The Boys Next Door (18 page)

It was such a relief to go wakeboarding that afternoon. Yes, I’d be trapped in the boat for over an hour with Adam and Sean, but at least I was out of the warehouse and into the strong sun and oppressive humidity. The Crappy Festival show was in two days. We all needed to nail down the course we wanted the boat to follow and the tricks we planned to do—especially Sean. Maybe thinking about the show would get our minds off each other.

Or not. Adam climbed out of the water and onto the platform after busting ass four times. He had a stare-down with Sean, who was getting in the water for his turn. If two girls had been in a fight like this, one of them would have flipped over the side of the boat rather than face probably the tenth stare-down of the day. But Sean and Adam were not two girls. And because
I
was a girl, it stressed me out more to watch them than it stressed them to growl at each other, teeth bared. I left my seat and slid into the bow, watching ahead of us as the boat drifted across the choppy water kicked up by the afternoon traffic.

The bench sank next to me, pulling me down into the hole. “So you still want Sean?” Adam hissed. “Let me give you some advice.”

“No thanks.” I leaned further over the bow to watch the large waves. A whitecap rolled by. A
whitecap
? You didn’t see those on the lake very often. The water was choppier than I’d ever seen it.

“At first,” Adam went on, “we thought we’d make him want something I had. You. Now he wants something
you
have.”

“Boobs?” I asked, trying to sound bored.

“Your place at the end of the wakeboarding show. Throw a jump and fake an injury. You have to make it look like you’re really hurt, so Cameron doesn’t rib Sean about girls making sacrifices just to go out with him.”

Cameron cranked the boat to pull Sean up, and my brother spotted. With the motor roaring and Nickelback blaring, I was free to tell Adam (loudly) exactly what I thought of that plan. I sat up and turned to face him.

Before I could get the words out, he leaned close and said, “I told you before you’re not a good actress. I have a lot more confidence in you now. I thought you liked me. You had me fooled.”

I stared into his blue eyes, trying to see what was behind them. “You really want me to throw a jump and go out with Sean?”

“This has nothing to do with me,” he said grimly.

“It has everything to do with y—”

He put his finger to my lips. “If you want Sean, this is what you need to do, because this is how he is. Love him or leave him. I’m just trying to help.” He slid off the seat with a high zipping sound of his board shorts against the vinyl and bounced toward the back of the boat. He plopped down in the seat across the aisle from my brother and crossed his feet on the edge of the boat, relaxed, satisfied by a job well done. When Sean landed a front flip, then tumbled a couple of extra times before face-planting, Adam’s shoulders shook. He was laughing.

“Lori!” McGillicuddy shouted, standing directly in front of me. The boat drifted again, and Sean dripped on the platform. “I said, did you see the log? I guess you didn’t see the log, since you’re in a coma.”

“Log schmog.” I stood up and reached for my life vest.

McGillicuddy followed me as I stepped over Adam and Sean, who didn’t bother to move their feet out of the aisle as I passed. Just like old times. “There’s a huge log out near the pontoon boat,” McGillicuddy said. “When we get near it, I’m veering to the right of where we usually go. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, sliding over the back of the boat to the platform and stepping into the bindings on my wakeboard.

“To the
right
,” Cameron laughed.

“I said
okay
.” I was in no mood to be teased about my driving right now.

The drone of the motorboat was great for thinking, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on whether you hated yourself. At the moment I wasn’t enjoying it too much. I was supposed to be pinning down my routine for the show, but I just did flips and 360s automatically, my mind on Adam.

Staring at him in the boat told me nothing. He was so far away that he was just a tan face with light brown hair, and if he’d changed places with Sean, I wouldn’t have known. But I stared at the boy I thought was Adam and tried to figure out exactly what he was plotting. Clearly he’d paid more attention to MTV reality shows than he’d let on.

