The Boys Next Door (The Boys Next Door 1)

Today I held my own in push-ups. After about fifty, I was nowhere near my limit. Cameron’s grunting increased. I tried to concentrate on my own self, but Cameron was hard to ignore. His face turned very red. His arms trembled, and finally he collapsed on his bare stomach. My brother hadn’t trembled or grunted as much, but he took the opportunity to lie down on his stomach, too, hoping no one would notice as Cameron drew the fire.

Cameron cursed and said, “I don’t know why I can’t get my ass in gear today.”

Between push-ups, I breathed, “About twelve ounces too much frat party for both of you.”

Cameron scrambled toward me. I knew I was in trouble, but it was too late to get up and run. One solid arm circled my waist. With his other arm, he held my legs so tightly I couldn’t wiggle or, better yet, kick him in the gut. He took two steps toward the edge of the wharf.

I managed not to plead or scream. After almost sixteen years with boys, I had a lot of control over my natural girl-reactions. It wasn’t until he pitched me off that I remembered I did want to react like a girl today. Then, as I hit the water, I realized I hadn’t screened this swimming area for bryozoa. “Eeee—”

I plunged in. Almost before my toes hit the bottom, I was pushing up through the water, toward the sunbeams and the platform on the back of the boat, which was less likely to harbor bryozoa than any part of the concrete wharf. Ugh, ugh, ugh, I could almost feel a heinous mass squishing past my skin—but I made it safely to the surface.

And slapped myself mentally as I climbed up on the platform. If I’d pulled off my new siren act, Cameron wouldn’t have tossed me into the lake. I would have been too delicate and too haughty. He wouldn’t have dared to touch me. On the other hand, he did recognize that I was a girl, on some level. If I’d been Adam, he would have just shoved me in instead of picking me up.

By the time I stood on the platform, I remembered I was now wearing a wet bikini. I collected myself enough to make jumping down into the boat look halfway svelte. But nobody was looking at me anymore. Cameron and my brother stood over Adam and Sean still doing push-ups.

Adam, eyes on the concrete, kept pushing himself up in an even rhythm. Sean watched Adam with a little smile and gritted teeth, turning redder and redder. The bulging muscles of Sean’s tanned arms trembled.

Oh God, Sean was going to lose.

3

He fell on the concrete with a groan, followed by eleven choice curse words. Adam kept doing push-ups, probably because these games we played tended to change without warning. Sean might claim Adam was required to do five more push-ups per year younger. Adam was no fool. He made sure. Sean stood, and Adam was still doing push-ups.

“We’ve created a monster,” my brother said.

Adam did one last push-up for good measure and stood up slowly. He clapped his hands together to brush off the dust. And then—don’t do it, Adam, don’t make Sean any angrier than he already is—he gave Sean a grin.

“I don’t believe it!” shouted Cameron. “You know what else? Adam is taller! Stand back-to-back and let me make sure.”

Sean refused to stand back-to-back with Adam. They goaded him and called him names that I can’t repeat, but that had to do with Sean being a girl, the worst insult imaginable. So Sean and Adam stood back-to-back. Sure enough, Sean was more muscular and filled out, as always, but Adam was half an inch taller.

Adam turned and gave Sean that grim look with dropped jaw, trying not to laugh. “I’m the biggest.”

“Ohhhhhh!” Cameron and my brother moaned like Adam had gotten in a good punch on Sean in one of their boxing matches. I’ll spare you the full five minutes of size jokes that ensued. Tammy and some other girls on the tennis team had told me they were so jealous of me growing up around boys, because I had a window into how boys thought. This, my friends, was the deep, dark secret. The size jokes went on and on as if I weren’t there, or as if I weren’t a girl. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

Sean smiled, wincing only a little when they shoved him. He would keep smiling no matter what they said to him. This was one of the many things I loved about Sean. Surely the boys knew they couldn’t break him. They would try anyway.

I was a little concerned about what Sean would do to Adam later. Sean didn’t let Adam get away with stuff like that. But I supposed that was Adam’s business, the dumbass.

Disgusted, I sat in the boat with my back to them. When they ran out of size jokes for the moment—they would think of more as the afternoon went on, trust me—they piled into the boat and proceeded to argue about who got to drive first. The consensus was that Sean could drive first as a consolation prize because he was a loser.

