The Boys Next Door (The Boys Next Door 1)

He snorted, then seemed to have a hard time huffing out laughter, almost as if he were relieved. He snatched me to his tanned chest, hugged me hard, and breathed into my wet hair, “You’re not a dog. You’re beautiful.”

Right. I knew what he meant. Beautiful on the inside. I had saved a baby sparrow or two in my time. I was not someone he would want to hook up with, but a beautiful person. Hooray.

“Don’t ever let Sean convince you you’re not.” He glanced in the direction Sean had gone. “Let’s go for a sailboat ride.”

I loved sailing. But if we went now, we’d be late for the party. “Can’t we do it tomorrow?”

“This will be an investment in your future. It’ll be worth it.”

I waited while Adam leaned into the office to tell Mr. Vader what we were doing, and I followed him back into the warehouse. The sailboat was very old and very small. The hull was a light fiberglass platform with a hole for the metal mast. Adam and I toted the hull, mast, and sail to the edge of the wharf, threw them in, and tossed down a couple of life vests. Adam stepped carefully onto the hull, sat down, and steadied it against the concrete wall for me as I stepped on and sat down. The sitting down was very important. The boat was so small that it would tip and throw us off if we shifted our weight the slightest bit too far, like trying to stand on a basketball. Together we lifted the mast upright, slid it into the hole in the center of the hull, and unfurled the red sail.

“Do you want to drive?” he asked.

“You can drive,” I said.

I scooted around the mast to the tiny bow. Adam slid to the back, taking the rope attached to the sail in one hand and the handle of the rudder in the other. He pulled the sail taut, the wind filled it—and the boat tipped over, dumping us both into the lake.

I came up quickly. The life vests were floating away on the current, but the more important thing was to make sure the mast didn’t fall out of the hole and sink. We’d have a hard time retrieving it from the bottom of the lake, even here near the wharf where it was relatively shallow.

Adam had the same idea. Without a word to each other, we met under the boat. His hair floated weirdly around him and his blue eyes were bright in the dark green water as he motioned for me to turn the hull right side up while he dove after the slowly sinking mast.

I came up into the sunshine for a breath and flipped the hull. Adam surfaced beside me, groaning with the weight of tugging the sail full of water. Together we managed to bundle it around the mast so less water was trapped in it. We pulled the sail and mast out of the water, slipped the mast into the hole in the hull, and peeled the sail into position. Water rained everywhere.

“This is romantic,” I said. “You have a knack. What the hell kind of date is this?”

He laughed. “You’ll see.”

After we retrieved the life vests, I sat on the bow like in Titanic. But without any of that I’m queen of the world bullshit, holding my arms out. Come on, it was a sailboat on a lake. Adam steered us back and forth across the water. The red sail billowed above us in the strong breeze, so we wouldn’t get T-boned by drunks. Unless of course they headed straight for us like in a bullfight.

Sometimes Adam jerked the boat around so fast that I slipped off the bow and into the water. Dunk! These were not accidents, I thought—the gleam in his blue eyes was too gleamy. He turned the boat only when we were very close to shore, though, where it was safe. I wasn’t too concerned about getting ground to bits by a passing boat motor in the open water.

We made it to the bridge and floated under. The sound of cars zooming on the highway overhead echoed in a sucking sound underneath, with a clack-clack, clack-clack as they crossed from one section of bridge to another. I called over the noise, “How much farther are we going?” I looked back at the Vaders’ house, tiny across the water. “The party will start soon.”

“Someone there you want to see?”

I thought he sounded bitter. But when I turned around to glance at him, he was the usual Adam, quiet and intense, one finger tapping the boat with barely contained energy.

“Yes, duh. Isn’t there someone at the party you want to see? We can’t make them jealous if we’re not there.”

“Actually, we can.” He nodded to a pile. “Catch that and stop us.”

I hugged the pile and brought the sailboat alongside it. Adam opened the compartment in the hull and pulled a can of spray paint out of the pool of water inside. He popped off the cap, sprayed a little paint into the air as a test, and stuffed the can into the waistband of his board shorts. “Wait here, woman,” he said, then grinned. He climbed the pile, finding tenuous footholds between the concrete blocks.

