After school Yvonne the “au pair” picks us up and drives us to Madison’s house. Madison doesn’t have a nanny anymore; she has this blond college-age girl from Finland who’s more like a driver and tutor and general all-around helper. Dad said he’d like an au pair for his life too…until he found out they get paid.

Pulling up to Madison’s house is like arriving at a castle. There’s no moat or drawbridge, but there’s a big gate that opens with the touch of a button, leading to a wide circular driveway. Most people—like me—would call it a mansion. Even a princess would dream of having a room like Madison’s, with its pink wallpaper and canopy bed, a little table with a mirror and chair, lots of open space, and no junk on the floor. My favorite part of her room is the big white sliding door that opens to a balcony with a patio overlooking her backyard. It’s as pretty as a city park out there, with shrubs and flowers and a perfectly cut lawn—not like my backyard, which is mostly dirt with patchy grass peppered with poop from my awesome Irish setter, Toby. Madison doesn’t have a dog, which is too bad because her parents would probably pay someone to do nothing but be a poop picker-upper.

Standing on Madison’s balcony, I raise my hand and wave slowly, making a figure eight in the air. I’m like a queen looking over my kingdom and its subjects—though my only subject right now is a guy in a baseball cap skimming Madison’s sparkling blue pool. He waves back.

Oh well, having one subject is enough for now, I guess.

“Hey, I thought you were gonna help me with my art project!” Madison says, joining me on the balcony. Then she tosses something on the floor that makes a slurpy, sloshy sound.

I look down. It’s a green bucket filled with lumpy white gloop. It looks like oatmeal someone ate that came up again, and I can tell just by looking at it that it’s cold and clammy and sticky and gross.

“We’ve got to rip up newspaper into strips and dip them in that,” she tells me.

I look down again. I don’t mind creepy and crawly or dirty and dusty, but this gloppy, gloopy concoction immediately makes me sick to my stomach.

“You want me to put my hands in that?” I ask. “I seriously might barf.”

I really might.

Madison doesn’t believe me. “You? You don’t even mind a slimy millipede crawling on your arm!”

That is true. Millie the millipede is my favorite pet. Well, my equal favorite with Toby, of course. “But Millie is cute!” I say in a voice dangerously close to a whine. “That”—I point to the glop—“is not cute.”

“You said you’d help me,” says Madison. “I only just came up with this idea, and I’m behind. I can’t do it all alone.”

“What are you making anyway?” I ask, trying to delay this a little longer. She runs back into her room and returns to the balcony with an oval made of chicken wire, about the size of a watermelon, partially covered with strips of newspaper.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’s papier-mâché.”

“I know that. But what is it?”

“I’ll tell you later, when it’s further along,” she promises. With that, she plops herself on the tile patio, rips a piece of newspaper, and plunges it into the bucket.

I watch her flatten the paper onto the chicken wire. “Well, I wish you’d picked something less disgusting,” I say. Our school’s art show—named the Immersive Interactive Art Installation (nothing is simple at Friendship Community School)—is coming up in two weeks, and the project I chose is simple and neat: storyboards. Storyboards are drawings that show a movie director how each scene is going to look—like a super-detailed graphic novel or comic book. We saw some in Madison’s dad’s office when we sneaked in to look at his People’s Choice Award. My movie is only in my imagination so far, but it will star my favorite character that I created: Pandaroo, an intergalactic bear who propels himself through space by farting rainbows.

Madison places another piece of newspaper onto her chicken wire and pats it down neatly. She plunges both hands back into the bucket and lifts them up, white glop dripping disgustingly between her fingers. With a pretend evil laugh she asks, “So, are you going to help me…or do you want to be covered in this stuff?”

I slowly stand up. “What I want to do is…get out of here!” I run off the patio into her bedroom, hoping my sneakers won’t smudge her ultra-shiny hardwood floors. I hide in the closet, which is the size of most people’s bedrooms…or living rooms…or houses. Madison’s T-shirts are color-coordinated, her jeans are neatly piled in individual cubbyholes, and every shoe is matched with its partner, lined up on shelves. It’s a long way from my bedroom, where T-shirts are shoved unfolded into a drawer and jeans are usually wadded up on the floor next to Toby.

Even though nobody wears winter coats in Los Angeles, Madison’s closet has a whole row of them. It’s a great place to hide! I squeeze in between two puffy parkas. Their fur hoods tickle both sides of my face, and I try not to laugh as I wait for her to find me.

But I find something first.

Underneath a low-hanging rod filled with blouses are two…eyes.

Human eyes.

For a second I think they might belong to a real person. You never know at Madison’s house, with its housekeepers and pool cleaners and handymen around all the time. But why would any of them be silently chilling on the floor of her closet?

“Hello?” I ask quietly. This can’t be a person, but I’m still cautious as I take a step forward. The eyes don’t move or blink or close. I take a deep breath, step closer, and push the blouses apart.

Turns out it’s not one pair of eyes but a bunch of them.

