Lou with the Band Excerpt by Candlewick / Holiday House / Peachtree

EL VIAJERO, TX

“Are you sure you’re ready?”

“I’m sure.”

“Like, really sure, or only a little sure?”

“I’m really, really sure.”

Lou squeezed her eyes shut, preparing herself for the drag of the electric razor across her scalp—but it never came. She opened her left eye, and in the bathroom mirror she saw Molly’s pursed lips.

Lou watched Molly drop her hand with the razor in it. Molly sighed. “I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can! It’s not like you’re shaving your head.”

“Yeah, but shaving your head is practically the same as shaving mine. Besides, you’ve had this hair for as long as I’ve known you. I feel like I’m about to cut off one of your arms.”

Cutting off her hair did feel like losing a huge part of herself, but Lou knew saying that would just make Molly more anxious. “Technically, I had completely different hairs on my head in sixth grade,” said Lou.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Lou gave the raggedy towel around her shoulders a tug. The towel was stained through with lime-green, cotton-candy-pink, and cherry-bomb-red streaks from all the times they had dyed Lou’s hair together. The latest color was jet black—“a return to form,” as Lou had called it. It had taken Molly a full week to get the black dye scrubbed out of her cuticles.

“It’s the rst one that feels the hardest,” said Molly, her eyes drifting down the snarled tapestry that was Lou’s wild hair. “Once there’s a big chunk missing from your head, I’ll want to shave the rest off so you don’t look so ridiculous.”

“What if I like the way one missing chunk looks?” asked Lou, half joking but half genuinely wondering if it could look cool.

“Well, I’m the one with the clippers, so you don’t really get a say in the matter,” Molly replied. She raised the electric razor to Lou’s forehead. They looked at each other in the mirror like this was nally it, but the razor stayed silent.

“What if we do it together?” offered Lou, her hand shooting up to hold Molly’s. Molly’s pale hands always looked so elegant next to her own with their chipped nail polish and burns from her job at the bakery.

When Lou clicked the razor on, she could feel its buzz through Molly’s hand. Really, it would be way more symbolic if they did this together anyway. “On the count of three, OK?”

“On the count of ve,” countered Molly.

“OK, count of ve. Ready?”

“No.”

“OK, ve. Four. Three. Twoooo . . . ONE.”

The girls screamed as their entwined hands pushed the razor against Lou’s scalp, creating a big white patch.

“Ohmygod, oh my GOD!” screamed Molly.

Seeing the fat, hairless stripe on her head was like the monster reveal in a horror lm—Lou felt terri ed and thrilled at the exact same time. There was no going back now. “Keep shaving!” she laughed.

Molly ran the razor through Lou’s hair a second time, and they screamed again.

The bathroom oor was ankle high with Lou’s hair by the time Molly clicked the razor off. “You could make a puppy out of all the hair on the oor right now,” she said.

Lou stood up close to the mirror. Her big brown eyes looked even bigger and browner now that her curtain of curls was missing, and her stubby nose stood out more, too. It was a pretty good face looking back at her in the mirror, if she was being honest. She ran her ngernails lightly over the stubble on her head. “Dang, that feels so good.”

“Your scalp is so white, it’s almost blue. It’s like a glass of milk.”

“Yeah, it’s got a blue tint to it, right? I just realized . . . I’ve never seen my scalp before.”

“You know what I just realized?” asked Molly.

“What?”

“None of your new coworkers will know you as the girl who dyes her hair all the time. They’ll know you as the shavedhead girl.”

“That’s the point,” said Lou. She whipped the towel off her neck and began dusting little hairs off her cheek. Lou could feel Molly watching her.

“I thought the point was that you didn’t want to have to deal with washing your hair all the time while you were on tour.”

“I mean, that’s one of the points,” clari ed Lou as she picked a stubborn hair off her chin. “But the other point is that I’m ready to be a new person. A new Lou.”

“New Lou. New Lou,” muttered Molly under her breath as she absentmindedly wiped up the hair Lou dropped into the sink. “Who is New Lou?”

Lou examined her very round, very bald head in the mirror. She traced the slight ridge on the back of her skull that she never knew she had. New Lou was the girl who shaved her head. New Lou was the girl who decided to defer her rst semester at Texas State to go on tour with a famous musician. She reinvented a new Lou every year, but this one really felt like she was going to stick.

Lou turned around and looked at Molly directly. “The real question is who is New Molly?”

Molly’s eyebrows got all worried. “New Molly looks exactly like old Molly . . . She still has all her stick-straight, dirty-blonde hair. She still works at the Ranch Market, and she still can’t nd a boy who wants to kiss her. The only difference is that her best friend is leaving for the summer to go on tour with Zaiya.”

“Wow, New Molly’s friend sounds amaze.” It was always best to crack a joke when Molly got down on herself like this.

“Oh my god,” scoffed Molly as she pushed Lou playfully in the shoulder.

“Come on! Let’s go show the gals my bald head!” Lou threw the rainbow towel into the sink and pushed through the bathroom door. She jogged through the living room toward the back of the house and banged through the tattered screen door into the backyard. It was only two days into summer break but it was already sweaty-hot. Lou’s scalp felt warm and tingly under the beating sunshine.

