The Boys Next Door (6 page)

“The children and I watched the last part of your wakeboarding run,” she said. “You’ve improved so much since last year!”

“Thanks! But that’s not why you called. You’re dying to know what happened with Sean.”

Frances was in on my Life Makeover. Not the fashion part—sheesh, look at her. She hadn’t even given me advice on what to do. I wandered into the Harbargers’ house every week or so and told her how my plan was shaping up, and she told me I was being ridiculous and it would never work. I guess I went to her because I wanted to hear some motherly input. We had the perfect relationship. She wasn’t really my mother, so I could listen to her input and then do the opposite. The difference between me and girls with mothers was that I didn’t get in trouble for this.

“Let me guess,” she said. “When Sean saw you in a bikini, he acted incrementally more cozy to you. Therefore you expected him to profess his love. You honestly did. And he didn’t do a thing.”

“Rrrrrnt!” I made the game-show noise for a wrong answer. I told her what had really happened.

“What?” she said when I told her Adam beat Sean at calisthenics. “What?” she said when I told her I landed the air raley. “What?” she said when I told her Sean wiped out. As I got to the part about Sean touching my tummy
repeatedly
, she interrupted me so often that I had to pitch a frustrated fit. I threw the phone down to the grass, cupped my hands around my mouth, and hollered across the lake, “LET. ME. FINISH!”
Inish, inish, inish
, said my echo. I picked up the phone and told her the rest of the story, ending with my plan to implement Stage Three that night.

“But you don’t really think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will solve all your problems, do you?” she asked.

“Of course not. I think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will show Sean I’m ready for him.”

“Lori, no girl is ever ready for a boy like Sean. How were finals?” Clearly she wanted to change the subject to impress upon me that boys were not all there was to a teenage girl’s life. As if.

“Finals?” I asked.

“Yes, finals. To graduate from the tenth grade? You took them yesterday.”

Wow, it was hard to believe I’d played hopscotch with the quadratic equation only twenty-seven hours ago. Thinking back, it seemed like I’d sleepwalked through the past nine months of school, compared with everything that had happened today.

Time flew when you were having Sean.

Mr. Vader let the boys throw a party at their house every Friday night during the summers. He reasoned that if they were home, they weren’t out drag racing the pink truck against Mrs. Vader’s Volvo. So I’d been to a million of these parties. It should have been old hat. Yet it was new hat. I had put on my seductress bonnet. Ha! Not really. This would have dented my hair, which I’d blown out long, straight, and bryozoa-free.

We’d had a lot of rain in May, which made the lake full, the grass lush, the trees happy, and the ground soft. Walking through my yard into the boys’ yard in high heels was like wading in the lake where the sand was deep, feet sinking with every step. I felt like Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
(tenth grade English) hiking through pastures to a house party, her petticoat six inches deep in mud. Wait a minute—oh crap, I’d forgotten my petticoat.

And what ho, cheerio, here was Mr. Darcy getting his groove on with Miss Bingley under a massive oak tree. Actually, it was only Adam and Rachel.

I did a double take. Adam pressed Rachel against the tree, kissing her. Deeply.

This shouldn’t have surprised me. They’d been together for a month. He was my age, and she was a year younger, so neither of them had a driver’s license. But they met at the arcade or the bowling alley. I’d even seen them kiss before, a quick peck. I’d just never seen them kiss like
this
.

Knowing Adam, I would have thought his love life would be like every other part of his life: dangerous. It started that way. Since middle school, he’d followed in Sean’s footsteps, coming on to a different girl every week. I had imagined this would continue as Adam got older. The only difference between Adam and Sean would be that Adam would get in a lot of fistfights with the girls’ ex-boyfriends in the movie theater parking lot, and occasionally I would hear a rumor about a drive-by that he would swear wasn’t true.

Instead, he’d been with Rachel for a month. A whole month. It seemed stable. Even boring. Well! Maybe her own budding womanhood had brought out the pirate in him. Yaaarg.

He broke the kiss, turned, and stared at me as if I had no right to watch what was going on in a public place. That’s when I realized
I
was staring at
them
. Standing still in the middle of the yard, just staring, my heels settling in the dirt. Watching him kiss Rachel bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. There was nothing to do but wade to the front porch of his house.

