The Boys Next Door (9 page)

“Okay, we’ll pretend to hook up.” He still watched me. His eyes traveled from my eyes to one of my ears, down my neck and further down to my cleavage (thank you sports bra!). He actually leaned back against the fence for better viewing of my legs beneath the micro-miniskirt. Then he met my gaze again. Like he was surveying what he had to pretend to hook up with, and it checked out, with no damage to his rep.

I should have appreciated this. I passed inspection! But his gaze made me uncomfortable enough that the pesky tingle returned. Worse, he seemed to sense he was causing me to tingle. He made that face with his jaw dropped, trying not to smile. Then he gave up and broke into the broadest grin I’d seen on his face since—well, since yesterday afternoon, when he beat Sean at push-ups.

A memory flashed into my mind of Adam, age eight, jumping off the roof because Sean dared him to. (Broken ankle.)

I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

Suddenly very nervous, I rubbed my tingling hands together and looked toward the road. “Should we drive to the movie theater parking lot where more people will see us together? We could pretend to k—” I looked back at Adam at that moment, and something stopped me in the way he watched me.

“Iss,” he said, nodding.

“And they’ll tell everyone. It’ll get back to Sean and Rachel.”

Now he was shaking his head no. “That’s not going to work. We can’t stage it so carefully. I’m an awful actor. Something tells me you’ll never win an Oscar, either.”

“Hey—”

“So we need to make it look natural. We need to act like we’re into each other all the time, without checking first to see if someone is watching.” His hand was trembling in mine. “Maybe this is the first time we’ve realized we’re into each other. And maybe this is our first kiss.”

He leaned down. When his face got within a few inches of mine, I giggled. Not the fake giggle of a tomboy raised by wolves, either. A real, girly, high-pitched giggle that originated somewhere in my sinuses and made me want to slap myself. There was hope for me yet.

“See?” he whispered against my lips. “This is what we’re trying to avoid. We need to act like we
want
to do this.” And he kissed me.

There were still a few inches between our bodies. So there was no embrace. Only his lips, soft, warm, on my lips.

Our fingers, interlaced.

A tingle so strong, it turned into a vibration.

A hick driving by on the road, hollering, “Get a room, Vader! Wooooo!”

Adam laughed a little against my lips. I thought I detected the slightest shudder, like he felt the vibration too. Then he backed up and looked at me. “Is that what you wanted?”

“Yes,” I breathed. “Is that what
you
wanted?”

His smile faded. “Yeah. Come on.” He led me back up the sidewalk, toward Tammy and McGillicuddy still talking together but never taking their eyes off us. When we got close to the truck, Adam asked me, “Will you go out with me tomorrow night?”

“I’d love to,” I said, focusing only on him like I had no idea my brother was staring a hole through my head.

“I’ll pick you up at seven,” Adam said. “No, wait.”

“That’s fine,” I laughed. “You can drive a hundred feet and pick me up at seven.”

“I’ll walk over at seven.” He smiled and twisted a lock of my hair around his finger. “Seven is lucky.”

McGillicuddy cleared his throat.

“That’s not what I meant!” Adam roared at McGillicuddy in outrage. Adam’s cheeks were bright red.

“Are we finished?” Tammy asked quickly. “Lori, didn’t you lose four or five balls over the fence in the kudzu?”

McGillicuddy, Adam, and I all started for the kudzu patch. But Tammy caught me by the sports bra, and I snapped backward. She waited until the boys were out of earshot before she hissed, “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Yes!” I said happily. “But you can’t tell anybody. And I don’t mean you need to keep this secret the way the tennis team kept a secret last year, by leaking it to the basketball team.” I’d seen Holly and Beige work.

“I promise,” Tammy said, pulling a tennis ball from her pocket and bouncing it against the truck fender. She’d seen Holly and Beige work, too. On
her
secrets. Personally, I’d never had a secret for them to work on before. I was that popular.