“Ta-dah!” announced Lou.

Her mother and grandmother, who were crouched over an anemic-looking zucchini plant, looked up at Lou.

“¡Dios mío!” exclaimed Ita Juju, her grandmother.

“Luisa, what have you done?!” cried her mother.

They crowded around her and rubbed their hands over her head as if they were consulting a crystal ball. Lou purred like a cat. Their ngers felt delicious.

Lou’s mother tsked disapprovingly, the way she always did when Lou got a new haircut, or a new ugly sweater from the Goodwill, or changed anything about her appearance at all, really.

“What do we think?” her grandmother called to Molly.

“I think baldness suits her,” offered Molly, who was nudging a squash vine with her sneaker.

Juju held Lou’s chin in one soft hand and turned Lou’s face toward her own. “Hmm. Yes. Suits you.”

“Let’s get you out of this sun, Ita.” Lou gently placed both hands on the curved hunch of her grandmother’s back and guided her over to a plastic chair in the shade. Being around her grandmother was one of the few things that actually made Lou feel calm. When she was with her Ita, she could feel the

frenetic buzz of her octillions of atoms slow down enough so that she didn’t feel like a blur of motion.

The Cuernavaca—the spindly silver spike that hung from Juju’s neck—glinted in the late morning sun as Lou carefully helped her grandmother into the chair. Juju’s mamá, Lou’s great-grandmother, had given the necklace to Juju when she was a girl, the day she ed Cuba. That was the last time they ever saw each other, and Juju had worn it almost every day since, so it was fogged and tarnished from decades of wear.

“Are you excited for your graduation party tonight?” Ita Juju asked Lou in Spanish.

“Yes! I’m going to debut my new hairless head to the whole family,” announced Lou.

Her mother tsked again as she looked over at Lou and Juju. “Did you sweep in the front like I asked you?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“And you washed the platters and serving utensils?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“And what about—”

“Yes, Mom,” interrupted Lou, “I did everything on the list.”

Oh god, her mother’s infamous lists. They were always popping up when you least expected them: a list tucked into Lou’s backpack of the top ten college scholarships offered to Cuban Americans, a list left next to Lou’s toothbrush of dinner items needing to be picked up after school from Foodtown, a list sitting on the end of Lou’s bed of weekend chores. She had learned a long time ago that it was a lot less painful to complete any list as soon as humanly possible than to be tormented by her mother’s nagging.

“Good,” said her mother, “go clean up the mess you two probably left in the bathroom, and then we can head over to the bakery.”

They could have walked to the family bakery in less than ten minutes, but they always drove when Ita Juju was coming with them. The walk was too much for her now. Molly joined them for the car ride. She spent almost as much time at the bakery keeping Lou company as she did at her own job. But of course Molly’s job was an of cial after-school one with speci c hours and a paycheck. Lou was expected to work at the bakery whenever she was needed, and for free.

The Cierres Family Bakery was all shiny chrome inside. Gleaming cases held row after row of empanadas, tequeños, croquettes, pastries, and cakes, and the chrome kept going all the way back to Lou’s domain, where the stainless steel ovens and cooling racks lived. Lou knew every ding and divot in those metallic surfaces by heart. It was like her whole childhood was a collection of dents: The time she was messing around with Uncle Arty, riding on a rolling rack, and they crashed head rst into a prep table. Lou had to get stitches on her chin, which she thought made her look kind of tough, so she and Molly had no choice but to go thrifting for leather jackets. Or the time that Lou tripped while carrying a full tub of cream cheese, and she knocked over three sheet-pan racks like dominoes into the walk-in freezer. The door had a lightning-bolt-shaped crack in it forevermore.

Lou loved watching her grandmother enter the bakery. Juju’s usual soft, slow vibes completely evaporated, and she turned into this tiny hustle-bustle machine. It was like a magic trick.

And if Lou was honest with herself, it was always a relief to see her grandma acting young again. It made her feel like maybe her grandmother could live forever.

Today, Juju headed straight to the cake decorating station, where she planned to decorate Lou’s graduation cake herself. Her grandmother always insisted on decorating the “postres importantese” herself, and the only person she sometimes trusted to help her was Lou. Her grandmother was a legit frosting artist. She could pipe hundreds of different kinds of owers, borders, ruf es, and fonts from memory, and even though Lou wasn’t normally into frilly stuff, she had studied her grandmother’s work closely since she was a little girl.

There was a pre lled piping bag waiting on Juju’s table, all fat with icing, just begging to be poked. Lou couldn’t help herself and jabbed her nger right into the middle of the bag. She pulled her hand away just as her grandmother was about to smack it.

“Luisa! Hands off!” Juju laughed. She picked up the piping bag and looked at Lou and Molly with a sparkle in her eye. “You want to taste it? Es un sabor especial.”

“Yes, please!” She and Molly held out their ngertips and Juju squeezed out a tiny dollop onto each of them. Lou sucked on her nger thoughtfully. It was delicious—everything in her grandmother’s bakery was delicious—but she couldn’t quite place the hint of spice.