I rang the doorbell.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes, I pressed my ear to the door and rang the doorbell again. I definitely heard the chime of the doorbell inside, the bass beat from the stereo, and laughter. Why didn’t someone come to the door? Maybe they had a closed-circuit camera on me right now and everybody at the party was watching me on TV, taking bets on how long I’d stand there before wading home. I peered into the top corners of the porch for a camera.

Why hadn’t I dispensed with the last three coats of eye shadow and gone with my brother to the party when he told me he was leaving the house, like usual? He was a dork, but at least he was totally comfortable in social situations, like Dad. Comfortable, or oblivious, which amounted to the same thing.

The door swung open, revealing Ashton Kutcher. Just kidding! It was actually my tennis team captain, Tammy.

“Tammeeeee!” I squealed, hugging her. This was what girls did.

“Loreeeee,” she said in her husky, low-key voice, playing along. “I figured someone had better open the door, because you obviously weren’t going to. Why’d you ring the doorbell? No one’s ringing the doorbell. They just walk in. Besides, don’t you practically live here?”

Did I? I supposed I knew the territory, and always hoped someone in the house noticed me. This sounded less like I was a member of the family and more like I was a stray dog. I changed the subject. “What are
you
doing here? Are you friends with Sean or Adam or Cameron?”

She knitted her eyebrows at me. “I’m friends with
you
.”

“Right!” I said. Was she? I fought the urge to look behind me, like she’d actually been talking to someone over my shoulder the whole time.

“You look great!” she said, pulling me through the doorway and into the brighter light of the foyer. “Cute top, and your eye shadow looks great!”

“Thanks!” I watched her reaction to make sure she’d said what I’d thought she said. The stereo was loud, and
you look great
was not something I heard every day, or every year.

“You weren’t planning to wear mascara?” she asked. “Usually when people wear shadow and liner that heavy, they wear mascara with it.”

“I do have some! I forgot! Thank you!” I grabbed her hand. She flinched. I didn’t let go. “Will you come with me to my house to make sure I put it on right? I’m serious.”

Her eyes moved past me out the door, toward my house. “You live next door, right?” Clearly she didn’t want to venture too far from the party with a weird-eyed lunatic such as myself.

“Noooooo,” I said sarcastically. “I live on a planet far, far away. Women are from Venus. Come on.” I pulled her toward my house until she seemed to be keeping pace with me. Then I dropped her hand. I knew girls pulled each other by the hand and squealed a lot, but it was too weird for me to do it for long.

Adam and Rachel were still making out. They’d moved behind the tree where I wouldn’t have seen them unless I’d been looking for them (which I was). I almost pointed them out to Tammy, then decided against it. I didn’t want to sound like a fifth grader:
Wow, kissing!

“You really do look cute,” Tammy said, “other than the—you know. Why the makeover?”

I took a deep breath and readied myself for my next step into girldom: spilling a giggly secret. When we’d gotten far enough away from Adam and Rachel that they couldn’t hear me, I said, “I have a crush on somebody. I’m trying to get him to notice me.”

“Sean Vader?”

I stopped short in my garage, and Tammy ran full force into me. I shoved her and shrieked, “
Why would you think that?
”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she yelled back. “Maybe because
you have told me this over and over
!”

I blinked. “I have?”

“Maybe not in so many words.”

Oh
no
! “So, I’ve been really obvious at school?” I tried to keep most of the horror from my voice.

“Isn’t everyone?” She flipped her hair back over her shoulder with a tennis ace flick of the wrist that I would try later to reproduce (and fail). “Girls fall all over themselves when Sean comes around. He’s hot, and soooooo sweet.”

“He sounds like fondue.” Mmmmm, fondue. I opened the door and led the way into my house.

I didn’t think we were being quiet, particularly. High heels may have looked dainty, but they didn’t sound that way on a tile floor. Maybe it was just that my dad was so absorbed in the convo on his cell phone. For whatever reason, when we emerged from the kitchen into the den, he started, and he stuffed the phone down by his side in the cushions. I was sorry I’d startled him, but it really was comical to see this big blond manly man jump three feet off the sofa when he saw two teenage girls. I mean, it would have been funny if it weren’t so sad.

