Who Is Lucas Ryker O'Riley?

3. NEW FRIEND

After dinner my parents gathered us up and we went for a short walk around the block to meet our new neighbors, the Delacroix family.

It turned out they had two kids. The first was a boy, James, who was thirteen. That's two years older than my brother and three and a half years older than myself. At our age, that was a pretty big age gap.

My brother was happy because he always felt a little let down that there were no other boys to play football, basketball, etc, or just horse around with in general.

The other kid, however, was a girl, Amanda. She was almost eleven making her slightly younger than my brother but still nearly a whole year older than me.

When we met for the first time that evening, Amanda, or Mandy as I quickly learned to call her, had her long honey blond hair done in beautiful braids that wrapped around her head forming a crown, in a way that I had never seen before.

Since I had no sisters, Mandy would prove to be a valuable source of new experiences and perspectives for me as they pertained to learning about girls.

As soon as we were introduced, she excused herself and asked if she could show my brother and I her new room. My brother wasn't very interested in making friends with a girl, but he went along anyway since our parents did a pretty good job teaching both of us not to be rude.

After a half hour of enthusiastic introductory chit-chat between Mandy and I, she excitedly invited us to come back after they finished moving in. Though she seemed like she was talking more to me, she was much like my brother and I, and was polite to both of us.

During our conversation, I was pleased to learn that she was going to be in the forth grade with us when school started again in the Fall.

On the way home, I was thinking about the way Mandy's braids crowned her head, giving her an angelic look. That, along with her enthusiastically friendly personality, caused me to decide that if there were angels, she was the closest thing to one here on earth.

That summer, Mandy and I quickly became best friends. Despite being a girl, she liked to do many of the same things I enjoyed during summer vacation. Whether we were exploring the neighborhood on our bikes, swimming for hours in Mandy's pool or even playing video games together. It was a very rare occurrence when either of us wanted to do something that the other wouldn't also enjoy.

It didn't take long for us to become inseparable friends. Whether we were exploring the wooded area at the end of the neighborhood, hanging out in the tree house my dad built for my brother and I, or even playing one-on-one hoops in the backyard, this little girl and I were like two peas in a pod, seemingly friends made for each other.

When we were out and about in the neighborhood, some of the adults even mistook us for boyfriend/girlfriend or the one Mandy seemed to always get a kick out of, brother and sister, although I didn't care for that one as I had developed a crush on her and much preferred when they thought we were romantically linked.

A couple times we were even mistaken for sisters, because of my wavy, shoulder length hair. It was the middle aged clerk that ran the convenience store on the corner of the block. She had poor eyesight, I know this because she always had to hold things real close to her face to read them properly. Everytime we came in she made a comment about how our mom must be one gorgeous lady to have produced such beautiful daughters.

That didn't happen too many times, though. Mandy and I had been hanging out for about two weeks when one day she told my mom how funny she thought it was that the old lady with the bad eyesight down at the quickie mart had mistaken us for sisters. Dad overheard it and took me that afternoon for a haircut.