“Is it clove?” guessed Molly.

“Not clove!” The sparkle in Juju’s eyes got even sparklier. She looked at Lou. “Come on, you smart girls, you don’t know?”

It was on the tip of Lou’s tongue, quite literally. She knew it

was a cream cheese base, but what was the other avor? Anise? Canela? “Uh, cardamom cream cheese?” she said nally.

“Yes! Good girl! Cardamom will go perfectly with the chocolate sponge. You know your spices.” Lou felt her grandmother’s warm hand patting her back. “You have very good avor instincts. That’s what the shop needs from its future head baker.”

There were two things Lou knew about her future: (1) it would be fabulous, and (2) she was not going to work in the family’s bakery, or any bakery, ever again. There were just too many things in the world that she wanted to see, and do, and devour. Whenever her grandmother mentioned anything about the future of the bakery, she changed the subject, which is exactly what she did now.

“And what do we have over here? Cookies for my party?” Lou started rif ing through a stack of amingo-pink boxes, and this time she let her grandma smack her hand away.

“No snooping!” cried Juju. “You’re going to ruin your surprises! Out! OUT! Molly will help me today.”

Molly smiled and joined Juju in waving Lou away.

Lou kissed her grandmother’s cushiony cheek and grinned at Molly, leaving them to their secret cake decorating. Her evasion tactic had worked, but now, probably for the rst time ever at the bakery, she had no idea what to do with herself.

Lou brie y toyed with the idea of joining her mom in the back of ce, but she decided against it. No one willingly walked into that windowless cave of stress. She knew exactly what it would be like in there. Her mom would be hunched over her desk, sorting stacks of receipts and invoices, worry plastered all

over her face. Lou was pretty sure her mother developed her list-making compulsion from years of stressing about the bakery’s nances. Either that or she came out of the womb with a to-do list clenched in her st. (Item one: Be born).

Nabbing a tortica off a tray, Lou sauntered back to the front of the bakery and decided she would people-watch while she munched. Marta, who washed dishes, winked at her as she passed by. She winked back. Familiar, comforting sounds swirled all around Lou. The robotic beeping of the oven timers. The crunch of pastries being stuffed into paper bags. The quiet scrape of the electric mixer.

Suddenly, her heart felt like it was being squeezed. She leaned against the metal countertop, her thumb gripping a sharp dent the shape of the dough hook that had made it.

Normally, she absolutely loved a “moment,” when some big emotion came out of nowhere and crashed into her heart, but this one was utterly baf ing. Up until this very second, she was certain she’d never want to work another minute in the bakery. But now she—what?—felt left out because she wasn’t going to be around this summer? She never ever looked back when she moved on to the next thing. Forward, forward, always forward. That was basically her motto. And now, out of nowhere, she was feeling nostalgic for a thing that she didn’t even miss yet, or even planned on missing.

“What’s the matter, hija?” And just like that, the moment was gone. Her mother always thought something was wrong, even when everything was perfectly right; this time she had just gotten lucky. When Lou looked at her mother’s face, all she saw were her eyebrows. They were like two knitting needles tangled

up in a ball of yarn, and the last thing Lou wanted to do was add another snag to the tangle.

“Nothing,” sighed Lou. “Everything is good.”

Her mother started to reach for Lou’s head, but then she seemed to realize her hair didn’t exist anymore. “Where’s your Ita? You’re not helping her?”

“No, she kicked me out because she’s decorating my cake. Molly’s keeping her company, though.”

Apparently her mother had already moved on to the next thing on her mental agenda. “I have to go drop a check off at the mill, but someone’s coming from the Department of State Health Services at one o’clock. Can you wait in front of the shop for them and give them this?” She handed Lou a stapled packet of paper with lots of signatures on it. “I don’t want them coming in and snooping around the shop.”

Two contradictory feelings battled it out inside of Lou when her mother was stressed or worried (most of the time both): she wanted to immediately solve whatever the problem was, and she wanted to get as far away from her mother as possible. It felt like wrapping a leash around her own neck. Lou took the papers, rolled them into a tube, and saluted her mother. “Sí, capitan!”

Her mother nodded, then was gone.

It would be another twenty minutes until the DSHS person came, but Lou had nothing else to do, so she headed outside, posting herself under the shade of the bakery’s blue-and-red awning to wait.

Finally, the front door jingled and Molly came outside.

“Thank god you’re here,” moaned Lou. “I’m so bored my brain was starting to ooze out of my ears.”

“You mean watching cars drive down First Street isn’t extremely riveting?”

“Yeah, as riveting as watching water evaporate.”

A faint roaring-whooshing sound caught Lou’s ear, and she knew it could only mean one thing: an approaching pack of skater boys. Three guys from Lou and Molly’s high school were skateboarding toward them. Lou instinctively clenched her jaw, preparing for what would inevitably be a shitty interaction. At the very least they’d hurl some kind of Neanderthal-level insult at them as they passed by. She felt Molly move closer to her, as if their physical proximity would make them stronger.