There was no question about me driving. I got my boater’s license when I turned fifteen, just like they did. The problem was that I didn’t know my left from my right. This was their fault, really. They taught me to waterski when I was five years old. Nobody thought I’d get up and stay up on the first try, so I wasn’t properly instructed on the dismount. I couldn’t steer. Too terrified to drop the rope, I ran into the dock and broke my arm.

My right arm. At the time, my brain must have been designing the circuitry that told me left from right. Because since then, I’d never been able to hear Sean yell, “Go left!” or my brother holler, “Turn to the right!” without thinking, Okay. I broke my right arm. This is my right arm. They want me to turn this way, by which time I had missed the turn, or run the boy I was pulling on the wakeboard into a tree. We found this out the hard way last summer, the first time I tried to pull Adam.

Sean started the engine and putted through the marina waters, and Adam had the nerve to plop onto the seat across the aisle from me. Sean reached the edge of the idle zone and cranked the boat into top speed. Adam called to me so softly I could barely catch his words over the motor, “Close your legs.”

“What for? I waxed!” I looked down to make sure. This was okay now, because Sean was facing the other way and couldn’t hear me in the din. Indeed, I was clean. I spread my legs even wider, put my arms on the back of the seat, and generally took up as much room as possible, like a boy. I glanced back over at Adam. “Does it make you uncomfortable for me to sit this way?”

He watched me warily. “Yes.”

“May I suggest that this is your problem and not mine?”

He licked his lips and bent toward me. “If it keeps Sean from asking you out, it’s going to be your problem, and you’re going to make it my problem.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, crossing my legs like a girl. “Thanks for staying out of my way. How the hell am I supposed to get Sean to ask me out when he’s all pissy?”

“You wanted me to lose to him at team calisthenics? That was too sweet to miss.”

“You didn’t have to win by quite so much, Adam. You knew I needed him in a good mood. You didn’t have to rub it in.”

Adam grinned. “And you wanted me to stop growing?”

“Do not make a joke about your size. If you can’t think of anything to talk about except your large size, please say nothing at all.”

So we sat in silence until Sean slowed the boat in the middle of the lake. McGillicuddy put on his life vest, sat on the platform, slipped his feet into the bindings of his wakeboard, and hopped into the water. He and Cameron had been the ones to discover wakeboarding, and they did it first while the rest of us were still waterskiing. To look at them today, you’d think they’d never gotten the hang of it. My brother face-planted twice in his twenty-minute turn. Cameron had a hard time getting up. Frankly, I was beginning to worry.

Since we were kids, we’d spent every summer afternoon skiing and wakeboarding behind the VADER’S MARINA boat as advertisement for the business. Sean had even convinced Mr. Vader to go all out with a boat made especially for wakeboarding, which made bigger waves. Bars arched over the boat for attaching the tow rope, and speakers on the bars blasted Nickelback like the music came on automatically with the boat motor. (Once I’d brought the first Kelly Clarkson album and asked to play it rather than Nickelback while we wakeboarded. They’d laughed in my face and called me Miss Independent for months.)

We held a special wakeboarding exhibition when the lake was crowded on the Fourth of July and Labor Day. But our show during the Crappy Festival in two weeks was the most important, because sales of boats and equipment at the marina were highest near the beginning of the summer. Okay, it was actually the Crappie Festival. Crappie is a kind of fish, pronounced more like croppie. The Crappie Festival had a Crappie Queen and a Crappie Bake-Off and a Crappie Toss, in which folks competed to throw a dead fish farthest down the lake shore. Sean started calling it the Crappy Festival, which sounded a lot more fun.

But the festival would be no fun at all if we kept wakeboarding like this! None of us had been out on the water since Labor Day last year, but come on. I never expected Cameron and my brother to be quite so awful on their first time out. And since Sean would be watching me now, I hoped I broke the cycle.

I strapped a life vest over my bikini. Such a pity to cover my shapely body (snort). Then I tied my feet tightly into the bindings attached to my board. I hopped into the water, wakeboard and all, and assumed the position. I wished my brother would putter the boat away from me a little faster. The wakeboard floated on its side in front of me as I crouched behind it with my knees spread. Talk about needing to close my legs! The embarrassing stance had caused me to get up too quickly and face-plant more times than I cared to count, just to save myself a few seconds of the boys cracking jokes about me that I couldn’t hear.

