Double-Crossed

by Lin Oliver

 

Grosset & Dunlap

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

G
ROSSET & DUNLAP

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Cover illustration by Mallory Grigg

 

Text copyright © 2013 by Lin Oliver. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

 

ISBN 978-1-101-61088-6

For Amanda Bickman,
my wonderful niece and great advisor—LO

The New Boys

Chapter 1

“The new boys are here!” my twin sister, Charlie, shouted as I jogged across the beach to the lounge chair where she was sprawled out sipping a strawberry smoothie.

Before you get the wrong impression of me, let me tell you right off that I am not a major jogger. In fact, the only thing I hate more than jogging is running. And the only thing I hate more than running is running fast. I think you get the point. But my dad has me on his super-duper “shape up, slim down” program for our next tennis tournament. (Oh, did I mention that Charlie and I are ranked doubles tennis players? Well, we are.) Anyway, if I take a daily run, my dad, who is also our coach, lets me have fries on the weekend. I'd say that's worth a twenty-minute jog.

“What boys are you talking about?” I asked, grabbing the smoothie from Charlie's hand and taking a giant slurp. “Ouch. Brain freeze.”

“Press your thumb against the roof of your mouth,” Charlie suggested.

“Why? So I can look stupid?”

“Because it warms your mouth, and gets rid of the brain freeze. Honestly, Sammie, everyone knows that.”

I shrugged but did it anyway, and after about ten seconds, the brain freeze went away. Unfortunately, what didn't go away was our older brother, Ryan, who was hanging out on the deck, juggling a volleyball in his hands. The minute I stuck my thumb in my mouth, he dropped the ball, reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and snapped a picture of me.

“Nice thumb-sucking,” he commented, checking out my image on the screen. “Oh, and just a little heads-up, Sammie. That's not a real popular look in the seventh grade.”

“Delete it, Ry,” I ordered.

“I was thinking that the new boys might enjoy seeing this picture. Along with your other new pals at Beachside Middle School. What's it worth to you for me to delete it?”

I lunged for his phone, but he held it up high above his head where I couldn't reach it. Ryan has always been tall, but he's in the middle of his fourteen-year-old growth spurt, and now he's such a beanpole that I can't jump high enough to knock anything out of his immense hands. Charlie can because she weighs less than me, so when she jumps, she goes higher. That's one advantage of being the thinner twin.

Oh yeah, there's also one other minor advantage—all the boys think she's hot. There is that little detail.

Anyway, the higher Ryan held his phone, the more I jumped, mostly just to harass him. Eventually it worked.

“Okay, okay, if you get out of my face, I'll delete it,” he said. “On one condition. You tell me who these new boys are. Spill it. Could our little Sam-I-Am be having a hot romance?”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Ryan. I don't know any
new
boys. I barely know any
old
boys.”

“Well, I know who they are,” Charlie said. “Their names are Eddie and Oscar.”

I just stared at Charlie blankly. None of this was ringing a bell.

“Alicia called when you were jogging,” Charlie said. “Or what you laughingly call jogging because it looks more like creeping. Anyway, she said to tell you her cousins Eddie and Oscar have arrived and she wants to bring them over to say hi.”

Ding, ding, ding.
A bell rang inside my head. I remembered that when I walked Alicia to her bus stop after school last week, she had mentioned that her twin cousins were coming to visit Los Angeles from El Salvador. She never mentioned their names, though, and I never gave it a second thought.

“Listen, Sammie,” Charlie said, and from her tone of voice I knew she was annoyed. “I'm having a little get-together here at the club, and it's just for my friends.”

“Don't worry, I don't plan on busting up your party, if that's what you mean,” I told her.

“But what about Alicia and her cousins?” Charlie asked, trying to be delicate. “Not to be rude or anything, but—”

“First of all, Charlie,” I interrupted, “Alicia is coming over to see me. As in
me
, not
you
. And about her cousins—let's just assume that two teenage guys haven't traveled all the way from El Salvador to hang around and discuss lip gloss with you and your friends.”

“We discuss other things than lip gloss,” Charlie shot back, pretending to be hurt. “We're not totally shallow.”

“Yeah.” Ryan laughed. “Like just yesterday I heard them discussing spray tans. Nothing shallow about that.”

