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Someone was hollering at Nani’s café, which wasn’t anything new. There was always someone hollering like a waiter calling out an order or a customer complaining about her salad or a kid shrieking because Stitch had picked up his seat with the kid still in it (but that one hadn’t happened for awhile now, Lilo was always quick to point out, and besides, even if it did, it wasn’t like that kid need the seat more than Stitch did). So Lilo would have just gone on ignoring the hollering like she usually did except that whoever was carrying on kept shouting, “Boh! This isn’t funny! Something’s gonna eat you!” and that was way more interesting than the normal sort of things people shouted at restaurants.
Lilo poked her head out of the kitchen. Everybody was staring at a girl Lilo’s age crawling around on the floor and shouting. Behind her, two people who had to be her parents looked very uncomfortable. “Chihiro, honey, don’t worry. We can buy you a new mouse,” her mom said.
Her dad grumbled something like, “Don’t know where the girl got the mouse in the first place.”
“Mouse?” Another customer asked, jumping on top of her seat. “Mouse?!”
“Boh!” Chihiro called.
Lilo felt something on her foot. She looked down and saw a fat tan mouse perched on top of it. He looked up at her. Then he made a noise that sounded very much like a sniff of disapproval and hopped off, scurrying into the kitchen. “Hey, wait!” Lilo shouted, chasing after him. He was faster than she’d expect from such a fat creature, but Lilo’d caught weirder things than him, and when he tried to slide under the pots shelf, she snagged him by the tail and dragged him out. “Don’t bite,” she said warningly as she gripped him with both hands. He gave her a look like such a thing was beneath him.
“Lilo!” Nani burst into the kitchen. “There’s a—” She stopped at the sight of Lilo holding the mouse up so they could talk eye to eye. “Mouse.” Nani sighed. “Just get it out of here, alright? I’ve got a café full of tourists screaming about rodents.”
“Tell the girl I got Boh!” Lilo shouted after Nani as she left, Lilo holding the mouse in question up like Simba at the beginning of The Lion King.
“Go!” Nani shouted back as she jogged out the kitchen doors.
Lilo went out the back, still holding the mouse with both her hands. He seemed bigger than the average mouse. Smarter too. And a bit meaner but in a people way, not an animal way. Lilo decided that she liked him. “I like you,” she told Boh. Boh seemed unimpressed by this. She wished that this dress had pockets. She wanted her hands back. “You really better not bite,” she said as she pulled open the neckline of her dress and popped Boh into her sport bra so that his head could peek out and he could still see.
Boh squeaked something that sounded affirmative. Lilo walked out onto the sidewalk and down towards an ice cream cart by the beach. Some people stared at the mouse poking its head out of her dress. Some people didn’t appreciate the efficiency of this plan.
“Hey!” said a voice from behind Lilo. It was the girl from the café, running to catch up. Her long black ponytail went up and down and up as she ran. “You found Boh,” she said when she caught up.
Boh hissed and ducked down out of sight.
“I guess he doesn’t want to talk to you,” Lilo said. “Sometimes animals get grumpy.”
Chihiro crossed her arms behind her back and shook her head. “He’s just upset because I wouldn’t give him any more tea cake. Because I’m supposed to be a responsible babysitter.” She addressed this last comment to Lilo’s chest.
Boh made a little squeak of disagreement. Chihiro stuck her tongue out at him.
“Oh, uh,” Chihiro said, looking back up at Lilo’s face. “Sorry.” She held out her hand. “Can I have him back now, please?”
Boh dug himself deeper into Lilo’s bra. When she tried to pull him up, his teeth grabbed the fabric and held on. “He really doesn’t want to come.” Lilo thought for a moment. “Okay, you cup your hands between my knees and I’ll pull my bra out. He’s bound to fall out sometime and you can catch him.”
Chihiro considered it. “He might scratch up your belly on the way down, even if he doesn’t mean it.”
Lilo shrugged. “I think I can handle it.”
Chihiro shook her head. “No, thank you. That’s a lot to ask from a stranger.”
Lilo thought that was nice of her. “Maybe we can bribe him out. Does he like ice cream?”