A set of oppy bangs with a face underneath called out to Lou. “Hey, aren’t you that girl who was in my World History class?”

“Yes. I’m also known as ‘girl with vast intellect’ and ‘girl with incredibly good looks.’” No one laughed except Molly, because she was the best.

Floppy Bangs stomped on the end of his skateboard and it ipped up into his hand. If Lou was supposed to be impressed, she wasn’t. “What’s your name again?” he asked.

“I’m Lou.” And when he didn’t ask for Molly’s name, Lou informed him. “This is Molly. Also in said World History class.”

“Hi,” said Molly, in the small voice she used when she was talking to new people.

Lou coughed loudly into her st, hinting that maybe he should share his name, but it seemed to go right over his head.

“Aren’t you the ones who dressed up as Napoleon for midterms?” he asked.

“She dressed up as Cesar Chavez,” corrected Molly. “I went as Eleanor Roosevelt.” Lou made eye contact with Molly, and because they practically shared the same brain, she knew her friend was thinking the exact same thing: these guys were hopeless.

Floppy Bangs just blinked—slowly. Lou waited through the awkward pause, expecting him to say how lame they were for dressing up in costume or something like that, but he surprised her. “Is it true that you’re going on tour with Zaiya?”

She barely knew these guys, so word really must have gotten out about her summer job. “Yeah, I am,” she said.

Skater boy number two, looking skeptical, said, “Aren’t you going to be her personal maid or something? I heard you have to wash her dirty underwear.”

There it was. The shittiness she had been waiting for, with a little stereotyping sprinkled in. No, she was not going to be Zaiya’s personal maid; she was going to be managing the laundry and dry cleaning for all of the ninety-eight people on tour, including the crew, musicians, and dancers. Why did boys this age insist that being an asshole was a form of communication?

“And you’re doing what exactly this summer?” she asked. “Polishing vomit off of rides at the county fair?”

That shut him up.

Giving up on Lou, Floppy Bangs turned to Molly. “So what are you going to do with yourself when Napoleon’s gone?”

Lou watched Molly shrink right into herself, and it made Lou want to kick these guys right in their skateboarding shins.

Everyone just assumed Lou was the ringleader and that Molly was incapable of having a life when she wasn’t around.

“I’ll be ne,” said Molly atly. “Thanks so much for your concern.”

Lou started formulating something extra nasty to say when the third guy nally spoke. “It’s cool you’re going on tour. Where do you get to go?”

Finally, some freaking manners. She decided to take her tone down a notch. “We’re going all over Europe, like Spain, Germany, and Italy, and then we’re going to South Korea and Japan.”

“Japan? That’s dope,” said the kid with manners.

Lou was suddenly very aware of all the boys’ eyes on her, and they all seemed to be in some form of mild awe. This had never happened before, especially not with skater boys. So of course she couldn’t help but keep going. “Yeah, I get to travel with the band and dancers on all the ights and stuff. And I also get to work backstage.”

The three skater boys looked sideways at one another, and Lou decided they were de nitely impressed.

“Can you get us backstage when Zaiya comes to Texas?” asked Floppy Bangs.

“Probably not. But if you go into the bakery right now and buy a couple dozen empanadas, maybe I could get you some free tickets. Maybe.”

The skaters looked at one another again. Lou felt Molly nudge her in the side. And then to her utter amazement, the guys tucked their skateboards under their arms and headed toward the bakery door. How in the world did that actually work? These guys really were hopeless.

Lou mouthed, “Oh my god” to Molly, who mouthed right back, “I know.”

They waited till they were 100 percent sure the door had shut, then they fell into each other, cracking up. Lou was pretty certain she wouldn’t miss working in the bakery, but she sure as hell was going to miss messing around with Molly.

Strictly speaking, Lou’s family was Cuban American. But because half a century ago her grandparents decided the people of El Viajero, Texas, needed a good empanada shop, they opened up their bakery in the heart of a Mexican American neighborhood.

Lou’s combination graduation/goodbye party was a mishmash of Cuban and Mexican American tradition, just like all their other family get-togethers. It was a predictable pageant that Lou watched like a favorite movie: The Celia Cruz playlist on loop and her tíos and tías busting out their best salsa moves when “La vida es un carnaval” came on. Tío Florencio and Tía Dina in the kitchen, dramatically yelling and throwing their hands in the air about the fact that Tío Leo put sweetened condensed milk in the cafecito. Her mother hovering nervously around Uncle Arty and his best friend Micky as they poured way too much lighter uid onto the spit where they would cook the al pastor. Her little cousins, who actually weren’t so little anymore, relentlessly begging her tía Blanca to bring out the piñata until she caved and strung it up hours before she had planned to. Her three older boy cousins with their wispy facial hair playing the Xbox one of them had brought from home. Her cousin Hector, who also worked at the bakery, hovering around the dessert table next to his latest concoction: a tower

of guava- avored mini pasteles that he made everyone taste multiple times. The dessert table itself, full of confections from the bakery, including a heap of pink, green, and yellow sawdust cookies (as Lou liked to call them), two kinds of merenguitos, a bowl of churros, and of course her chocolate graduation cake with cardamom cream cheese icing emblazoned with ¡¡FELICIDADES, LOU!! in loopy cursive. And Lou in the middle of it all, shaking her culo to the beat of the salsa and bolero music as she inhaled the food, love, and excitement until she was full.