Charlie and I both rolled our eyes at Ryan. She and I have our differences, but we are united in our reactions to Ryan's so-called humorous comments about our lives. He never stops teasing us about everything—how we both dot our
i
's with a circle, how we both bite our nails, and how neither of us can boogie board without wearing a nose clip.

I know you're thinking that the nose clip thing probably doesn't come up very often, but actually, it does. We live at the beach, and that involves a lot of boogie boarding and nose clip wearing.

Our family recently moved into the Sporty Forty Beach Club, a white wooden cottage with blue shutters that sits right on the sands of Santa Monica beach, between Los Angeles and Malibu. We're not rich like the forty families who are the club's members—in fact we're the opposite of rich. We live in the caretaker's bungalow because my dad is working as the tennis coach at the club while my mom is away at cooking school.

Ever since we moved in a couple months ago, Charlie has become really close friends with all the members' kids, who call themselves the Sporty Forty 2s, as in second generation. My new best friend, Alicia Bermudez, is the daughter of Candido and Esperanza, who are the gardener and housekeeper at the club. I love my twin sister, but I truly think she's embarrassed about my hanging out with Alicia. Alicia isn't rich and fancy like the SF2s, but I don't care. I think she's the coolest friend anyone could ever want.

“I didn't know anything about this get-together,” I said to Charlie as I polished off her smoothie. “What's it for?”

“It's Saturday,” Ryan chimed in. “That's party day for Charlie's friends. Oh, I forgot. So are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wait, I left out Sunday. That's always a good day to party.”

“It's not really a party,” Charlie said defensively. “It's more of a photo shoot.”

“A photo shoot!” Ryan laughed. “Just because you girls stand around taking pictures of yourselves trying to look like models, does not make it a photo shoot.” Then he struck a ridiculous model-like pose, sucking in his cheeks, putting his hands on his hips, and doing a stupid-looking runway walk across the deck.

I laughed, but now it was Charlie's turn not to be amused.

“For your information,” she said to Ryan, “we are having an actual fashion photographer here. Lauren has arranged it all.”

That shut Ryan up. Lauren Wadsworth, his sometime girlfriend, who is rich and beautiful and perfect and the most popular girl at our school, probably had her dad call up
Seventeen
magazine and send over their best fashion photographer. The Wadsworths are that kind of family—they do everything really big. Like when Lauren had her twelfth birthday party, it was at a recording studio in Hollywood and everyone got to cut a real record. The Diamond family—that's us—is much more ordinary. We don't do anything fancy. Like when Charlie and I had our twelfth birthday party, our friends made necklaces out of colored macaroni in the backyard. No kidding. Our grandma, GoGo, is a jewelry designer and she got this idea that we should all create “wearable food” when she saw an article in one of her hippie magazines about bacon bikinis.

Charlie got up from her beach lounger and gathered up her headband, sunglasses, and sunscreen from the side table.

“My friends and the photographer are going to be here in half an hour,” she said to me. “So maybe you and Alicia and the new guys can hang out somewhere else.”

“No problem, Charlie. I'll just say the magic words and make us all invisible.”

Charlie let out a huge sigh. “I'm sorry, Sammie. I had dibs on the deck and patio. And we really don't want anyone else there. Just see if you can make that happen, all right?”

Charlie headed down the wooden path to the clubhouse and went into our bungalow, letting the screen door slam behind her. I looked over at Ryan and shook my head.

“I can't believe she still wants to be friends with those SF2 kids after the trouble they got her in,” I said.

Several of the SF2s had pressured Charlie to steal a history test from the teachers' lounge to give to Lauren so she could improve her grade and get ungrounded. Charlie actually did it, and had to go on trial before the school's Honor Board. She got in really bad trouble and just got off a month's detention. If that were me, I'd never want to talk to those kids again, but Charlie claims they all said they were really sorry and swore they'd never get her in that kind of trouble again.

“Charlie wants to be accepted by them,” Ryan answered. “She's not tough like you.”

“What makes you think I'm tough?”

“You've got spunk, Sams. Sometimes a little too much of it, in fact. But Charlie, she's traded in her spunk to be part of the SF2s. And if you want to be one of them, you have to play by their rules. Which means no little cousins from El Salvador allowed.”

