The Boys Next Door (17 page)

“S-bend or what?” Adam asked me, grinning.

I’d just climbed out of the water after
landing the S-bend
! And even though he’d dried in the hot sun and hugging me must have been a cold, wet shock, he wrapped his strong arms around my life vest and hugged me hard. Best of all, Adam acting this way wasn’t an unexpected hostess gift wrapped in Valentine’s paper anymore. It was part of being his girlfriend. I was getting used to it, and I
loved
expecting it.

Saturday we’d gone mud riding. Then we’d parked in the movie theater lot, watched the trucks go by, and just talked. We’d shared a milkshake. I was totally immune to his germs by now. Monday after dinner, when I thought I’d have to spend the evening with Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote a good space story but was not the greatest kisser, Adam asked me to go for a walk around the neighborhood with him. We held hands, which no longer seemed the least bit weird. Here it was Wednesday, and I hadn’t had more than a fleeting thought of Sean since Friday night with Adam in the lake.

I could have sworn Adam hadn’t thought of Rachel, either. When he kissed me (often!
really
kissed me!), it felt like he was thinking of
me
, not her. Yeah, he could have been faking. But as he’d said that first night at the tennis court, he wasn’t exactly drama club material.

And it would come crashing down around us any minute. Adam never looked over his shoulder to make sure Rachel was watching us when he kissed. He
did
check
Sean’s
reaction. I knew Mr. Vader was wrong about which of his boys was stabbing the other in the back, but I also knew Adam wouldn’t walk away after being stabbed, any more than Sean would. So I enjoyed my time alone with Adam as much as I could. Whenever Sean came around, I held my breath, waiting for the fall.

It wasn’t so long a wait. The boys
looked
harmless enough this afternoon. Adam, Cameron, and my brother had had fantastic wakeboarding runs, too. They’d finally gotten their wakeboarding legs back, as good as last year. Cameron and McGillicuddy lounged across the seats in the boat, basking in the late afternoon sunshine like big golden retrievers, watching me drip on the platform and wagging their tails vaguely. They felt what I’d been feeling since the first day we went out: sated with happy exertion. High.

Sean lay flattened across the bow seat, but not for the same reason. He hadn’t taken his turn yet. He said he didn’t want to miss a call from Rachel. She’d planned to come wakeboarding with us today (amid protests from the boys, because guests had never been allowed) and borrow my wakeboard since her bindings hadn’t arrived yet (whatever). Her mom was going to bring her down, but they never showed. Sean had called Rachel four times from the boat (to make Adam mad, Adam and I thought) and hadn’t reached her. I found this strange. Where was she? Wasn’t she waiting around for Sean’s call with her hand poised on the answer button of her phone?

Beyond the windshield that separated us from him, we heard his cell phone ring Nickelback’s “Fight for All the Wrong Reasons.” We knew it was Rachel calling him back. And when his curse word burst over the windshield, we knew what she’d said hadn’t been very nice.

Adam shrugged and turned back to me. Unlike Sean, he didn’t flirt with me by assisting me with things I was perfectly capable of doing myself. He didn’t help me off with my equipment. He did sit on the back of the boat and watch me appreciatively. When I took off my life vest, he surveyed my bikini-clad hotness (ha) and gave me a naughty smile. I untied my bindings and lifted one foot out. He licked his lips like he had a foot fetish. I burst into laughter.

Sean charged past the windshield into the back of the boat, eyes full of tears. “She broke up with me!” he wailed. “She broke up with me because she’s still in love with Adam!”

We all went quiet. Only the
clack-clack, clack-clack
of cars on the bridge and the lapping of waves against the boat disturbed the silence. The boys weren’t ribbing Sean. They must have been as shocked as I was that Sean would
admit
what Rachel had said.

Sean was in love.

He sniffled. “I’m going to her house. Take me back to shore.” When Cameron didn’t immediately slip into the driver’s seat, Sean took a step toward the steering wheel himself.

“Sean,” Cameron said, standing in his way. “You haven’t landed a good trick the whole week and a half we’ve been coming out. We only have today, tomorrow, and Friday to practice for the Crappy Festival. Take your turn first and then go to her house.”