“Don’t mention it to McGillicuddy. He might blab it to Cameron, depending on how funny he thought it was. You’re the only person I’m telling. So if it gets out, I’ll know you spilled it.” I explained in brief the ingenious and diabolical plan. “Doesn’t that sound ingenious? And diabolical?”

“It sounds hopelessly complicated. Wouldn’t it be easier to hook up with Adam for real? He’s adorable.”

“No, he’s not!” I eyed her, unsure I should have shared the diabolical plan with her after all. Granted, Adam
was
adorable. But I was after Sean. I didn’t intend to
act
on Adam’s adorableness. And at that moment, I realized I didn’t want anyone else to act on it, either. He was part of my Adorable Special Reserve. Now that Tammy was telling me there was indeed a problem with my plan, I found that I didn’t want to hear it.

She bounced the ball methodically against the truck. “You think
Sean
is adorable.”

“Duh.”

“And Adam looks a lot like Sean.”

“True dat.”

“So why don’t you think Adam’s adorable?”

I snatched the ball in midair and shook it at her. “Because he’s Adam!”

Adam and McGillicuddy had found all the escaped balls. They stood in the kudzu, oblivious to snakes, and threw tennis balls as hard as they could at each other. The balls bounced off their arms and chests, and they dove after the balls into the vines again. Typical. I turned back to Tammy. “You said yourself that Sean was fondue.”

“No,
you
said that.”

“You said girls fall all over themselves to get to Sean. They don’t do that for Adam.”

“But wouldn’t that be better? You’d have to share Sean. Adam would be yours.”

I’d thought girls giggled secrets to each other because they understood each other. Tammy didn’t understand me at
all
.

Adam had made a hangman’s noose out of a length of vine and was chasing McGillicuddy down the sidewalk with it. Both of them laughed like ten-year-olds. Adam really did look adorable when he smiled.

So, maybe Tammy was half-right. I knew Adam had been kidding about seven being lucky. I knew he was just playing the part with me, like we’d planned, so he could get Rachel back. But part of me, a tiny part about the size of a candy heart, wished he dreamed about getting lucky with me.

Sean had the nerve to smile down at me. His blue eyes were lighter than the sky behind him, a spooky blue. He shouted above the drone of the boat motor, “Lori, when we’re old enough, I want you to be my girlfriend.”

I tried to speak, spluttered, and spit out a lock of my hair the wind had blown into my mouth. I was nothing if not glam. “You’re old enough,” I told him. “And if Rachel is old enough,
I’m
old enough.”

He bent closer and said, “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

What a thrill! He’d asked me out! I was going out with Sean! Only, those were the words I’d
heard
. What he’d
mouthed
was something different. Like on one of those kung fu movies the boys loved to watch, with English words dubbed over the Chinese sound, and the characters’ mouths never quite matching up.

“Bastard!” I sat straight up in my cold, wet bed. I wiped and wiped with my palms, but I could
not
get all my hair out of my mouth. Then I realized what I’d said out loud. “Sorry, Mom,” I told her sweet sixteen photo on my bedside table. My alarm clock blared Avril Lavigne, “Keep Holding On.”

Right! I vowed to move things along with Sean that day at work. I would make sure he knew I was part of the hot scene. Unfortunately, the instant I stepped into the marina office, I was presented with an obstacle to this goal in the form of a seething matriarch with pinstriped hair.

“Lori!” she roared, spinning around in her office chair.

“Good morning, boss!” I said brightly, giving her a wave.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “It was bad enough when Adam told me yesterday that Sean stole Rachel from him. He wanted me to ground Sean, or take away his Wii.”

“Ground him for how long?” If Sean was grounded, he wouldn’t even be able to pick Rachel up and drive her back to his own house. He could only see her if her mom dropped her off. Talk about embarrassing. Sean didn’t like to be embarrassed. Instant breakup! On the other hand, if he were grounded for the whole summer, even after he broke up with Rachel, he could never go out with
me
.

