The kids gaped at me when they heard the K word. Which probably didn’t reassure them about their futures as well-adjusted teens under the instruction of Fanny the Nanny. It didn’t help matters that while I told Frances about Sean and Adam, she placed her hands on her knees and began one of her deep-breathing relaxation techniques.
“Well?” I shouted. Her eyes flew open. I prompted her, “Doesn’t this sound like a supreme girl-adventure? Do you watch MTV reality shows? That’s a silly question, isn’t it? Never mind. Maybe they have drama like this on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”
“Something else is going on with those boys,” she said.
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. It’s been years since I gave Adam or Sean or Cameron or Bill the evil eye. You’re the only one who comes to visit. Except… Mirabella, we do not eat the sand.” She scooped up the girl and took her inside. The girl didn’t protest. These children had been drugged or lobotomized.
I turned to the boy. “Don’t you ever protest?”
He shook his head.
“Hold strikes? Write letters of complaint? She always told us we had permission to do anything if we could write a convincing argument for it. We tried.”
He intoned in a cute little zombie voice, “We do not eat the sand.”
Frances came back out and deposited the girl in the sandbox again. The girl examined some nearby dried leaves hungrily. “I guarantee you something else is going on there,” Frances repeated. “Yours isn’t the only plot.”
“Right. Sean stole Rachel from Adam to get revenge. Sean is always the instigator of the plot. For the record, Sean is the one who started calling you Butt I Don’t Need a Governess. I probably wouldn’t have been half the hellion I was, if it hadn’t been for Sean egging everybody on.”
“I don’t know,” Frances said thoughtfully. “It was Adam who set off the firecrackers in my homemade cheese.”
“OH MY GOD I HAD COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE HOMEMADE CHEESE.” I laughed until I choked. The children studied me with serious eyes. They were adapting to the Montessori method a lot better than McGillicuddy and I had.
“I always loved Adam,” Frances said.
I sniffled. “You did?” Frances wasn’t too free with the professions of love.
“But Adam had room to grow. Sounds like he still does.”
Feeling strangely defensive of Adam all of a sudden, I said, “Everybody has room to grow.”
“And I don’t want you to be his field.” She gave me a stern look.
“What am I, a crop of rutabagas?”
She glanced at the kids and said through her teeth to me, “Do you understand?”
“Not really. Are you forbidding me to see Adam?” This was actually kind of romantic, though ridiculous. I forbid you to see the boy next door!
“Mirabella and Alvin,” Frances said, “please turn on the garden hose and water your mother’s beautiful flowers.” Miraculously, the brainwashed kiddies stood and obeyed, taking half the sand with them. Frances watched them go, then turned to me.
“Ever since your mom died,” she whispered, “your dad has been terrified for you kids. But he’s gone out of his way not to be overprotective so that you don’t live life afraid. And those were the instructions he gave me as your caregiver.” She reached over and patted my knee. “No one’s going to forbid you to do anything, Lori. Just… watch out around those boys.”
9
Adam sat on the end of my dock with his shoes beside him and his bare feet swinging in the bryozoa-infested waters. Just kidding—my dock had been Sanitized for My Protection by a minnow net with a very long handle.
I skimmed the canoe against the dock and stopped myself with an oar. He stood up dripping, caught the rope I threw him, and wound it around the dock cleat. “Date or what?” he asked.
Grabbing my shoes from the bottom of the canoe, I confirmed, “Date. Ew. It’s so weird to think about. Help me out, lovah.”
He put out a hand to help me onto the dock. He did it in such a gentlemanly fashion, with no tickling or pinching or even a secret handshake, that I couldn’t help but yank his arm to startle him. Then he put his weight on me to keep from falling, and we both came within a few millimeters of flipping the canoe over and landing in the lake.
We both managed to save at the last second. He helped me out of the canoe as if nothing had happened, except his face was bright red, and he wore that don’t make me laugh look. “Your dad said you went to see Frances.”
