I didn’t even have a real picture of the guys on hand. The closest thing I had was the yearbook, which had a few pages of each boy’s autograph-letters to me, and that did them no justice. Our page that commemorated our talent show victory certainly wasn’t a flattering photo, either.

God, early seventh grade? Ren was a twig, Brendan looked mentally handicapped in his picture, and Luke looked high. I shouldn’t have spoken, though. I looked like a kindergartener.

A ball pounded into my hands, snapping me back to reality. It was a basketball, though - and that reminded me of the day I found out I was moving. I looked at the ground, dribbling slowly.

Here I was.

“What’re you all sad for?” Aliyah smacked my back. I shook my head, trying to smile.
“No reason.”

I didn’t have a reason to be sad, right? So why was I frowning?

“C’mon, Soria. You’re back home,” Crash said to me. I nodded and reversed my thinking, shaking all bad thoughts out of my head.

But when I shot for the basket, I missed.