Dad was a ferocious lawyer in court. Out of court, he was one of those Big Man on Campus types who shook hands with everybody from the mayor to the alleged ax murderer. A lot like Sean, actually. There were only two things Dad was afraid of. First, he wigged out when anything in the house was misplaced. I won’t even go into all the arguments we’d had about my room being a mess. They’d ended when I told him it was
my
room, and if he didn’t stop bugging me about it, I would put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers, maybe even
hide
some (cue horror movie music). No spoons for you! Second, he was easily startled, and very pissed off afterward. “Damn it, Lori!” he hollered.

“It’s great to see you too, loving father. Lo, I have brought my friend Tammy to witness our domestic bliss. She’s on the tennis team with me.” Actually,
I
was on the tennis team with
her
.

“Hello, Tammy. It’s nice to meet you,” Dad said without getting up or shaking her hand or anything else he would normally do. While the two of them recited a few more snippets of polite nonsense, I watched my dad. From the angle of his body, I could tell he was protecting that cell phone behind the cushions.

I nodded toward the hiding place. “Hot date?”

I was totally kidding. I didn’t expect him to say, “When?”

So I said, “Ever.” And then realized I’d brought up a subject that I didn’t want to bring up, especially not while I was busy being self-absorbed. I clapped my hands. “Okay, then! Tammy and I are going upstairs very loudly, and after a few minutes we will come back down, ringing a cowbell. Please continue with your top secret phone convo.”

I turned and headed for the stairs. Tammy followed me. I thought Dad might order me back, send Tammy out, and give me one of those lectures about my attitude (who, me?). But obviously he was chatting with Pamela Anderson and couldn’t
wait
for me to leave the room. Behind us, I heard him say, “I’m so sorry. I’m still here. Lori came in. Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try.”

“He seems jumpy,” Tammy whispered on the stairs.

“Always,” I said.

“Do you have a lot of explosions around your house?”

I glanced at my watch. “Not this early.” I passed through my bedroom, into my bathroom, and found the mascara in the drawer. Poised with wand to eye, I realized Tammy hadn’t followed me. I leaned through the bathroom doorway.

She stood in the middle of my bedroom, gazing around with wide eyes. I hadn’t made my bed. In three years. And the walls were plastered with wakeboarding posters and snowboarding posters and surfing posters (I was going to learn to snowboard and surf someday, too). It all might have been overwhelming at first—not exactly
House Beautiful
.

“Is this McGillicuddy’s room?” she asked.

“What! No. McGillicuddy’s a neat freak. Also he collects Madame Alexander dolls.”

She turned her wide eyes on me.

“Kidding! I’m kidding,” I backtracked. Why did I have to make up stuff like that? My family was weird enough for real.

She stepped over to my bookshelf to peer at the stacks of wakeboarding mags and sci-fi novels. Well, let her stare, the bi-yotch. I didn’t need her damn help. I swiped the mascara across my lashes and popped back out of the bathroom. “Ready?”

She looked up at me guiltily like she’d gotten caught thumbing through my issues of
Playboy
(stolen from McGillicuddy, and more useful for learning what not to wear than teen fashion mags). But she hadn’t found those yet. Standing at my bedside table, she held the photo of my mother.

She set the photo down and narrowed her eyes at me. “
You’re
not ready.” She came into the bathroom and explained the aesthetic we were going for was not clumps of lashes honed to points and sticking out from my eyeballs like the tentacles of a starfish. Somehow in the purchase of my fine cosmetics, I’d missed out on the idea of an eyelash comb. She used a regular hair comb to tease my lashes apart.

We stomped back down the stairs (no cowbell, but I made air-raid siren noises to warn my dad) and waded across the yard. Adam and Rachel were
still
making out behind the tree, like they hadn’t seen each other for a year. Jeez, we’d just gotten out of school
yesterday
.

I tried to look without really looking and letting on to Tammy I was looking. Both Adam’s hands were on Rachel’s shoulders, holding her in place while he kissed her. Both
her
hands were under his T-shirt, on his stomach—his stomach hard with muscle, his smooth tanned skin… I couldn’t see this, of course, but I knew it was there.