“Uh,” I said. He was already at the top of the pile. “Adam?” He reached to the metal outside edge of the bridge (thank God this side faced away from the setting sun, or it would have been too hot to hold) and, using only the strength of his arms (thank God for calisthenics), hoisted himself up until he stood on the ledge. All I could see of him was his heels peeking over the edge.

I wasn’t worried about him falling. Cameron had fallen off before, and it had only stung. I was worried about the black clouds creeping up on the sun on the far side of the bridge, and the wind picking up. A cold gust caught the sail. The boom swung around suddenly and would have decapitated me if I hadn’t ducked. Not really, but I would have had a blue bruise across my neck, and how sexy is that? I crawled to Adam’s spot in the back of the boat, untied the rope, and lowered the sail. “Hey, Adam.”

The clouds blotted out the sun. Far across the lake, the shoreline looked misty with a wall of rain. Lightning forked from the black clouds to the dark green lake.

“Adam, lightning!” I called. My voice was drowned by thunder.

The paint can dropped into the lake. I fished it out and put it back in the compartment. Lightning flashed, closer.

His feet appeared, his legs, his board shorts. With the strength of a hundred push-ups a day, he lowered himself slowly until he hung by his arms from the edge of the bridge. I expected him to drop into the water, because he was like that. He would be electrocuted, just to paint our names on the bridge. Which might sound romantic, except something could sound only so romantic when it involved spray paint.

Thankfully, he swung his legs onto the pile and descended the way he’d gone. He stepped carefully onto the boat just as lightning cracked again, so loud and bright we both jumped, and thunder boomed directly overhead. I scooted toward the bow to make room for him.

He raised the sail, saying, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay!” I shouted over the noise of the rain and the deafening echo of rain under the bridge. “Not your fault.”

“It wasn’t supposed to rain tonight.”

“Storms pop up in the summer.”

Pushing the sail into the wind just long enough to give the boat momentum, and pointing the sail out of the wind again before we blew over, he steered us toward shore. Two piles spanning the width of the bridge stood between us and the bank. Twice, we both put our hands on the piles to pull the boat out into the rain and around to the other side. I bent my head under the cold deluge. Big, hard raindrops beat the back of my neck.

We made it to shore and climbed partway up the slanted concrete embankment under the bridge. Adam brought one of the ropes from the boat with him. He curled it around his ankle so the howling wind didn’t blow the boat home without us. I curled it around my ankle, too, for good measure.

We both stared forward at the swaying sailboat, red sail puddled on the hull, and the pile beyond it. Rain cascaded off both sides of the massive bridge in sheets. My bikini bottoms didn’t provide much padding between the rough concrete and my ass. The rain had chilled me. I moved imperceptibly (I hoped) toward Adam to bask in his heat.

The noise and echo of the rain filled my ears, but Adam’s voice beside me sounded even louder. “Why’d you go to the shrink?”

I looked down. My palm was bleeding. I must have scraped it on the pile.

“Was it because of your mom?”

I wiped my palm on my other hand. Great, now I had blood on both hands. Helpful. I wiped them on the back of my bikini bottoms. Blood stains came out in cold water, and we had plenty of that.

I could feel Adam watching me.

“It wasn’t right after my mom died,” I said. “Actually it wasn’t until sixth grade, when Frances left because McGillicuddy and I had gotten too old to need keeping during the day while Dad was at work. Frankly, I think she was glad to go. Sean calling her Butt I Don’t Need a Governess probably got tiresome.”

“Sean gets tiresome in general.” Adam didn’t meant to change the subject—he just couldn’t help making this comment. He tapped my knee with his knee, prodding me to go on.

“It wasn’t like I did anything so crazy,” I said. “Though that’s probably what crazy people always say, right? I just didn’t want to sit in class anymore. The teachers were fine and the kids were fine. I just couldn’t picture myself sitting in a desk in a straight line of desks for another seven hours.”