“Yeah. I told her about the plan, and she thinks you’re only going along with it because you want to get lucky with me.” We shared an uncomfy titter at this ridiculous idea as he slid his feet into his shoes, but something made me press him about this. “Did you get lucky with Rachel?”
He stared down at me, disapproving. He turned the disapproving stare in the general direction of the Harbargers’ dock across the lake.
“You did,” I said with a sigh. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.
“N—,” he started. “W—Mmph.” He put both his hands into his hair. This showed me how strong and well-formed the biceps were on this tanned, beautiful boy. “I didn’t, but you don’t know that, okay? I have two older brothers. As far as they’re concerned, I’ve been doing the entire cheerleading squad since I was fourteen.”
He hadn’t. So why was I picturing the tanned biceps straining as he braced himself above… who?
“Your dad’s thinking the same thing,” Adam said.
“About your biceps?” I chuckled.
Slowly and oh so painfully I realized no one had made a joke out loud about Adam’s biceps.
Slowly and less painfully he put his arms down. “I would like some gum,” he said. “Would you like some gum?”
“I would love some gum,” I croaked.
He reached deep into the pocket of his shorts and drew out each of the following items in turn, placing them in his other pocket: his wallet, a lighter, a Sacagawea dollar, a plastic box of fishhooks, a four-inch-long pocketknife. Finally he produced a pack of gum so old, the company had switched to a new logo since it was made. Fine. Anything I could stuff into my mouth.
“I meant,” he said, jaw working hard on a petrified square, “your dad thinks I want to get lucky with you too. At least, that was his second reaction when I rang the doorbell and told him I was there to pick you up for our date. His first reaction was to threaten to have me arrested.”
“Oh, pshaw.” I swallowed a mouthful of artificial flavoring. Mmmmm, igneous. “He threatens to have me arrested. It’s a term of endearment.” I walked down the dock so Adam would follow me. When I glanced back, he was still standing at the end of the dock. I threw over my shoulder, “I’ll visit you in prison.”
He jogged to catch up with me, and held my arm to balance me as I slipped my heels on. I knew better than to wear heels on the dock. I’d seen too many girls wear them at the boys’ parties. Heels got caught between the planks and arrested forward motion, yo.
“Why didn’t you tell your dad we’re hooking up?” Adam asked. “I told my mom we’re hooking up.” He sounded almost hurt, like he thought I was embarrassed of him.
“Would you come off it? You shouldn’t have told your mom. She gave me the third degree this morning, like she knows something’s up between you and Sean. You tried to get her to ground him? How am I supposed to go out with him if she grounds him?”
Adam shrugged and said with a straight face, “If you really loved him, it wouldn’t matter what you did when you went out, as long as you were together.” He pressed his lips together.
“You are so full of it. Anyway, I told Dad you were giving me a lift to town to buy an eyelash comb tonight, and we might hang out for a while. I figured he’d stage an intervention if I told him the whole truth. And if I told him you and I were hooking up for real, he’d give me the fourth degree about it, and you, and sex, and… oh.”
Adam nodded. “Whereas if you didn’t tell him, he’d give me the fifth degree.”
“I guess I didn’t think it through. It didn’t seem worth the trouble, since we’ll only be together a couple of weeks.” Truth was, I’d focused on how our diabolical plan would help me get Sean. With an emphasis on Sean. Not that Adam’s relationship with my dad didn’t matter, because they did have to live next door to each other for several more years, but come on. What were a few fake dates between friends?
We walked up the hill to Adam’s driveway. I opened the passenger door of the pink truck and climbed inside—and I do mean climbed, because when I stood on the ground, the seat was even with my head. Adam sat in the driver’s seat, weirdly. He’d driven McGillicuddy and me home from tennis the night before, but I was used to sitting in the backseat with Adam while someone older drove. I wasn’t used to seeing him as a driver himself.