The person who was conspicuously never at these parties, thanks to the messiest divorce in Texas history, was her father. Which was why Lou was halfway to abbergasted when the doorbell rang and she found her father standing on the front porch.

“What are you doing here?!” Lou exclaimed. “What?” said her father, a faux-innocent look plastered on his face. “I can’t come visit my only daughter on the day of her graduation party?” He pulled a giant sun ower out from behind his back and opened up his arms. “Come give your dad a hug already.”

It had been weeks since she saw him last. He was barely ever in town because he was always on the road trying to drum up interest in one of his harebrained business ideas. One year it was the house key with the built in tracker; another year it was a portable playground (“you know, so parents can shop without their kids hassling them”). They weren’t terrible ideas if you really thought about them, but he couldn’t ever seem to get them off the ground. Lou tried not to complain about the fact that he was never around because he always came through with

the child support checks, which she knew her mother really relied on. Instead, she just soaked him in whenever she could get him.

Her dad jostled Lou into his arms, wrapping her up in his Cool Water cologne she loved so much. It smelled like Dad.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi, Lou-Lou. I missed you.”

“Missed you, too. You know mom is going to ip when she sees you here.” Lou pulled herself out of his hug and closed the front door just in case. Her mother needed at least forty-eight hours’ advance notice before a sighting.

“Oh, let her.” He put his hat back on and eyed Lou’s head. “You shaved your hair off! Good thing you have your dad’s looks. You make a good baldie.”

Lou smiled. Her dad was kind of known for being handsome. Strong jaw, deeper-than-deep brown eyes, awless skin. Lou always gured his looks were why her mother ended up with him in the rst place. (Her mother normally avoided daydreamers who told terrible jokes.)

“Do you want some food or something?” asked Lou. “I can probably talk Mom into letting you stay for a little bit if we hang out here on the porch.”

“Nah, I have to run in a few.”

“Oh . . .” She really should have known this was going to be one of his famous drive-by visits.

“Anyway,” her dad said, changing the subject, “I know you’re going on tour with a famous rock star and everything—”

“She’s not a rock star, Dad!” laughed Lou. God, how old was he anyway?

“So what is she, then?”

“Say ‘musician,’ or ‘pop star,’ or ‘singer-songwriter.’ No one calls artists ‘rock stars’ anymore.”

“So you’re going on tour with a famous pop star. Excuse me.”

“Yes, I am.”

Her dad chuckled. “That’s real good, Lou-Lou.”

“Yeah, thanks, Dad.”

“No, I’m serious now. It’s the biggest job anyone in the Samalea family has ever had. You should feel proud of yourself.”

Lou took in a deep breath, as if she could actually inhale what her dad had said. Her parents rarely used the P-word. She could probably count on her rst three ngers all the times they’d told her they were proud of her.

Her dad cleared his throat. “So, you ain’t the only one who has a big new job.”

“Oh yeah? Did you nd an investor for your one-size- ts-all garbage bags?” she guessed.

“No, no. I’m talking about a real job.”

“A real job?” she said skeptically.

“Yeah, I’m selling cars at a lot down by the outlet mall. My title is sales associate. Pretty schmancy, huh?”

“Dad, that’s amazing!” Almost unbelievable, actually. Her dad was a lot of things, but she couldn’t imagine him going corporate.

“Yeah, it’s gonna be huge. We’ll celebrate your graduation and your new job in style when you get back. I’m gonna take you out for prime rib. Watch, I’ll have a wad of cash in my wallet so big that when I put it in my back pocket and sit on it, I’ll lean to one side.”

Lou laughed, but it actually made her kind of sad. It gured that he had gotten himself a job nearby right when she was about to y halfway around the world. Oh well, at least he’d be there when she came back.

“Anyway, I just came by to tell you that I owe you one for your graduation.” Looking down at his feet, he meekly handed over the sun ower. It made Lou’s heart want to crumble to pieces.

“It’s OK, Dad,” she said. “You don’t need to do anything special for me. It means a lot that you came by today.”

Her dad still didn’t lift his head up. “You leave tomorrow, huh?”

“Yeah, rst thing.”

“OK, well, you go kill ’em dead, Lou-Lou. Tell Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower I say hello.” He pulled her back into his chest. Lou breathed in his cologne, and his warmth, and his love and didn’t pull away until he did.

“Love you, girl!” he called as he hopped down the front steps in his cowboy boots.

“Love you too, Dad.”

“’Nother taco, Lou?” asked Uncle Arty.

“Nah, I’m good.” Lou and Molly were plunked down next to him at the picnic table in the backyard. The cake was eaten, the last tía had been kissed goodbye, and now the sun was sitting low in the trees. Lou always found herself with her uncle Arty at the end of family get-togethers. Of all her aunts and uncles, he was her favorite, ever since she was a baby. She loved listening to him tell stories in his deep, gravelly voice about his life

on the road with famous artists. When he’d get really worked up, his black mustache would twitch, and she knew the punch line of his story was coming. And it was always hilarious.