“Ha!” Adam said. “You had ADHD.”

“It must have been catching. So when Dad dropped me off at school in the morning, I started checking in at homeroom, then disappearing into the basement, or into the attic. I could stand over the ductwork at one corner of the attic and hear everything the principal said in her office. I could crawl above the auditorium, where the janitor went to change the spotlight bulbs, and listen to rehearsals of the school play. I was seeing this whole side of the school that other people didn’t know existed.”

Lightning flashed, thunder clapped. The rain pouring off the bridge into the lake sounded like static. That’s what sitting in class back then had been like. Where there had been a channel before, now there was only static. I couldn’t tune in, and even if I could, there was nothing to see.

“Eventually the school called my dad to say I’d missed so much school, I was going to flunk the sixth grade. My dad threatened a lawsuit because it was the school’s fault they’d lost me. The upshot of it was that I went to a shrink for a while, and took some pills—”

“Pills,” Adam said in utter disgust, like I would say bryozoa or gelatin salad. I hated gelatin salad. It was so ambiguous. What was it made of?

“These pills weren’t bad,” I said. “They helped. I only took them for a while. I went back to class and everything was fine. Really I think it never would have happened if you’d been in my class, if I’d had someone to talk to. The other kids didn’t even notice I was gone.”

We listened to the rain for a few moments. He said, “Lately I’ve been thinking about going back on my pills.”

I thought he was saying this to make me feel better about spilling my secret. I hoped he was just saying this. Adam on his pills was no fun. He was serious and levelheaded and cautious. Like everybody else. But if that’s what he wanted, I should support him.

“Sean makes me…,” Adam said slowly, balling his hands into fists, “… so… mad.” He flexed both hands with his fingers splayed. Like the anger was so great, he needed to shoot it out his fingertips before it caused him to burst into flames.

“I know,” I said. “Me too.” This wasn’t exactly true. Sean didn’t make me mad at him. He made me mad at myself.

A cool blast of wind made the chill bumps stand up higher on my arms. The sailboat rope tugged at my foot. I crossed my arms in front of me, covered as much skin as possible with my hands, and contracted into a ball.

“Hey. Come here.” Adam slid his bare arm around my bare shoulders. Assuming we were both 98.6, I didn’t understand how he could be so much warmer than me. His skin felt like he’d been standing in front of a fire. I slid my arm around his waist, too, and relaxed into his toasty goodness. I leaned my head against his shoulder. His fingers moved a little on my arm. I thought I heard his heartbeat speed up, but I wasn’t sure.

Eventually the rain dwindled like someone turned down the volume of the static on TV. The thunder moved far away, and what was left of the sunset flung pink and orange on the scattering clouds. I hardly shivered as we edged down the embankment to the boat. Now the problem was finding any wind at all to get us home in the calm after the storm. Sitting on the hull, we both ducked as he wound the boom all the way around the mast and finally caught a little breeze.

We emerged from darkness under the bridge, into the golden light, and looked back. Partly because rain had battered the wet paint, and partly due to Adam’s atrocious handwriting, the bridge didn’t say ADAM LOVES LORI. I cocked my head to one side, then blurred my eyes, neither of which helped. I read out loud, “AOAN LOVES LOKI.”

“They’ll know what I meant.” He was so proud. “Let Sean top that.”

And he did.

13

The party had started. It was hard to see in the twilight, and with the mist rising off the water around us after the rain. But the gray twilight and gray mist made colors pop. Bright T-shirts and Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Tops dotted the Vaders’ lawn and concentrated at the end of the dock. The faint bass beat of the music across the water was punctuated by the occasional foop of a bottle rocket.

Just as Adam had been waiting for me on my dock last Sunday when I canoed to see Frances, Mr. Vader was waiting for us on the marina dock. It was awkward generally for someone to wait for you on the dock like this, because you realized they were waiting for you and watching you when you were still ten minutes from reaching them. With Adam, I’d felt compelled to wave and make faces at him the whole return trip. With Mr. Vader, it was worse. He stood on the dock with his feet planted and his arms folded.