Sean cursed, and cursed, and cursed, and dove into the lake. We all rushed to the side of the boat and watched him glide to the surface twenty feet away, already swimming. We weren’t so far from the Foshees’ yard that we needed to fish him out for his own safety. He swam until he could touch bottom, sloshed the rest of the way to land, and hit the grass running through the Foshees’ yard, through my yard, toward his house.

Adam said quietly, “I’m the biggest.”

“Adam,” I scolded him.

Cameron and my brother looked from me to Adam and back to me, wondering what was going on between us. Frankly, I wondered the same thing. I wasn’t sure what I’d wanted or expected Adam to say when we finally got our wish for Sean and Rachel to break up. But
I’m the biggest
wasn’t it.

We drove back to the wharf still in silence—except, of course, for the deafening motor. Adam and I sat across the aisle from each other without glancing at each other. Something was about to happen.

And everyone sensed it. Cameron and McGillicuddy took more than their share of equipment into the warehouse, leaving Adam and me alone in the boat. As they came back out, Cameron looked down at us from the wharf and said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do”—which made me wish I hadn’t confessed to Adam that Cameron and I had kissed. After five years of hiding this from everyone, he had to hint about it
now
? Whatever was coming for Adam and me, it was going to be hard enough already.

McGillicuddy asked me, “Do you want me to tell Dad you’ll be late for dinner?”

“No,” I said. “I won’t be long.”

We watched McGillicuddy and Cameron walk toward the houses. They stopped to talk. Cameron took a swipe at McGillicuddy. McGillicuddy shoved Cameron. They went their separate ways. Friends to the end, the simplest relationship possible.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Adam snapped into the silence. “You won’t be long?”

“It’s dusk in the summer. Mosquitos,” I said, slapping at a bug. While my mouth spouted this drivel, my mind worked on what I really wanted to say to Adam. But I had no more idea than I’d had out on the lake.

You know what didn’t help? When he reached behind his neck and worked at the knot in the leather string. I knew what was coming. It took him a few seconds to get through that knot. Even though the whole time I was thinking about what to say when he asked me to turn around, I was speechless when the moment came. I turned around on my seat. He tied the skull and crossbones around my neck. The metal was hot against my breastbone. I pressed the skull between the eyes with my fingertips. Turning back to him, I murmured, “You’re giving me a piece of you.”

He looked over at me. We were together for real, and he was
so hot
. I should have been giggling with delight and dorkiness. The angry look in his blue eyes broke my heart.

“Rachel told Sean she likes you better,” I said, “but you don’t want her back. You’ve never wanted her back. All you’ve wanted was to get revenge on Sean. You’re giving me this to show him you don’t even want what he can’t have.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed at me. I made an effort not to shrink back against the side of the boat. He said evenly, “I’m giving it to you because I want to give it to you.”

“Your timing is odd. Usually a boy wouldn’t laugh at his brother hitting rock bottom, then show his love for his girlfriend practically in the same breath.” Now
he
was shrinking against his side of the boat, which made me brave enough to throw in still more sarcasm. “I don’t have a lot of experience with this, but that’s my theory.”

He closed his eyes and said in a rush, “I’m in love with you.”

I took a breath to tell him if he really meant it, he wouldn’t have to say it with his eyes closed. But he didn’t just have his eyes closed. Those worry lines had appeared between his brows. He was in pain, concentrating hard to make it go away, like the second time he broke his collarbone wakeboarding, and lay still as death in the floorboard of the boat and wouldn’t let anyone touch him but me.

He opened his eyes but remained plastered against the boat. He looked small, if this was possible. “That’s my plot. You were right, I had a plot, and that’s my whole plot. I’m in love with you. The last nine months with McGillicuddy away at college have been freaking torture for me, because I didn’t have an excuse to come to your house. If I came over without McGillicuddy there, you’d know. I hardly saw you the whole school year. I thought I might finally have a chance with you since I was about to get my license, and you were about to get your license. We could go places together, alone. I could get you away from Sean. But the more I hinted we should go out, the more you talked about hooking up with Sean. When I heard Rachel liked me, I asked her out, and I kept asking her out. To make you jealous. And at the tennis court that night when you said we should make Rachel and Sean jealous, I nearly had a heart attack. I thought you saw right through me.”