“How about you, Moll? One more taco?”

“No, thank you, I’m stuffed,” said Molly. Molly usually avoided crowds, but Lou loved that she t right in with her big family. It was because Molly came from a big family, too; she had four younger brothers and a little sister.

“Come on, we got half this freaking lechon left; you can eat another taco, Lou,” pressed Uncle Arty.

“Uncle, I swear,” Lou said, rubbing her stomach for effect. “If I eat one more taco, I’m going to turn into a literal pig.”

“Don’t make her eat any more, Artencio. She’ll be sick,” chided Lou’s mother from across the table.

“Fine,” he relented. “But I’m packing the rest of this in foil and you’re taking it with you on the bus tomorrow. I hope you have an extra suitcase.” Uncle Arty winked at Lou, and Lou nodded her head matter-of-factly, like packing an extra suitcase for some leftover pork was the most normal thing in the world. “You know, Susana, your Lou is going to be a whole new woman when she comes back in four months.”

“Mmm,” murmured Lou’s mother. “As long as she comes back in one piece.”

“Well, that I can’t promise,” teased Uncle Arty.

Lou’s mother glared at him like he had just told a joke at a funeral.

“She’ll be ne, Susana! I’ll make sure of that.”

“Mom, come on,” said Lou. “Even if Uncle wasn’t going to be there, I’d be ne. I’m tough, I can take care of myself.”

“It’s not you I’m worried about, Luisa. It’s all the other mala gente in the world.”

The mala gente were her mother’s favorite reason for not allowing Lou to do something. They were why she couldn’t go to the independent movie theater on Behrens Street, and why she wasn’t allowed to drive on the highway until she was eighteen. “You know not every stranger is a kidnapper or a murderer, right?”

Her mother pursed her lips.

It had been at a backyard barbecue just like this one when Uncle Arty rst oated the idea of Lou going on tour with him. They were all sitting around the table as usual, and her uncle had said, “Hey, you know they’re looking for someone to do the laundry on tour this summer.” Lou laughed because the idea of ying all over the world with Zaiya seemed about as realistic as doing it by apping her arms. But when Arty didn’t laugh back, it became Lou’s sole mission in life to convince her mother to let her go. After two months of begging, pleading, and doing every bakery and household chore she could possibly think of, Lou nally got her mother to relent.

She knew there were two reasons why her mother caved: (1) Lou needed money for college and the gig paid more than she could have ever made working a local job that summer, and (2) Uncle Arty would be on the road, too, keeping an eye on her.

Lou’s mother trusted Uncle Arty but also saw him as a little bit of a screwup. To Lou, he was a nomad living an exciting life full of surprises. She never would have admitted it to her mother, but it was a life she could see herself living.

Lou’s mother also knew that Uncle Arty loved Lou like a

daughter and would do anything for her. He did his best to ll the empty space left by Lou’s dad after the divorce. And in the end, that’s what mattered to Lou’s mother the most. At least for the four months Lou would be on tour with him.

“Remind me the name of the guitar pedal you’re picking up tonight?” Lou asked her uncle.

“It’s called Iguana Fuzz.”

She laughed. “It’s such a good name. Mom, did Uncle Arty tell you about the guitar pedal?”

Her mother shook her head.

“Right, so,” Uncle Arty said, cracking his knuckles and pulling his chair closer to the table, “there’s a guy in Corpus Christi who’s famous among guitarists for making this one kind of pedal. You can only get them by appointment—makes them seem more exclusive. They make your guitar sound like a frizzed-up intercom on a UFO. It’s cool. But he’s a big weirdo, right?”

Lou looked from Molly to her mother, just to make sure they were paying attention. She could hear this story a hundred times and never get bored.

“The reason it’s called Iguana Fuzz is because he’s got an iguana farm in his living room, and when he’s not making pedals, he’s feeding or doing whatever you do with iguanas. So Chris—you know, Zaiya’s lead guitarist?—he’s a come mierda, and he wants one of these famous pedals. So he makes an appointment to pick one up.” Uncle Arty took a swig of his beer and shifted the black baseball cap on his head like he was revving up for the rest of the story—Lou’s favorite part. “So yesterday he goes to the iguana guy’s house, and when he gets there, the guy has one of his pedals set up on the oor with

an amp so Chris can test it out. Chris plugs in his guitar and starts playing around, only he’s being kind of rough with it in a way the iguana guy doesn’t like. The guy tells Chris, ‘Hey, if you wanna treat it like that, you have to buy it.’ Well, you know Chris doesn’t like that. So what does Chris do?”

Lou watched giddily as Molly and her mother, rapt with attention, leaned in, hanging on Uncle Arty’s words. “What did he do?” Lou asked, even though she knew exactly what Chris did next.

Uncle Arty’s mustache twitched. “He kicks the pedal across the oor and it crashes right into one of the glass iguana tanks. The tank breaks into a thousand pieces and two iguanas go sprinting across the living room and out the door!”