Boh’s head instantly shot up. In a flash, Chihiro grabbed him and pulled him out. Boh squeaked and tried to wriggle free. “Stop that!” Chihiro said. “Or I’ll tell Granny and your mother.”
Boh stopped wriggling instantly.
“He’s a weird mouse,” Lilo said.
Chihiro rubbed between his ear with her thumb. “You’ve got no idea.”
“We tell people my dog’s a dog,” Lilo said. “But he’s actually an escaped experiment from outer space.”
“Oh,” Chihiro said.
Lilo nodded. “Our neighbors are aliens too. Sometimes other aliens land here and we help them.”
“Oh,” Chihiro said again.
“I don’t normally tell people this.” Lilo’s face felt strangely hot. “You just sorta seem like you’d get it.”
Chihiro considered this for a moment. She actually looked like she was considering it, not like she was trying to figure out the most polite way to call Lilo weird or crazy. Or the least polite way. Lilo got both.
“He’s not a mouse,” Chihiro said. “He’s the son of a witch who runs a bathhouse for ghosts. His aunt had to do a very powerful spell so he could visit me in the world of the living.”
Boh nodded.
“In his real form, he’s a six foot tall baby,” Chihiro added.
Boh nodded again. He looked very proud of that fact. Good for him. If you can’t like yourself for being a six foot tall baby, than how can anyone else.
“I got trapped in a ghost world four years back,” Chihiro said. “Ever since then, I’ve been able to see all the spirits in our world.”
“That’s cool,” Lilo said.
Chihiro grinned. “It’s not alien cool.”
“No,” Lilo agreed, “but spirits are still pretty cool.”
Chihiro nodded in agreement. “I’m Chihiro.”
“I know. I’m Lilo.”
“Lilo.” Chihiro bowed. When she straightened, Boh bowed too. “It’s nice to meet you.” Suddenly, she seemed shier. “I, uh, I don’t tell people about all this either.”
That made Lilo feel very proud. It also made it a little hard to look at Chihiro’s face. Chihiro seemed to be having the same problem as both girls looked around at everything that wasn’t each other.
“Chihiro!”
They both turned to the source of the call. Chihiro’s mother waved at them from about twenty paces down the sidewalk. “Come on, sweetie!”
“Give me a minute, Mom!” Chihiro shouted back. Her ponytail holder glinted like sapphires in the sunlight, and Lilo wanted to look at it some more before Chihiro turned back. “I gotta go. Thank you for finding Boh.”
“You’re welcome,” Lilo said. They both looked at the ground. Chihiro was wearing green flip-flops, and her toes were painted pink. Lilo decided that this was the best color combination that she’d ever seen.
“Chihiro!” Chihiro’s mom called again. “You can talk to your new friend later!”
Chihiro flushed a bit. “Mom!”
“Do you wanna come over to my house tomorrow?” Lilo asked quickly because for some weird reason it was hard to get the words out. She’d ask Nani about it later. Or maybe she wouldn’t. This seemed like the kind of thing that Nani would be too supportive about. “You can meet Stitch.”
“Stitch?”
“My dog.”
“Oh! I, uh, well—”
Boh squeaked in assent. Chihiro looked down at him and laughed. “Okay. Yes, okay, thank you,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. Her hair was already behind her ears. She kept tucking it anyway.
“Okay.” Lilo crossed her hands in front of her. “Meet you at the café at noon tomorrow?”
“Chihiro!”
“One second! Yes, that sounds great. We’ll do that.”
The two girls looked at each other for a second. Then Chihiro grinned. “Sounds great,” she said again. She started walking to her mom but backwards so she could keep her eyes on Lilo. “It’s nice to meet you!” she said as she turned to run to her mom.
Lilo waved, and Chihiro waved back, and Lilo felt weird, almost giddy, like her heart was having palpitations. She was probably having a heart attack. She was probably dying. That was what this was. Like enjoyable dying. And then when I die, Chihiro can still see me so we can still hang out at my house tomorrow. It was a very pleasant thought. It had been a long time since Lilo had met a human that seemed so interesting. She’d met interesting people, sure, but interesting humans seemed a lot rarer.
Lilo grinned and ran home to tell Stitch what had happened. She couldn’t wait for him to meet Chihiro tomorrow.