He looked so hurt, and his eyelashes were so long. I had fallen in love with him. I
wished
he were in love with me too. But in telling me this elaborate lie, he’d betrayed the truth.

“You don’t love me,” I said. “You’re competing with Sean. Maybe you’ve even convinced yourself you love me, but it all comes back to Sean.”

His expression changed from hurt back to anger. “Last Friday night in the lake didn’t mean anything to you.”

Friday night had been the best night of my life. He was picking up each thing I loved about my life, grinding it to a point, and pushing it through my heart. I’d thought only Sean knew how to do that.

“The past week and a half hasn’t meant anything to you,” he went on. “The past sixteen years—”

“Sixteen years!” I howled.

“You
told
me you’re stuck on Sean,” he shouted. His voice made the metal wall of the warehouse hum. “You think your mother chose him for you—”

“No, I don’t!” Well, maybe I did. And maybe I didn’t care so much anymore, but this was hard to explain while yelling. “Look, Adam. Let’s say you
had
been in love with me all our lives, which, by the way, I don’t believe for a second.” Because why would any boy fall in love with a girl like me? “What you loved about me would have been exactly what I hate about myself. To stay the person you wanted, I’d have to stay the same. I want to change.”

“You think your
mother
wants you to change,” he corrected me. “Lori, when your mother said that, she was kidding.”

“You weren’t there. You don’t know.
Your
mother didn’t laugh.”

“My mother
never
laughs. It’s called a dry wit. You’re basing your whole life on one conversation you overheard when you were four years old that you don’t even remember right.”

I felt like I’d been slapped. When I’d shared my deepest secret with him, it never once occurred to me that he’d throw it back in my face. Adam, of all people, had betrayed me. I stepped out of the boat, onto the wharf. “Let’s end this now before we ruin our friendship.”

“Too late,” he called after me.

I intended to flounce across his yard and mine, but I ran straight into a cloud of gnats. I spent the rest of the walk pressing one nostril closed with my finger while I expelled gnats from the other. Eat your heart out, Adam!

Except I
didn’t
want him to eat his heart out. I wanted to be friends with him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to make out with him in the lake some more—that was for damn sure. I wanted him to stare longingly after me from the boat as I flounced to my house, which sounded a lot like I wanted him to eat his heart out. I didn’t know what I wanted.

I’d made it to my garage before I realized I was still wearing the skull and crossbones. I couldn’t get the knot undone. I turned the knot around to the front but still couldn’t pick it apart. The pendant was searing a hole through my skin. I cut through the leather string with garden shears and tried to grind the pendant into dust in my fist like a superhero. I opened my hand and found the outline of the skull and crossbones pressed into my palm.

I didn’t sleep well that night. This was probably a good thing. If I’d had to lie through one more dream about Sean being a tease, I would have had to slap him. When I woke up and found myself sleepwalking, who knew what wakeboarding posters I might have destroyed? I might even have found myself choking my childhood teddy bear, Mr. Wuggles, which would have traumatized me for life.

In the morning, I walked to the marina with the skull and crossbones in my pocket (actually, Adam’s pocket, the pocket of his cutoff jeans), intending to give it back to him and say something appropriate. This would have been a stretch for me, I know. To save my friendship with Adam, I would have found a way to do it.

Mrs. Vader assigned us both to the warehouse. Great,
now
she finally believed we were together? I tried to look at the long day with him as an opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with him. Another one. Actually, the convo the evening before had been more of a spleen-to-spleen.

I could never find the right time. He was busy locating boats to take down. I was busy checking the oil. The fulltime workers wandered in and out. Besides, this day of all days, he worked with his shirt off. Sweat glistened on his tanned muscles, and his brown hair fell in his eyes. He was so hot that I felt intimidated. He was telling me to eat
my
heart out, and it was working.

There were a few instances when I
could
have screwed up my courage, sidled up to him, handed him the skull and crossbones, and talked him down. But whenever I started toward him with this in mind, he flashed those blue eyes at me, and I felt that slap all over again.