Free Poseur #2: The Good, the Fab and the Ugly by Rachel Maude Page B

on the surface, slowly dispensing chlorine. She had to get to her playhouse — not that it was hers, not anymore. Sofia and Isabel had captured it long ago, replacing Petra’s green flag with their own pink one, and, for mysterious reasons all their own, rechristening it Mooyaka Baka.
    Petra stooped at the tiny red door, with its heart-shaped window and real brass knocker, punched in Isabel and Sofia’s top-secret code (P-R-I-N-C-E-S-S), and pushed into the castle’s miniature interior. After a moment’s fumbling, she flicked on the track lighting, mounted the spiraling stairs to the roof, and clambered up the silky rope ladder fixed to the castle’s right turret, spilling into the crow’s nest. Above a battery-operated lantern and a mini-arsenal of water balloons, an antique-looking toy telescope dangled on a hook. Petra took the instrument into her lap, twisting it counterclockwise until it fell into two parts. In one, she kept a blue Bic lighter and a small blue and green glass pipe. In the other, a baggie of weed.
    She lit up and exhaled, watching the smoke slowly swirl, turn inside of itself, and disperse. She searched the night sky for the North Star and imagined she was at sea, where nobody judged you for drifting.
    “Hey.”
    Petra ducked low into the crow’s nest, sucking in her breath. Did somebody just say “hey,” or had she imagined it? Above her, the pink castle flag whipped around in the wind, the nylon rubbing into itself, sounding small whirs of friction. She exhaled.
Just the wind,
she reasoned.
Playing tricks.
    “Dude!”
    Okay.
She swallowed hard. Had the wind just called her “dude”?
    “Come on, man. I know you’re up there. I can smell you from here.”
    With all the courage she could muster, Petra lifted her tousled head and peered over the edge of the crow’s nest, scanning her night-cloaked backyard. “Over here,” the voice instructed, punctuating his command with a splash of water. Petra redirected her gaze to a corner of her neighbors’ Olympic-sized swimming pool, where a boy around her age grinned up at her, his finely chiseled face pale in the moonlight. He pulled right up to the pool’s edge, the muscles in his arm tensing as he pushed a dripping mop of dark blue hair from his eyes. Petra couldn’t believe it. She’d seen this guy before, months ago, from the corner of her bedroom balcony, and had looked for him every night for a week, but he’d never showed again. After a while, she filed him away under “vivid dream.” It was either that or “hallucination.”
    She wasn’t hallucinating now, was she?
    “Oh shit!” He floated a little ways from the wall before yanking himself back again. “Are you, like, a
girl
up there?”
    Petra forked her fingers through her tangled honey-blond mane and gave it a little tug, grabbing her brain by the reins. If he was a hallucination and she answered, wouldn’t she technically be talking to herself? “Hey,” she began slowly. “You weren’t here before, were you? Like in July?”
    “Probably,” he replied, still gripping the wall. “My grandparents live here. What are you, some kind of spy pervert?”
    “No!”
she cried, appalled at the accusation. “I was just on my balcony, and I, like,
happened
to see you. It’s not like I . . . I mean, I seriously didn’t even think you were
real
.”
    “Man,” he snorted after a pointed pause. “It’s a good thing I know you’re stoned. Otherwise I’d think you were retarded.”
    Petra laughed, allowing the insult to slide. “I even had a name for you,” she confessed with a tiny shiver. The pot had made her skin hot and the night air liquid and cold, like forgotten bathwater. “I called you the Naked Moon God.”
    “The Naked Moon God?”
He curdled with scorn. “Wait.” He paused, plastering himself against the side of the pool. “Are you saying you saw me naked?”
    “Well, yeah,” Petra answered, bewildered. “I mean, you’re naked now, right?”
    He