“No!” squealed Lou’s mother.

“Oh my gosh!” exhaled Molly. The expression on both their faces was priceless.

Lou clapped her hands, howling with laughter. “Can you believe that?!”

Uncle Arty kept going. “So the pedal guy goes ballistic; he grabs Chris by his shirt and ejects him from his house.”

“Did he get the iguanas back?” asked Molly.

“Nope. And now Chris is banned from the dude’s house for life,” grumbled Uncle Arty. “And my sorry ass has to drive all the way there tonight so he can have his pedal for the last day of rehearsal tomorrow.”

Lou shook her head. This Chris guy seemed like one of those classic male divas that her uncle had horror stories about. She made a mental note to avoid him like the plague. “I can’t believe

you have to go all the way to Corpus Christi just to get that jerk a guitar pedal.”

“Tell me about it. That’s some real BS right there.”

The stereo drone of cicadas was quiet by the time Lou and Molly headed to Lou’s bedroom. She should have been packed up hours ago.

Lou watched Molly roll out the sleeping bag that she kept in Lou’s closet for nights like this, then let her eyes wander. Her bedroom was a riotous graveyard of all the phases she and Molly had ever been through. The abandoned ocarina collection from when they had tried to form their high school’s rst ocarina orchestra but ultimately failed because they could only enlist four other people (eighty-six fewer than Lou had hoped for). The dusty orange wig from when they tore through all 180 episodes of I Love Lucy in three weeks. Lou went as Ricky for Halloween that year because she was Cuban American, after all, and could nail his accent, and Molly went as Lucy. But they both knew that Lou was the Lucy of the friendship.

Her eyes went to the ery red phoenix over her bed, the one that she had collaged out of magazine cutouts and tissue paper in their Mixed Media Art class. The only reason Lou even held on to the thing was because Molly begged her not to throw it out. Once Lou knew that the collage meant something to Molly, she didn’t just keep it, she put it in the most prestigious spot in her room.

The reason Molly loved the collage, was because it was from the beginning of their friendship. The rst week of middle school, the art teacher had wanted them to make a collage of an

animal that represented their “true essence.” Lou knew exactly what animal to choose: the phoenix. It would represent her emergence from her old chaotic life, the one from before her mom and dad mercifully divorced. Molly, on the other hand, had drawn a picture of a chubby manatee. Lou liked this girl who hadn’t chosen a “pretty” animal like a Pegasus or a snow leopard like the other girls in class.

“Did you know that sailors used to see manatees and think they were mermaids?” Lou had asked.

“No,” said Molly, shaking her head.

“Are you a secret mermaid, too?” asked Lou. And with that one question, they became inseparable.

Lou stroked the phoenix’s tissue-paper beak, then turned to look at Molly, who was staring up at the ceiling. “Beep-boop, beep-boop.” It was the sound Lou made when Molly was off in her head somewhere. She always imagined it was the sound of a little robot booting into the mainframe that was Molly’s vast and mysterious brain. “I think you’re lying on my pants.”

“Oh . . . sorry.” Molly rolled to her side, and Lou yanked a pair of faded black Levi’s out from under her. She balled them up and stuffed them into her suitcase.

“Why are you only packing black stuff?” asked Molly. “Is this part of New Lou?”

“No, they’re my show-blacks.” Lou felt legit saying it out loud even though she’d only learned what the term meant like a month ago.

“Your what?” asked Molly.

“My show-blacks. Uncle Arty told me I have to wear all black so that when I go onstage I blend into the background better.”

“Wait, you’re going to be onstage?”

“Maybe,” said Lou. “You know, to bring water bottles to the band in between songs, or a clean towel for Zaiya if she needs it.”

“I still can’t get over the fact that you’re working for Zaiya. Like, I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to that idea.”

“I know,” agreed Lou, tearing open a fresh pack of black socks. “Me neither. It’s surreal.” Or whatever was one thousand times more unbelievable than surreal.

“Do you think you’re going to get to, like . . . talk to her?”

“Oh yeah. Zaiya and I are going to be best friends by the end of the summer,” Lou joked. Then, realizing it was kind of a shitty thing to say to her actual best friend, she added lamely, “I mean, not my best friend, but you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” sighed Molly.

Damn, thought Lou. She crammed the socks into any little pockets of space she could nd in her bulging suitcase. It was too full to zip by herself, so she got Molly to sit on top of it as she yanked the zipper around its track. When it was closed up, she rolled it over next to her bedroom door and they looked at it in silence. This was the moment they had been dreading, though neither of them had ever said it out loud—the moment when Lou’s departure became real.

Lou looked at Molly’s sad face and took her hand. “Hey, I made something for you. Actually, it’s for both of us.”

Molly raised her eyebrows even though she probably wasn’t that surprised. Of course Lou made something for them; that’s what Lou did.

Lou slipped her beat-up laptop out of her backpack and sat down on her bed, pulling her friend down with her. Molly

watched Lou sign into a game called MistyDrop Hollow. The screen dissolved then reassembled into a hyper-colored, 16-bit world centered on two cottages, separated by a eld full of rocks and weeds. Two avatars stood in front of the cottages, one with pierced-up ears and a shaved head, and the other with a sandy-blonde ponytail and hazel eyes.