“I can’t
ground
him,” Mrs. Vader squealed. “I can’t
ground
a legal adult. And I can’t
ground
one son for stealing the other’s girlfriend. But I’ve got to do something. Adam’s cheekbone is blue. Sean is holding his jaw at a funny angle and won’t let me look at it. The physical fights are bad enough. They can’t torture each other psychologically, too!”

Of course they could. They’d been doing it for years. Obviously Sean was careful not to call Adam ADD when their mother was around. Somehow I didn’t think pointing this out would help my current situation, so I nodded like I understood her plight. “Do I have gas?”

She folded her arms. “And this morning Adam told me he’s going out tonight. With
you
.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I sang, sweeping my hand down my body in the
all this can be yours
gesture.

“You were after
Sean
,” she spat.

“Who, me?” Yes, I actually said,
Who me?
I was beginning to see Adam’s point about me never winning an Oscar. “I was after Adam.”

“You were after Sean. You watched him moonily all day Friday. You took an hour and a half for lunch, waiting for him to show up.”

I raised my chin haughtily. “You people are slave drivers. Can’t I have a break to watch
What Not to Wear
?”

“Besides,” she said more calmly, examining me too closely for comfort, “if you and Adam really were about to start going out, Adam wouldn’t have complained to me just yesterday about Sean stealing his girlfriend. He’d be happy to have you, and he’d forget all about her.”

Good point. Where was Adam to take some of this heat? I looked around futilely for him. Then I told part of the truth. “It’s the principle of the thing. Adam’s also mad Sean broke his remote-control pickup that he got for Christmas six years ago.”

She went limp with exasperation. “
Adam
broke that! Adam said Sean broke it on purpose, Sean said Adam broke it, and I believed Sean.”

“Exactly.”

She stared me down, waiting for me to crack, while I tilted my head this way and that way and fluttered my eyelashes at her. Finally she nodded at the door and said, “You’re in the warehouse. With Sean.”

A torture worse than death, ho ho. A second chance to move things along. Sean and I helped the full-time workers take boats out of storage. Mostly we found the boats that needed to be brought down, cleaned the seats, and topped off the fluids in the engines. As we finished each boat, Cameron and my brother delivered it across the lake. Adam had gas. More than throwing me with Sean for spite, I think Mrs. Vader was trying to keep Sean and Adam away from each other.

I did my best with Sean, but it wasn’t good enough. He treated me
exactly
like he always had, except for two days before in the boat. He would do things that were so, so sweet, like get me a soda from the office when he got one for himself. But then he spoke to an old lady customer in the same loving tone he’d used on me. Also his mother.

Maybe he didn’t know yet that Adam and I were going out. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Vader had shared this tidbit with him if she thought it would add fuel to the fire. So Sean didn’t understand he was supposed to realize I was girlfriend material and feel jealous. Skilled though I was in the womanly arts of manipulation and talking smack, I couldn’t quite figure out a way to pass this info along to him without coming out and telling him, which would blow my cover. So I was super-sweet right back to him and traipsed around the warehouse in my tank top and generally acted like he and I were just friends. Ha!

Late in the afternoon we went wakeboarding. Yesterday we’d skipped calisthenics for the first time ever, and we had no taste for them today either. My brother didn’t announce it was time for calisthenics, and neither did Cameron. Sean and Adam just glared at each other as they threw life vests at each other to pitch into the boat.

I think we all were a bit on edge by the time we launched. But Sean spotted first and Adam sat way up in the bow, so we began to relax. After all, Sean and Adam weren’t likely to get into it on the boat. Cameron and my brother were there to pull them off each other. My brother was bigger than any of them.

As for me, I wanted so badly to sit across the aisle from Sean. He might scoot over and share my seat with me, like two days before. But no, he would never do this and mess up his “relationship” with Rachel—not while it was having the desired effect on Adam.