Not today. I relaxed in the water. Anyone care for an eyeful? I parted my knees and gave Adam the okay sign. He was spotting. Sean and Cameron watched me, too, as concerned as I was that we all sucked and Mr. Vader would pull the plug on our daily outing. No pressure. When my brother finally got around to opening up the engine, I let the boat pull me up and relaxed into the adrenaline rush.

Wakeboarding was pretty simple. I stood on the wakeboard like a skateboard, and held onto the rope as if I were waterskiing. The boat motor left a triangular wake behind it as the boat moved through the water. I moved outside it by going over one of the small waves. Then I turned back inward and used one wave as a skateboarding ramp to take off. I sailed over the wake, and used the opposite wave as a ramp to land.

After a few minutes I mostly forgot about the boys, even Sean. The drone of the motor would do that like nothing else: put me in this different zone. Even though I was connected by a rope to the boat and the outside world, I was all alone with myself. I just enjoyed the sun and the water and the wakeboard.

My intention all along had been to get my wakeboarding legs back this first day. Maybe I’d do tricks when we went out the next day. I didn’t want to get too cocky and bust ass in front of Sean. But as I got more comfortable and forgot to care, I tried a few standbys—a front flip, a scarecrow. There was no busting of ass. So I tried a backroll. And landed it solidly.

Now I got cocky. I did a heelside backroll with a nose-grab. This meant that in the middle of the flip, I let go of the rope handle with one hand, reached down, and grabbed the front of the board. It served no purpose in the trick except to look impressive, like, This only appears to be a difficult trick. I have all the time in the world. I will grab the board. Yawn. And I landed it. This was getting too good to be true.

My brother swung the boat around just before we reached the graffiti-covered highway bridge that spanned the lake. Cameron had spray-painted his name and his girlfriend’s name on the bridge, alongside all the other couples’ names and over the faded ones. My genius brother had tried to paint his own name but ran out of room on that section of bridge.

McGILLICUDD

Y

Sean wisely never painted his girlfriends’ names. He would have had to change them too often. For my part, I was very thankful that when most of this spray-painting action was going on last summer, I was still too short to reach over from the pile and haul myself up on the main part of the bridge. I probably had the height and the upper body strength now, and I prayed none of the boys pointed this out. Then I’d have to spray-paint LORI LOVES SEAN on the bridge. And move to Canada.

It was kind of strange Adam hadn’t spray-painted his name with Rachel’s in the past few weeks. Maybe he didn’t consider it daring enough, if Cameron had managed to do it. Adam had painted in red letters in the very center of the bridge, WASH ME. The bridge was a big part of our lake experience. Wakeboarding underneath it would have been cool. But driving the boat under the bridge while towing a wakeboarder was dangerous. Adam had been the one to discover this (seventh grade).

My brother pointed the boat for the rail. A few summers ago, the boys had pulled the guts out of an old pontoon boat that also said VADER’S MARINA down the side. They anchored it near the shore and built a rail sticking out from it, topped with PVC pipe. You could really hurt yourself on this contraption (Adam: eighth grade) but my ride was going great, and I was in the groove. I zoomed far out from the wakeboarding boat, popped up onto the rail, slid across it on the board, and landed nice and soft in the water on the other end.

Adam raised both fists at me. (Nice, but no love from Sean?) If Adam yelled, I couldn’t hear him over the boat motor. What I could hear as my brother paralleled the shoreline was the Thompsons and the Foshees, our neighbors hanging out on their docks. They came out to watch us practice a lot of afternoons. Cha-ching! Two sales we’d as good as made for Vader’s Marina when their kids got a little older.

Then came my family’s dock, the Vader’s dock at their house, and finally the marina. Dad had gotten home from work, I saw. He and Mr. Vader sat in lawn chairs on the marina dock, holding beers. I really shouldn’t have done this if I was trying to be ladylike. But the opportunity was too perfect to resist, and old habits died hard. I arced way out from the wake, aiming for the dock.