Endless Summer: The Boys Next Door; Endless Summer (44 page)

“I’m not gone yet.” I could hardly bear the thought of being without him until Christmas or after, but seeing him cry would be even worse. So I pushed him down into the softness of the sleeping bag and tried to make him forget.

“Still alive?” I asked him an hour and a half later.

He chuckled. By now we’d been in the tree house so long that I’d become nocturnal, like the foxes who used to hang out here. The candle had burned low, but I could still see every curve of his face and every golden hair in his baby beard as he lay on his side, watching me. The worry lines between his brows were gone.

I touched the space where the lines had been, then took my hand away. “I’d better go. I wouldn’t want to miss my curfew.”

“You make no sense whatsoever,” he said, but he must have agreed with me, because he sat up and ran his hands back through his hair to detangle his curls.

“It’s the principle of the thing. I’m coming home before curfew, as I discussed with my dad. He simply does not know who I was with. Or that I was out at all. Details.” I waved them away.

He caught my hand and shook it, the deceptively basic first move in the secret handshake we’d started when we were in first grade. “One last time?” We shook hands upside down, with a twist, high five, low five, pinky swear, elbows touching.

“And add this.” He traced the tips of his thumb and finger across my lips, zipping them. “Keep your mouth shut, and I promise to keep mine shut. With football stardom and my GPA in the bag, we’ll be dating again before you know it.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I rolled over to the ladder and climbed down, reluctantly watching our cozy nest disappear above my head. Adam didn’t bother with the ladder. He jumped down beside me and took my hand. We walked through the dark forest like nothing was wrong.

And nothing was. We would stay apart. My dad would come to his senses. We would get back together. But this future was predicated on Adam starting as quarterback, keeping up his grades, and generally making good. As McGillicuddy had said on the sad morning after my birthday, Sometimes what Adam intends to do and what he actually does are two different things.

“I worry,” I admitted.

“Why do you worry?” Adam’s voice came from above me. He’d been taller than me since fourth grade or so, and I’d never gotten used to it.

“You like a challenge,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You like danger.”

“Sorry.”

We reached the edge of my yard, as close as I dared come to my house without fear of being overheard. I turned to him and said softly, “I worry that you’ll lose interest in me now that I’m not a dangerous challenge.”

He stroked the back of my hand with his thumb. “You are the one way I’m normal. When I’m with you, I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with me.”

“There’s not anything wrong with you. You’re high-spirited.”

“I sound like a horse.”

“You are like a horse.” He was exactly like a colt incessantly dashing around the paddock and leaping away from the fence for no apparent reason.

“Like a stallion?” He pressed his lips together, trying not to laugh. He was so adorable.

“That’s a good note to say good-bye on,” I said. “I will remember you just like this, feeling your oats—”

“Ha!”

“—and whinnying about yourself.”

“Good.” Gently he kissed my forehead. Then he squeezed my hand and let me go.

With a deep sigh of regret, I walked toward my house alone, looking up at my bedroom window. After about ten feet I stopped, turned around, and walked back to where Adam still stood. “How do I get back inside?”

He closed his eyes. Probably he was counting to ten, which was very mature of him—and I would have been proud of his self-control, except that it meant I had screwed up.

He opened his eyes. “You are mine,” he said slowly, “and you are blonde, and I love you, but damn. You get back inside by using your key.” I licked my lips. “What key?”

“The house key you put in your pocket before you jumped out your window.”

I glanced behind me at my house, which suddenly loomed like a haunted mansion, monsters lurking inside. Widower monsters with OCD. “I need to work on this disobedience thing, because I am not good at it.” I could still joke with Adam, but my heart raced. “What do I do? Can you pick the lock?”

“I can’t pick the dead bolt. Use the spare key hidden under a fake rock in the flower bed.” Though his words were reasonable, I could hear the same rising panic in them that I felt.

“We don’t have a fake rock,” I said tightly. “My dad works with criminals and thinks he has a bead on them. Burglars know all about the fake rock. Besides, he’s sitting with Frances in the den. No matter what, he’ll hear me when I unlock the door.”

“Wait out here with me until McGillicuddy comes home and sneak in with him,” Adam said.

Now that was a good idea. McGillicuddy would protest, but he wouldn’t really rat me out when it meant such dire consequences for Adam. I was so relieved! I grabbed Adam in a bear hug.

The kitchen door swung wide open at the same time all the outside lights flicked on, blinding us.

I jumped away from Adam.

“LORI ELIZABETH McGILLICUDDY!” my dad roared.

“The hounds caught us after all,” Adam said calmly.

“Adam!” I whispered. “Run!”

“No,” he said in a normal voice, even though we could hear my dad stomping toward us through the pine needles and the blinding light. “I’m not hiding from him. I won’t let you take the fall for this.”

“There won’t be a fall. If he doesn’t see you, he’ll have no idea I was with you. I’ll tell him I just wanted to go for a walk by myself on a beautiful summer night.”

“Out your window? Anyway, he’s seen me already.”

“Well, he has now.” I raised my voice to a normal tone, too, now that we were busted yet again.

Dad’s silhouette loomed in front of us. Frances’s was farther back, still in the garage, allowing her man to take care of family business. I felt a stab of anger at her for refusing to help Adam and me in the first place.

But it was pointless now. My dad hardly glanced at me. Focusing on Adam, he waved in the direction of the Vaders’ house. He didn’t prod Adam with a shotgun, but that was the overall effect.

I could tell from the looks on both their faces that Adam was going to military school.

I woke the next morning and stared at the ceiling, searching for a reason to get out of bed. Why should I go to work? If I was a no-show, my parents couldn’t do anything worse than send me to military school. And I didn’t need any money where I was going.

