FOUR >> LOLITA AND THE DANCE PARTY

Lola walked out of her bedroom the next morning, after a sleep filled with nightmares, to find Richie, her mother, and Eddie standing in her kitchen, the boys wolfing down pancakes drowned in syrup.

"Morning," she mumbled, sliding into the chair at the table next to Richie. He smiled at her, but behind that smile was a set of worried eyes.

Across the table from her sat Eddie, and, stretching her neck to work out the kinks, she asked him, "What are you doing here so early, Eddie Spaghetti?" She brushed her knotted curls out of her face and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.

Through a mouthful of pancakes, he snapped, "Eating pancakes, what the hell do you think, Lola?"

"Hey!" Mrs. Green exclaimed, pointing the spatula at Eddie. "Language, Kaspbrak. You kiss your mother with that mouth?" She sounded stern, but with the sparkle in her brown eyes, exactly like the mischievous glimmer that was always in Lola's, it was obvious that she was joking.

Richie snorted, pushing up his coke-bottle glasses. "Yeah, he actually does, Mrs. G." He laughed loudly and obnoxiously.

Lola elbowed him in the side. "At least he's kissing someone," she whispered in his ear, biting her lip to suppress a giggle as his face turned pink. He looked down, embarrassed, and she grinned widely at him. The smile on its own was enough to brighten his mood and make his thoughts about what happened in the middle of the night slip to the back of his mind.

Apart from the dark bags under her eyes, she looked like normal, happy, Sunshine Girl Lola. That was the Lola Richie liked to see—the Lola that everyone liked to see.

And, now that he was thinking about it, she had been Sunshine Girl Lola ever since her brother died. Almost as if she was trying to spread the happiness that she knew her brother had needed, but had never received. He had to ask himself: was that the real Lola, or was she putting on a facade that she thought other people would want from her? He thought he knew who she really was, but maybe he was wrong; maybe the real girl was the one locked underneath, the one who would creep out late at night, when everyone else was asleep but him and her, the one who was sad and scarred but strong and brutally honest.

The one who confessed to missing her brother, even though, after the funeral, she'd sworn up and down that she was fine, that she was done grieving.

So, when Richie Tozier looked at Lolita Green for what had to be the billionth time in his life, he saw the bright, smiling girl, but also the girl who had gone through hell and come out alright. And he admired her for it.

"What are you looking at?" She whispered, lips not quite smiling, but almost. Her elbow was resting on the table, something her mother chastised her constantly for, and her chin rested in the palm of her hand.

He looked around, then pointed to himself as if to say, Who, me? When she rolled her eyes and nodded, like it was obvious, he shrugged.

"Nothing."

🎈

Richie held a record up for Lola and Eddie to see.

They were in Lola's room later that morning, and the girl had laid back on her bed, staring at the planets Charlie had painted on her ceiling the year before, each with its name written carefully in permanent marker. She remembered how her mother had screamed for an hour at the siblings about how they ruined the ceiling paint, but when her father had gotten home from work—before he had been enlisted—the man had just laughed, and said, "Mary, the kids are happy, we're all healthy. Don't worry about it."

Lola smiled, thinking back to the day in late August, right around her fourteenth birthday.

"Hey, Lola?"

She sat up suddenly, looking at Eddie, who was looking back at her with raised eyebrows. "What did you say?" She questioned, feeling dumb.

The asthmatic gestured to the record in Richie's hands. "I asked if you wanted to listen to music." He repeated.

"Oh," she said, shuffling around so she could lay on her stomach. "I don't care. Put on whatever you want, just not that ACDC bullshit that my dad likes." She swung her feet back and forth as she inspected her nail polish. She didn't sound bored, but she seemed almost disconnected.

Then, the opening notes of the Police's Every Breath You Take began to spill from her record player. It was her favorite song, although she had only coughed it up to Richie, and no one else.

Lola's head snapped in the boy's direction. "No," she warned, with a finger pointed sternly at him.

He grinned in response, pushing up his glasses as he also pointed at her. "Every breath you take," he sang, loudly and horribly. He took slow, ridiculously exaggerated steps toward her, hands out in front of him like he wanted her to hold them.

"Richie, don't you dare—" she started to say, but she was cut off when he suddenly grabbed her arms and yanked her off the bed. She stumbled into him, and he pushed her to Eddie, who put one hand awkwardly on what he thought was her waist—it was really just her ribs—and held her own hand with the other.

The music continued to play, and Eddie attempted to twirl her around; she wasn't having it. If Richie singing along terribly wasn't bad enough, the shorter boy had started to, too. Her eyes seemed to be on a constant roll.

It wasn't that Lola didn't like to dance. She loved to dance, whether it was to the radio in the kitchen, the one that only picked up country stations, with her mother, or alone in her room, jumping and spinning around to the New Kids on the Block record that she'd never admit to anyone that she adored.

"Mind if I cut in?" Richie said in a silly British accent. She knew this was an attempt at making her laugh, as most of his jokes always were; she stifled the barest hints of one with the heel of her hand.

He slipped his hand into hers, and set the other on her back. His posture was much more relaxed than Eddie's, although she could still feel tension in his bones. He didn't want to mess up.

She raised her eyebrows at him. "You know, Trashmouth, I'm taller than you." The girl, smirking at him, teased. And she was taller than him, only by an inch or two. She had always had height on him, since the day they met in kindergarten. Back then, she towered over him, by almost five inches. But he had grown, and she had, too.

"Don't remind me, Sunshine Girl."

She was smiling at him, a pure, genuine smile that lit up her eyes.

And she continued to smile, until the phone rang.

someone very sweet told me to publish the chapters that I've already written so im doing just that :))) love u angels <3

EDIT: I haven't finished this book but should I? I love Lola and Richie and I have things planned for them but would u rather I just post what ive already written and tell y'all what id planned for the rest of it?