Method
i.
California is a tough sell.
It's not the cost, or even the distance they might find themselves from their eldest daughter, no, the Martinez's have purely ideological issues with the west coast that kill all of Lola's most innocuous lead-ins. It has something to do with crime or disease or the fundamental loss of her innocence, she imagines them imagining a cult membership invitation that covers all of the local depravity hot spots and ends with a Kool Aid party in the mountains. That PCA is a relatively inexpensive boarding school in a city responsible for nurturing the dreams of everyone Lola's ever wanted to be makes no difference.
Texas is safer. California is "tacky". They're opening a Lego Land in Houston and who on Earth would want to miss that?
The thoughtful brow-furrowing and solemn nodding point to a certainty in their beliefs that borders on the Evangelical and leave no room for Lola's carefully crafted rebuttals. Her protests are shoved neatly at the end of long speeches about the air quality of Southern California, melodramatic retellings of her birth story, and impromptu family meetings wherein Camilla and Gabriel turn in Oscar-caliber performances, feigning surprise at the sight of the dinning-room table covered in brochures for every prep school in a fifty mile radius.
Her counterarguments are lost in the careless whirring of the blender, the grinding sound of the garage door and Dr. Phil's salient life-advice concerning the dangers of bath salt consumption. Her father whistles merrily over the blender as though Lola wasn't just making a totally valid point about her "small horizons". Her mother points to her ears and shakes her head as the garage door descends even though the enthusiastic hip-shaking/fistbumb session Lola witnesses through the windows minutes later suggest her hearing is fine.
By the time Dr. Phil is giving straight talk to seventh graders addicted to bath salts, the Martinez's, bored by the burden of having to hide their disinterest, turn the volume up as a unit.
iii.
This thing with Chase, Lola tells herself, is not a thing. Doesn't have the necessary qualifiers, the prerequisites to be a "thing" because a thing has-is made up of attributes, qualities that modify its "thing-ness" and she and Chase...Lola and Chase-not as like, a title or a sequence but as two totally separate, individual entities, they don't have attributes or descriptors or modifiers or anything that would make a comparison to any real thing necessary or sane.
See? Not a thing.
If it was a problem (and it isn't, ever) that would be the fault of its promotion to the status of a 'thing', which it clearly and unequivocally isn't (see logical and not at all vague argument above). But there's no problem. No difficulty. No social quagmire that takes the collective power of what Nicole christens one sluggish afternoon in Biology, "the American S Club 7" to solve.
Except.
Soon after that day in Biology Zoey high tails it to England due to the super cool, once in-a-lifetime business opportunity not one person silently resents her dad for taking. Before Nicole can submit her Which S Club 7 Member are You? quiz to Buzzfeed Zoey is waving goodbye and staring resolutely out of a plane window and leaving a terrible dent in the dynamic. On the cab ride home, Lola swears everything's been moved like, thirty degrees to the left and she's even more disoriented upon reentering her room which...is it smaller? Everything feels smaller.
Her newborn late 90s pop group buzz properly euthanized, Nicole sets about tearing her room apart in search of emergency snacks, yelling in triumph when her victory comes in the form of a Ziploc bag of Double Stuffed Oreos hidden under her mattress. Quinn locks herself in her room with the Duplicator demo that takes up a good percentage of her week. (The machine will see more of Quinn than her remaining comrades for the better part of a month before she sinks into Lola's bunk with a yawn and a sleepy opening round of Never Have I Ever.)
Lola and Nicole sit on the latter's carpet watching Ferris Bueller, eating Oreos and trying to ignore the silence lying just beneath the colors of the room. Opting for the Bristow Cut-which consists solely of Nicole reenacting her favorite scenes in a host of freakishly pitch perfect vocal impressions-means Lola spends nearly two hours muffling her laughter in her comrade's shoulder.
"They think he's a righteous dude." Nicole nods solemnly, and when they get down to the last Oreo she pushes it into Lola's palm without hesitation.
(A week later Lola spends an entire Saturday morning putting purple streaks in her hair. She sits in the bleachers at basketball games and smiles wide and believable at Mrs. Thompson while explaining that she lost her Biology book in a freak "improv accident".)
ii.
She buys the wig the week before school starts.
It's short and white and makes her look like a fourteen-year-old Joan Jett/Danny Phantom hybrid. The make-up is from a costume shop in Houston. She strolls into Hot Topic and requests fifteen shirts in the darkest shade of black please. It takes three days to get used to the steel-toed boots, four to make skull necklaces, five to sample various thrasher albums to find just the right kind of horror surf metal.
Because the previous month is a series of detailed homages to the world's most nefarious dictators with a special emphasis on reenacting the death scenes of those who perished in coups, the Martinez parental unit find the temporary tattoos, collection of chokers, and the eardrum-battering Lord of the Rings-themed Satanic death metal interspersed between long intervals of Lord of the Rings-themed Satanic death metal in Swedish, a delightful change of pace. Having known Lola for a while, they understand that stomping around the first floor in her newly purchased combat boots or poking safety pins in every article of clothing she owns is just their daughter "getting into character". The monosyllabic answers that meet their earnest inquires about the quality of her day, the deep sighs issued for no other reason than life is suffering and death can't come soon enough suggests that she is already deep in method and their admiration for such a clean and thorough transformation can't help but shine through.
A child psychologist, Camilla Martinez marvels at the way adolescents use performance to micromanage and externalize their stress. An interior decorator and part-time portrait artist, Gabriel Martinez is fascinated/vaguely bemused by the fact that he can look across the dinning-room table and see Lola and at the same time, not see her at all.
(Camilla Martinez writes three critically-acclaimed books about the variety of coping mechanisms found in accelerated children while Lola is between the ages of four and six. Each volume revolves around the emotional development of a kindergartener named Lucia, who enjoys dressing up and speaking to her dolls in a host of accents. The trilogy is considered a landmark in child psychology and Camila Martinez one of the pioneers of a new era.)
Lola stops smiling on the first day of August.
She orders a handcrafted Ouija board and carefully begins easing herself into breaking every last house rule (puncturing the sound barrier here, ignoring curfew there). Free of the arbitrary confines of a bedtime she stays up late watching séances on You Tube, perfects her pentagram reproduction, and conducts extensive research on the lost art of animal sacrifice.
When she looks in the mirror it's only to count how many seconds it takes to find herself in the glass