On the other hand, I could add to my stash, and the day before I was supposed to go to school, I could steal Lori and run away—not to Montgomery, but all the way to Mexico. If only it weren’t for her lame idea that she needed to finish high school.

Lucky for my parents and their minimum-wage labor force, I’d always had a hard time staying in bed, or staying anywhere, for that matter. So I hauled my ass up and ran downstairs to breakfast.

The second I walked in, I wished I hadn’t. My mom had spread military school brochures in front of her breakfast plate—the one that had been pinned to the bulletin board in the office for months, plus others for schools in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Virginia—so she must have been looking forward to getting rid of me for quite some time.

Then, when we walked down to her office in the warehouse, she called in a couple of the full-time employees and arranged for them to hold down the fort next week while she and Dad toured these schools. She never mentioned touring them with me. My opinion didn’t matter.

“And just in case you decide to go hog wild with Lori while we’re gone next week,” she told me when we were alone in the office again and she was giving me gas, “just remember that some of these schools have a summer session. I’m sure they’d be willing to enroll you right now instead of waiting for August.” I slammed out of the office—oh, I was supposed to have learned to respect my parents through all this?—and walked down the endless wooden staircase to the floating dock with the gas pumps.

I stood looking out at the wide lake with mist slowly rising into the white sky. The mist would burn off to reveal deep blue by seven thirty. Another perfect summer day.

I walked up the stairs again, just because I couldn’t stand there on the dock any longer and there was nowhere else to go.

I walked down the stairs, because I’d catch hell from my dad if I stayed away from my post very long.

Half an hour later, just as the last of the mist lifted, Lori trolled the wakeboarding boat slowly out of the marina and nosed it against the pads on the floating dock. She jumped out and tied the rope to the cleat. As she bent over, I decided this was the worst punishment of all: watching this forbidden girl in my cutoff jeans.

She peeked at me between her legs. Her long ponytail touched the dock. “You’re pacing like a caged tiger.”

“So? Nobody gives a shit.”

“Yes they do. The whole warehouse is talking about it. Your dad has been watching you through his binoculars.” If things had been different in my family, I might have thought this meant they were feeling sorry for me and my parents might change their minds about bundling me off to school. But I knew better. They watched and pointed at me like a curiosity, one that would be safely sent away from them soon enough.

Or even sooner. “If they’re watching me, I can’t talk to you,” I told her.

She straightened and faced me. “Why not? You’re already as good as enrolled in military school.”

“If I screw up again, they’ll send me now. As it is, they’ll wait until August.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed. “I actually need gas,” she said. “I need you to give me gas. Can’t a girl get gas around here?” She was shouting at me for no reason. Or, she was shouting for a very good reason, but she wasn’t really shouting about getting gas, and she wasn’t really shouting at me.

What the hell. I took the nozzle from the pump and shoved it into the tank of the boat. It was a legitimate reason and a perfect excuse to exchange a few words with her.

But I looked into her sad green eyes and could think of absolutely nothing to say.

Lori could. “August. Football practice starts in August. You’ll miss it.”

I couldn’t stand to look at her anymore. The digital numbers ticked by on the gas pump as I said, “I don’t think you quite understand. I’ll miss football in general.

Period.”

“They don’t have football at military school?”

“I seriously doubt it. They probably have varsity latrine digging.”

“Boarding school. I can’t believe your parents are sending you away to boarding school. I thought that only happened in The Sound of Music .” She heaved a sigh big enough that I turned to look at her again. She watched a heron cruise low over the lake and dip its talons beneath the surface. It brought out a wriggling fish with nowhere to hide, doomed.

“What if they sent you to the military school up the road?” she asked. “Maybe I could visit you. They wouldn’t have to know.” I shook my head. “When they decided to send me away, they meant away. Mississippi. Tennessee. Virginia. Away.” Leave it to Lori to find the bright side. She cracked a smile. “Maybe you’ll like it. Will they let you shoot off cannons and machine guns?”

“No, I’m pretty sure you learn military traditions like wearing uniforms and standing at attention for hours, with all the good stuff like explosions taken out. My parents want it to be punishment because they think I’m worthless.”

Her smile faded. “They don’t think you’re worthless.”

“I don’t see why not. Sean will go to college in the fall. Cameron will go back. If I was away at school too, my parents would get their empty nest two years early. I’m sure they’ll be happy to get rid of me.”

She considered me, frowning hard. She looked like she was racking her brain for a response to this that would make me feel better, but the evidence against me was obvious. Finally she reached up beside my ear and touched my hair. “Will they shave your head?” I really didn’t care what I looked like, as evidenced by my beard. I definitely didn’t care about my hair—or, at least, I never would have admitted it.

But something about the way Lori touched it and looked at my hair rather than meeting my eyes made me care. A lot.

“My dad can see you,” I said.

She started to look in the direction of the warehouse, but she stopped herself with her head half turned and her chin pointed in the air. She dropped her hand.

The gas pump clicked off, and I slid the nozzle from the tank. Lori roared off across the lake on some errand, blonde ponytail streaming behind her.

I paced up and down the stairs again, but this time it wasn’t from a loss of anything else to occupy me. I was thinking.

I was thinking so hard, in fact, that when I wakeboarded with Lori and the guys that afternoon, I landed a perfect air raley and didn’t even notice. The guys told me I should be sent to military school more often, and then maybe I could have a professional wakeboarding career. Their little jabs didn’t touch me anymore. I was forming a plan.

After wakeboarding, I passed the office and heard Lori arguing with my mom about sending me to school. It wouldn’t work, and I didn’t let it faze me. I knew what I had to do.