“They're such snobs,” I said. “I hate to think Charlie is becoming like them.”

“You've got to give her credit, though, Sams. Charlie is going places in the world. She sets out to do something, and she gets it done. You and me, we're just ordinary dudes.”

“I am not ordinary,” I snapped, “and you're not either, Ry. You're the captain of the All-City volleyball team and I'm . . . I'm . . .”

“Sweaty,” he said, tossing me his terry cloth wrist guard. “You might want to dab your upper lip.” He tapped me under the chin and headed back out to the beach, tossing the volleyball in the air and setting it with his fingertips as he went.

When I went into the house and checked myself in the bathroom mirror, I discovered Ryan was right. I was a red-hot sweaty mess. My dark blond hair had turned that special shade of baby-poop brown it gets when it's damp, and my upper lip was doing its own impression of Niagara Falls. I took a fast shower, threw on a pair of cutoff sweats and a baggy old yellow T-shirt, and pulled my hair into a ponytail. When I came out of the bathroom, Charlie was in our room trying on outfits, deep in concentration about what to wear to the photo shoot.

“Don't wear white,” I said. “Makes everyone look ten pounds heavier.”

“Then I'd look just like you,” she answered, and no sooner were the words out of her mouth than she let out a little gasp. “Oh, I didn't mean it to come out that way, Sammie.”

“That's okay,” I said, even though it actually wasn't. “A fact is a fact. I weigh ten pounds more than you.”

Actually, that fact wasn't a fact either, because I weigh almost twenty pounds more than Charlie. We're identical twins in every way except for that—if you don't count the tiny red ladybug birthmark on my upper arm or the fact that I have a freckle over my right eye and she has one over her left. But over the last couple of years, I've kind of zoomed up on the old scale while Charlie has stayed the same. It might have something to do with french fries.

I said
might
because I choose to believe that french fries are not fattening if you eat them standing up.

“Doodle,” I heard GoGo call from the kitchen, “Alicia's here.”

Doodle is me, at least it is in GoGo-speak. She calls Charlie Noodle, not because she's limp and slimy like a wet noodle but because she's long and willowy. Since
long
and
willowy
are not words that anyone with two eyes would use to describe me, I became Doodle. Round and roly.

Enough said.

I ran out of our tiny bedroom, across the tiny living room, and into the tiny kitchen, all in about ten steps. Our bungalow is so small that Ryan has to sleep on the foldout couch in the living room and our dad sleeps in what was once a locker room. Alicia was waiting for me at the kitchen counter, munching some taco chips that GoGo was pouring into a wicker basket.

“I thought some of my homemade chips and salsa might make our visitors from El Salvador feel welcome,” GoGo said when she saw me come sprinting in. GoGo loves to make visitors from other countries feel welcome. Once, my dad had a friend visiting from France, and GoGo said
merci beaucoup
about ten thousand times even though the guy was born in Brooklyn and spoke perfect English.

“Hi,” I said, giving Alicia a hug. Usually she wears her shiny black hair pulled back in a clip, but today she was wearing it down and it looked really pretty and bouncy. “So where are these new boys everyone's talking about?”

“They're on their way in,” she answered. “Oscar's kind of a slowpoke. Wait until you meet them, Sammie. They're so cute. And their faces are totally identical, just like you and Charlie.”

“Wait . . . you mean I won't be able to tell them apart?”

“Oh no,” Alicia said with a giggle. “You'll be able to tell them apart, no problem. Trust me on that.”

That was a strange thing for Alicia to say, but before I could ask what she meant, I saw her dad, Candido, coming in from the parking lot, followed by a boy who looked to be around my age. He had golden-brown skin, long jet-black hair that flopped casually over one eye, and the whitest teeth I had ever seen. Alicia had lied—he wasn't cute, he was awesome.

“Sammie, this is my nephew Eddie,” Candido said. Eddie walked right up to me, with an easy, athletic bounce in his step, and stuck out his hand. He didn't seem shy in the least.

“
Hola
,” he said.

He smiled at me with those gorgeous, glistening teeth and I suddenly wished I had put on a better T-shirt. I'm not even going to go into how I felt about my cutoff sweats.