Leaning against the wall is a poster board collage, filled with photos from top to bottom, from left to right. They’re all pictures of the same boy in different sizes, some in black and white, but most in color. Sometimes in a baseball cap or a knit beanie, sometimes showing off a head of spiky blond hair. Smiling with glistening white teeth in some, serious in others. His eyes are blue…or green…or hazel…it’s hard to say, but one thing is for sure—they are the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. He is cuuuuuuute. This must be the boy Madison likes! Why would she be interested in one of the dopey doofuses at school when she’s known about this boy for who knows how long?

“Cleo, where are you?” Madison’s voice sounds nearby.

I pick up the collage and walk out of the closet. “Who…is…this?”

A worried look crosses Madison’s face. “Oh. I didn’t really want you to see that yet.”

“Why not?”

“Ummm, because you’d think I was a total dork.”

I stare at her and tell her the ultimate truth. “I could never think that, not in a million billion years.” If Madison tried to dress for Halloween as a “total dork,” it’s the one outfit she could never pull off. For me, the costume would be pretty easy. I’d put on my usual clothes and smile real big.

“You don’t? Think I’m a dork?” she asks.

“Of course not!”

Madison seems relieved as she lays the collage on the floor between us. I know they’re only pictures, but I feel weird inside, having this boy’s many faces all this close to me. For some reason it feels…embarrassing.

“So…who is he?” I ask.

Madison looks at the poster board dreamily. “Wow. I don’t even know how to begin to explain Ryder Landry.”

“That’s this boy?”

“Oh, he’s more than a boy,” she says seriously. “He’s a huge singer. He writes the most awesome songs, and not just pop stuff. Some of them are deep and meaningful and unbelievable.” As she fills me in, she walks into her closet and comes back with a bunch more collages. “He’s on TV all the time and online and in magazines. He’s everywhere!”

I don’t bother explaining that Dad and I don’t have a movie theater screen and a billion cable channels like she does—that we only watch stuff on the Internet, usually Japanese anime or new shows from England or Finland. And Dad listens to boring podcasts and songs from the eighties, not normal radio music.

“He’s what I’m making for the art show,” Madison tells me. “Out on the patio. That’s going to be his head.”

“I love that idea!” I say, but the Friendship Community School Immersive Interactive Art Installation is the farthest thing from my mind as I stare at photo after photo on Madison’s poster board, and Ryder’s eyes melt into mine.

“Let me show you a video!” Madison runs over to her computer, and with the quick click of a button, I’m seeing Ryder Landry onstage. A song is ending, and a huge auditorium full of kids—mostly girls but boys too—is exploding with screams and cheers. I can hear Madison saying words next to me—something about going to a concert once with Lisa Lee and Kylie Mae—but I’m not really paying attention. I can’t take my eyes off Ryder, who’s moving like a panther or a puma, prowling gracefully through the jungle.

“Thank you, everybody,” he says. His voice makes me think of a river of warm honey that, for some reason, I want to swim in. The crowd quiets down when he brings the microphone to his mouth and talks like he knows them personally. “I know what it’s like for all of you out there,” he says, “because I’ve been through it too. I’ve had my problems, my struggles. I’ve moved, I’ve changed schools….”

Me too! I’m still kind of a new kid at Friendship Community, after all.

“I’ve lost people who are important to me….”

Me too! My mom died when I was little, and I grew up with just my dad. Then right when I started to like his girlfriend, Terri, she broke up with him, so I sort of lost her too. I can’t believe how much Ryder and I have in common.

“I’ve known love and I’ve had my heart broken….”

Okay, well, he’s got me there. I mean, I love my dad and Toby and Millie, and I guess my uncle Arnie, but I don’t think that’s what Ryder’s talking about.

“This song goes out to all of you.”

The giant crowd is silent as Ryder sits on a stool and sings from his heart. “Baby, I never knew, not until you, the way I could feel, my soul you unpeel, like an onion, I’m not funnin’…” The lyrics don’t feel like they’re coming through my ears and getting translated by my brain in the normal way; they’re becoming part of me.

He stops in the center of the stage and looks straight out, his eyes dreamy. “I like you, baby. At least I think so, maybe. No matter what they say, I won’t go away, from now on it’s just you and me, we’re free-er…than…freeeeeeee!” He looks into the camera and smiles—not one of his big, gleaming ones; it’s a small, personal smile that feels like it’s for me. The video stops. It’s been two minutes and fifty-three seconds, but it feels like time stood still.

I think Madison says something to me, but I don’t know for sure. I’m too busy staring into those eyes. At that smile.

“Uh-oh,” Madison says, shaking her head. “I think you’ve landed.”

Finally I’m able to look away from the frozen image of him on-screen. “Huh?”

“You’ve landed. You’re a Lander. That’s what Ryder’s fans are called.”

“Too bad we don’t know how the love potion works,” I tell her, only half joking. “We could use it on him.”

“Oh my gosh, that would be unreal!” Madison squeals. Then she stops herself, like she’s realized how far-fetched the idea is. “Yeah, the next time we see him, we’ll have to do that.” She laughs. “But right now, you have to help me papier-mâché his head.”

Yuck. It’s the last thing I want to do, but now that Madison’s shared Ryder Landry with me, I owe her. So into the goop I go.

Blech!