The Boys Next Door (The Boys Next Door 1)

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.

It had never occurred to me to be jealous of Rachel before. Suddenly I was burning with jealousy, sweating in the humid night. It must be that I saw Rachel as an understudy for Holly and Beige and all the girls at my school who knew what to wear and how to act or, if they didn’t, hid it well. I could totally see a third-grade girl feeling inferior to Rachel and wanting to be Rachel when she grew up. That third-grade girl was thinking someday maybe she could have a boyfriend like Adam, who loved her like Adam—

“Argh!” I bellowed as I pitched face-first onto the pine needles. I must have gotten my heel caught in a snake hole.

“Are you okay?” Tammy asked, holding out a hand to help me up. “Nice trick. You should put that in your wakeboarding routine.”

“What? And steal Adam’s thunder?” I brushed myself off. Did I need to go home and change? I was new to this idea of a “wardrobe,” and my supply of Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Tops was limited. Fortunately, my denim miniskirt was made to look dirty. It was very me. And the wild pattern in my top probably concealed any decayed-leaf stains. Satisfied, I walked on with Tammy. I didn’t look back to see whether Adam had watched me fall. I hadn’t forgotten that stare of his.

“Want to play tennis tomorrow night, after it’s cooled off a little?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said before I thought. Tammy and I played tennis all the time in school. Why not out of school, too? After I’d answered, I realized that of course Sean would ask me out for tomorrow night and I wouldn’t get to go with him! Right. I wasn’t lucky enough to have problems like that. Silly me. “You shouldn’t have to drive all the way down here to pick me up and then drive me all the way back.”

“I don’t mind.”

Stepping onto the Vaders’ porch, I said, “McGillicuddy can come get me when we’re through.” My brother never had anything to do on Saturday night. It ran in the family.

“McGillicuddy?” she asked.

We walked back into the party. Fluttering my finely separated lashes, I could hardly believe my luck. Usually at parties I wandered in alone and hoped someone took pity and talked to me. Then, by degrees, I faded into the shadows. Tonight I was entering the party with someone.

Of course, the instant we hit the wall of crowd and sound, she pointed across the dark room and shouted above the music, “I’d completely forgotten McGillicuddy was coming back from college! I’m going to say hi.” The two people I felt most comfortable hanging with, hanging with each other instead!

Except for the kids from Birmingham and Montgomery who were vacationing on the lake with their parents and had wandered into the party, I knew all these people from school. I’d been in school with most of them since kindergarten. For some reason, this didn’t help, and possibly made things worse. I watched Tammy weave between knots of people to hug McGillicuddy. I thought about going after her. But then I might look like I didn’t want her to leave me by myself because I wasn’t good at talking to people at parties. Imagine!

Suddenly things looked way, way up. I saw Sean in the darkness, next to the stairs, with his back to me. He stood a few inches taller than his friends who’d just graduated too, who surrounded him. Sean was always surrounded.

As I crossed the room to him, folks kept stepping in my way, wanting to say hey and have conversations with me, of all things. The one time I wasn’t interested in being well-liked. Drat! I made nicey-nicey, go away, and resumed my uphill trek across the room, only to have someone else stop me.

By the time I finally reached him, my heart pounded. But it was now or never. I made myself grin at his friends as I slid my hand across his T-shirt, feeling his hard stomach underneath the cotton. I almost flinched at how good and how intimate it felt, but through the marvel of my own willpower, I did not flinch. I laid my head playfully against his chest, as I’d seen girls do when they claimed to be just friends with a guy but everyone whispered something more was going on.

I half-expected him to shout, “Get off me!” and shove me away. Not because Sean would ever do this to a girl—he had more charming ways of extricating himself from cretins—but because my life generally had been a long series of mortifications, and Sean shouting in alarm at my embrace would fit right in. The other half of me expected him to chuckle gently, but not make a move of his own quite yet. It might take him a while to get used to the new me.