Sean’s new truck had already left the driveway. He had to drive all the way across town to pick up Rachel. No worries. We’d see them at the movies. Our biggest problem would be deciding whether to sit on the back row with the other couples who planned to make out, or further down where Sean and Rachel could see us. Then maybe there would be the additional problem of the making out. But I was getting ahead of myself. We could solve that problem when we came to it, and we hadn’t even reached the movie theater yet. We were taking a detour at the dirt track, probably to show some of Adam’s friends the new (to him) pink truck. And the hot prize of a girl inside! Yeah, probably not.
Instead of parking in the dirt track lot, he drove around to the mud field. It was just a huge pit of mud that the owners of the dirt track lovingly sculpted into valleys and bumps, and watered daily. Build it and they would come. Boys loved to splash across the mud pit in their pickup trucks. They didn’t do this with their girlfriends, though. Girls wouldn’t put up with this.
And yet here we were, perched on the lip of the pit. Scooter Ledbetter pulled up behind us in his jacked-up F-150. We couldn’t even back out.
I ventured to ask, “Is this our date?”
“In all its glory.” With one arm, Adam made a sweeping motion across the mud field before us.
“Great. We’re trying to make Sean and Rachel jealous, besides which it’s my first date in real life, and you’re taking me mud riding.” I’d been with the boys and Mr. Vader to the dirt track countless times to watch races. I’d always thought my first date would be with Sean. Adam wasn’t too far off. But I’d never imagined my first date would be with Sean’s stand-in at the dirt track. “You’re bringing sexy back.”
He stuck out his bottom lip. “Where did you want to go?”
“Didn’t Sean and Rachel go to the movies?”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet she made him take her to the new Disney cartoon. That’s his punishment for stealing her from me. That and MTV. Endless reality shows on MTV.” He cracked his knuckles.
“Adam, I don’t care if it’s Mickey and Minnie Bust a Move. We need to be there.”
“We want to make them jealous,” he agreed, “but we can’t follow them around. We don’t want to admit we’re trying to make them jealous. And that’s exactly what we’ll be doing if we set foot in Mickey and Minnie Bust a Move.”
I started to protest. But as I thought about it, I remembered every time I’d watched a DVD with the boys, Adam had left the room after thirty minutes, asking Cameron to call him back in for the juicy parts. And we were always telling Adam to be quiet. We couldn’t hear the movie over his CD player, or his drum set, or the roar of the blender as he made milkshakes in the kitchen. I asked, “You can’t sit through a whole movie, can you?”
He frowned, which made cute little lines appear between his brows. He fished the lighter out of his pocket and flicked it, studying the flame.
Either he couldn’t sit through a whole movie, or it hurt him too much to be around Rachel while she was with Sean. This wouldn’t help us make them jealous. But it was only the second night after the freaking shock of seeing Sean and Rachel together for the first time. Adam’s heart must be breaking every time we talked about Sean and Rachel, yet he’d come with me this far. I could be more understanding and give him a few days for the wound to scab over.
“We don’t have to go to the movie,” I sighed, “but we need to go somewhere girls will see us. There’s no one here but boys. It’ll never get back to Sean and Rachel that we were together. Boys don’t gossip.”
“Pah! You don’t know us as well as you think.”
This was a disturbing prospect.
He stuffed his lighter back in his pocket. “Here’s an idea. Call me crazy, but what if we actually enjoyed hooking up?”
“Whoa, Nelly,” I said. “You scare me, thinking out of the box.”
“What if we made hooking up productive?”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Producing envy, with or without big fat teardrops.”
“Forget about that, Lori. It’ll come without us trying so hard.” He took the box of fishhooks out of his pocket and rattled it. “You’re turning sixteen in less than two weeks.”
That was a low blow. “You don’t have to rub it in that I forgot your birthday,” I protested. “You remember mine because yours is first.”
“And didn’t your dad stop taking you for driving lessons after you ran his Beamer into the woodpile?”