“Hey, that’s you and me!” said Molly, leaning closer to the screen.

“Yeah, and this is our farm. We can grow whatever we want, and even raise animals. If you download the game, we can play it together while I’m gone.”

Molly’s face collapsed and Lou knew she was going to cry. Molly cried a lot, but not in a dramatic way; she was just sentimental and really felt the beginnings and ends of things. Lou liked how Molly made everything more meaningful with her tears.

“I love it,” said Molly, swiping at her wet eyes.

“And see,” said Lou, wrapping an arm around Molly’s shoulders, “we can chat with each other here while we play.” Lou moused over a little box in the lower left-hand corner of the screen and typed “hi moll!!” with one hand.

“What should we grow?” asked Molly.

“Well, obviously artichokes,” answered Lou.

“Obviously.” They both loved artichokes. Eating an artichoke was like eating a giant ower.

“And I was thinking we could raise goats, because you can turn their fur into yarn and then knit clothes for your avatar.”

“Geez, they thought of everything.” Molly sounded excited

enough, but Lou could tell she was thinking about something else. Probably about fall and how far away it was and how they wouldn’t see each other again until then. And sure enough, Molly was crying again.

The truth was, all those phases the two of them had been through, every single one of them had been Lou’s idea. Lou was the one who came up with all their big adventures and obsessions. Molly was always a willing participant, but really she was just along for the ride. Molly sometimes called herself Lou’s sidekick, which honestly made Lou feel bad, but they both knew that Molly would be a little lost without Lou around, kind of like a Ricky without a Lucy.

Molly lay back on the pillow that Lou tie-dyed herself, tears silently rolling down her cheeks.

“It’s going to be OK,” Lou said softly, wiggling Molly’s big toe.

“I know. But you have so much to be excited about, and all I have is a summer full of scanning mispriced cat food at the Ranch Market,” she said glumly. “My job is like the polar opposite of yours.”

Lou did have so much to be excited about. She wasn’t just starting the most glamorous job ever tomorrow, she was going to tour the world! Lou had never even left Texas, let alone the country, and now was going to see Korea and Japan and half of Europe and everywhere in between. All she wanted to do was run down the street screaming about how ridiculously excited she was, but she didn’t want to rub it in Molly’s face.

Molly touched her belly and scowled. “I think I have liver disease.”

“Why? Does it hurt?” Lou hoped she sounded concerned, but this wasn’t the rst time Molly claimed she had some kind of illness when she felt sad.

“Yes. Right here,” said Molly, pushing her index nger into the skin to the left of her belly button.

“You don’t even know which side of your stomach your liver is on,” teased Lou.

“Fine, whatever is right under here, it’s diseased.”

Lou frowned, but then something kind of glorious occurred to her. “Moll . . .”

“What?”

Lou had that rushing feeling in her chest, the one she got when she knew she was on the verge of their next big adventure. “What if you came on tour with me?”

“What? How would I even do that?”

“I don’t mean the whole time, but like, maybe you could meet me somewhere for a few days?”

Molly raised her head, paying attention now. “Like where?”

The Howl’s Moving Castle poster was just on the edge of Lou’s eyesight, and she went with it. “What about Japan? We’ve always dreamed of going to Japan! We could go to the Ghibli Museum!”

“Oh my god,” said Molly, “we could go to a hedgehog cafe!”

“Yes! And we could go to one of those amazing ve-story craft stores. Wait!” Lou yanked the laptop back onto hercafées and clicked out of their game. She opened up the Zaiya tour calendar and quickly scrolled through until she found Tokyo. She knew it. “Moll, we’re going to be in Tokyo starting on August twenty-second.”

Molly nearly choked on her own gasp. “That’s my birthday!”

Lou threw her laptop onto the bed and grabbed her friend by the shoulders. “Oh my god, Moll, this is meant to be!”

“Yeah, but how would I get there? I mean, I can’t afford to buy a ticket to Japan.”

“We’ll gure it out. We can pool all our graduation money. I just got a bunch of cash from my aunts and uncles today. Plus, I’m going to be making the most money of my life, so I can save while I’m on tour.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be saving for college? Wasn’t that the whole deal with your mom?”

“Yeah, but whatever. How much is a ticket to Japan? You can save, too. I bet I could save half by the end of August, and you could save the rest.”

“My grandma always gives me fty dollars for my birthday. Maybe she can give it to me early this year.”

“See, that’s already a good start!”

“Lou . . . are we really going to do this?” It was the rst time all day that Molly didn’t look queasy.

“We are one hundred percent doing this.”

Molly looked down at her stomach and wiggled her nger into it. “Hey, my liver doesn’t hurt so much anymore.”

“How about while I’m gone, whenever you have a pain in your liver, that’s how you know I’m thinking about you?”

They smiled at each other, and Lou knew they were going to be OK, no matter how far apart they were.

Lou with the Band Excerpt

Also by Alexandra Leigh Young Idol Gossip

EL VIAJERO, TX