If I pretended to get hurt so Sean could take my place in the show, he probably wouldn’t ask me out. He’d watched Adam and me while we were together, that was for sure. And I’d thought at first that the light had dawned and he’d seen my ravishing beauty for the first time. Looking back, though, I thought he’d watched Adam more than me. Sean had worried Rachel would get jealous and Adam would snatch her away again.

If Sean
did
ask me out, though, I’d know for sure that my internal makeover had worked—two days before the deadline of my sixteenth birthday! And I’d also know Adam had been right. Sean was so low, he couldn’t stand to ask out a girl who’d shown him up. It was almost worth throwing a jump just to see what happened and get some closure on this issue.

I could do any old jump and pretend to hurt my ankle. I’d hurt it last summer when I fell and my foot came halfway out of the binding, which was why I’d laced up the bindings so tightly since then. Faking a limp would be more difficult. But I’d need to limp for only two days, until the Crappy Festival show. The question was whether I should complain about it enough to go to the hospital and have them find nothing, which seemed like a huge waste of time and money. Adam had hurt himself before and had been in a lot of pain but refused to go to the hospital, so there
was
some precedent for this. Of course, he finally had to go, and his arm was broken in three places. There was also the small detail that Adam was like that and I was not.

Suddenly I found myself shooting farther and faster beyond the boat than I’d expected. We were turning at the bridge, just under the words AOAN LOVES LOKI. I pulled up and took control of the run.

What had I been thinking? Had I seriously been considering throwing a jump and pretending to be hurt just to get a boy? What kind of boy did you catch with a ploy like that?

And furthermore, what kind of person was Adam to give me the idea?

I decided right then that I was
not
going to pretend to get hurt and throw this show for Sean or anybody.
Furthermore
, I would skip the party tomorrow night, because there would be no one there I wanted to see, except Tammy. Well, okay, maybe I wouldn’t skip the party, because who could skip a party next door? But I wouldn’t enjoy it. Or I would hang out with Tammy, ignoring the boys. And
furthermore
, sometime between now and then, maybe tonight since I obviously would not have a boy to go out with, I would ask McGillicuddy to drive me to town. I would buy the latest Kelly Clarkson album as a birthday present from me to me. I would fight and fight and fight to play it in the boat the next time we went wakeboarding. I was sick to death of Nickelback.

Something dark in the water flashed past the corner of my eye. I turned and saw an enormous log tumbling gently in the water. Just then the pull on the rope changed, and I remembered McGillicuddy was veering to the right to avoid the log. I veered to the right with him as I headed for the pontoon boat to ride the rails.

Only I was coming up too fast on the backside of the pontoon boat. I glanced over at the boys and motioned to Adam to slow down. I’d screwed this trick already.

Adam was motioning to
me
, an exaggerated wave away from the pontoon boat. And he was mouthing something.
Your other right
. I realized what I’d done then and dropped the rope. The side of the pontoon boat emblazoned VADER’S MARINA zoomed toward me,
smack
.

This probably would have been a lot easier if I’d gotten amnesia or at least felt a little woozy from the impact, but I didn’t. I knew exactly what was happening as I slipped wakeboard-first under the pontoon boat and slowed to a stop. The buoyant wakeboard on my feet and the life vest hugging my chest stuck me like magnets to the slippery underside of the boat.

My head—I had cracked my head open when I hit the boat, and the pain was almost unbearable, but I had nowhere to put it. Blood curled around me, backlit by sunbeams streaming through the water at the edges of the boat. I needed to get out from under. I was running out of air.

I tried to kick myself over to the edge—but my feet were still stuck in the wakeboard bindings. Bending over to untie them was the only way out. I would run out of air before then. I could hardly think of anything except running out of air, the throbbing in my head, the blood forming graceful curlicues in front of my eyes.

I reached one hand as far toward the edge of the boat as I could, hoping I could pull hard with every bit of life I had left and slip out from under, dragging the wakeboard with me. My hand sank into a firm, gelatinous mass. Without looking, I knew it was bryozoa. I had died and gone to hell. This was how my mother must have felt. The water had always been my friend. The water had betrayed me.

Then they came for me. They were under the pontoon boat with me, blurry and green like ghosts in the water. One boy shoved down on the wakeboard. The other boy put a strong arm across my chest and pushed off from the bottom of the boat with his feet. He took me lower in the water—wrong direction, hello, I could hardly suppress the urge to breathe in water instead of air. I struggled. He let me go. The wakeboard and the life vest propelled me to the surface, clear of the boat.

I popped into the air, gasping. Sean put his arms around me again and held my head above the water so I could breathe. The thought crossed my mind of rejecting a boy’s help and resisting the damsel-in-distress role, but really it was a little thought that had no effect on letting Sean help me breathe. The more I breathed, the harder my head throbbed, so I also had a little thought that MTV would never invite me to dance on stage during one of their Spring Break specials now that I looked like the Elephant Man.

And a little thought that I had been wrong about Sean. Mom had sent me a sign. She’d sent Sean to save my life. Maybe he
was
worth a faked injury, after all.

Of course, there was also McGillicuddy down at my feet, and the fact that the motorboat had been only twenty yards away from me when I went down, so maybe it wasn’t Mom’s doing. God, my head hurt like a mother.

McGillicuddy got me loose from the wakeboard. Sean held me up to Cameron in the boat, who grabbed me under the arms and lifted me in. Immediately Sean climbed the ladder and came to me. He pulled me out of the life vest, then eased me down and cradled my head in his lap.

Just like in my dream, he looked down at me with eyes lighter than the deep blue sky behind him. The sunlight turned his hair and shoulders and broad chest gold as he pressed both hands to my head.

Unlike in my dream, he dripped water and tears on my face, stinging my eyes. The blood didn’t help either. Oozing from under Sean’s hand, it crawled like mosquitoes on my skin. I felt pretty.

“Calm down,” McGillicuddy said. “Calm down. For God’s sake, would you calm down?”

“I’m fine,” I said between heaving coughs. “At least I can move my toes, so I won’t have to ride the short bus.”

“I meant Adam.”

I stared past the pain in my head, upward at Adam’s chin. Adam held me, not Sean. I hadn’t recognized him upside down, without the skull and crossbones.

“Sean,” Cameron called. “We’ve got her. Let’s go.”

The engine started, and the boat lurched into high speed. Down in Adam’s lap, below the sides of the boat, the motor sounded muffled, more a buzz than a roar. Without Nickelback blaring, for once.

“Let me see,” McGillicuddy said, bending next to Adam.

I cringed and closed my eyes and tried to go to a different place, away from the pain, as they fumbled on my forehead. Poked at my forehead. I came back from that different place and said, “DON’T TOUCH IT.”

“It’s going to need stitches,” McGillicuddy said. “They might have to shave your hair a little. But if they do, I’ll shave mine too. So will Adam. Right, Adam?”

“It’s a wonder you weren’t killed,” Adam cried. “It’s a wonder you didn’t at least put your eye out.”

McGillicuddy said, “Adam, would you calm down?”

I squeezed my eyes more tightly shut.

“I can’t believe you actually did it,” Adam said. “I can’t believe you’re that stupid.”

“I didn’t,” I mouthed. That’s all I could do. Sean and Adam had been my whole life for the last couple of weeks, but it was surprising how little I cared about them when I suddenly had a throbbing headache the size of the lake. Even if I’d wanted to, I didn’t have the strength to fight. Adam wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.

At first, all five Vaders plus McGillicuddy crowded into the emergency room with me. The nurses kicked everyone out except Mrs. Vader. They must have mistaken her for someone motherly and soothing. She barked at people and insisted on seeing their credentials before she’d let them touch me. Then Cameron came back and said Adam had taken a swing at Sean and gotten them all kicked out of the waiting room. So Mrs. Vader herded them all home where they could beat the hell out of each other in peace. She sent McGillicuddy in to sit with me.