The Boys Next Door (The Boys Next Door 1)

“Only because he told me to back to the left, and I thought I did. I would have done fine if he’d pointed instead of telling me the direction. Again, you don’t have to rub it—”

“I’ll teach you to drive.”

I blinked. He was a daredevil. “Around town?”

“No, right here. It’s safer.”

I pondered the mud field. “I might wreck the pink truck.”

“Who could tell?”

“I might hit somebody else.”

“If they’re here, mud riding, they’d probably get off on it.”

As if in agreement, Scooter Ledbetter chose this moment to start honking his horn in time to his stereo blasting Nine Inch Nails.

“Oh, what the hell,” I said, spitting my petrified gum out the window. It had turned more of a metamorphic flavor anyway. I scooted into the driver’s seat as Adam crawled over me. Nose close to his shirt, I caught a whiff of his cologne.

And then, too soon, he was on his side of the truck and I was on mine. “Is it in first gear?” he asked. “Are your feet on the brake and the clutch? Look both ways and make sure no traffic is coming before proceeding carefully into the mud hole.”

I screamed like a girl as the edge of the pit fell away under us. Then I bit my scream off short as we bounced over a little hill and then a big hill that sent us flying. Now I was giggling.

Adam grinned and fastened his seat belt. “Put the truck in first gear again,” he said in an amazing imitation of the calming announcer voice from the films we watched in driver’s ed. “Press harder on the gas to scale the side of the mud hole. As you reach the top and circle back around for another turn, don’t forget to signal.”

Later, waiting in line for our seventh time through, he told me, “You drive fine.”

“Really?” I squealed.

“Yeah. Of course, I haven’t told you to turn left or right.”

“Right,” I said, disappointed. I thought I’d been driving fine, too. But I’d done well only because he hadn’t asked me to do anything hard, like tell left from right. And let’s not even think about starboard and port.

“When you’re driving by yourself, it won’t matter,” he reasoned. “You’ve lived in this town forever. You know how to get around. Your dad won’t be sitting in the passenger seat, telling you to turn left or right. The only time anyone will do that is when you take your driving test.”

“That’s also the only time a person taking her first road test will be banned from driving in Alabama for life.” I edged the pink truck forward as a Dodge Ram dropped into the mud field in front of us.

“I have ADHD,” he said. “I’m the master of cheating on tests. Just put your hands on the wheel like this.” He placed his hands on the dashboard with his first fingers up and his thumbs in, pointing toward each other. “L is for left.”

“Won’t the chick giving me the test notice I’ve got my fingers in an L on the steering wheel?”

“Hold your hands like that while she’s examining your car,” he said. “By the time you start driving, she won’t think anything about it. She’ll think you have arthritis and it’s none of her business.”

I looked over at him. “You’re a lot sneakier than I thought.”

He smiled.

I said, “Frances hasn’t forgiven you for exploding her homemade cheese.”

His laughter rang out at just the moment I plunged the truck into the pit. He’d given me the confidence of Dale Earnhardt Jr. on holiday. I veered off the very beaten path and into uncharted mud puddles. I kicked up splashes so high, Adam rolled up his window and asked me to roll up mine to save what was left of the ancient interior. We bounced from corner to corner and were bouncing our way back again when the truck dipped lower than I expected, sending a wave of muddy water across the hood and up the windshield. I pressed the gas and heard a ripping sound.

I turned to him in horror. “I broke your truck.”

“We’re just stuck. It happens.” He unfastened his seat belt. “Switch back.”

I started to crawl over him. He’d crawled over me last time, and I figured this time he’d slide under. But he started to crawl over, too. We met in the middle, laughed, and both moved to slide under at the same time.

“Do you want to be on top or on bottom?” he asked.

“Either way,” I heard myself saying. I had to remind myself that this was Adam, not Sean. This was the baby of the Vader family, who had always been the littlest, up until two days ago. At least in my mind.

He picked me up and, before I could wiggle, removed me to the passenger side. “There.” He slid into the driver’s seat and pressed the gas, harder than I’d pressed it, with a longer and louder ripping noise. He opened the door and stepped out, sinking much farther than he would have on solid ground. “They’ll call a tractor from the racetrack to pull us out, but it might take a while. Let’s wait by the concession stand. You’ll ruin your shoes, though. Here, get on my back.”

He stood outside the open driver’s side door. His back was waiting. I hadn’t been on a boy’s back since… hmm… a free-for-all fight with girls on boys’ backs at Cathy Kirk’s pool party in middle school. If I’d been included, obviously there hadn’t been enough girls to go around. And in middle school, the girls and boys were about equal in height and weight, so I’d worried I would crush the boy I rode on.

Not so with Adam. My shoes were dainty things you shoved your toes into with nothing to hold them on. I kicked them off and held them in one hand. I slid across the seat and onto his strong, solid back, feeling like a feather. A snowflake! A dainty snowflake surrounded by an acre of mud.

He nudged the door closed with his hip. I looked down. His feet had disappeared. “What about your shoes?” I asked. “Your mom will kill you.”

“They’re Sean’s. I’ll put them in his closet just like this.”

I felt a momentary pang for Sean. Then almost laughed out loud, picturing the look on his face. They were his shoes, and he would have a right to be mad. But if anything could ever make me dislike Sean, it was how much he cared about his clothes. I cared about my own clothes only through great effort.

Sean’s shoes made a schlep sound every time Adam took a step. He struggled getting up the hill to the lip of the mud hole, and I thought I would have to dismount after all.

He felt me start to slide down. “No!” he said, catching my legs more tightly. “We’re fine.” With one last schlep we made it to the top. The prize was a tiny Airstream trailer blowing smoke out an exhaust fan. The air smelled like fried food. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

“No, but that never stopped me before.”

“Me too.” He stepped up to the window and looked in. “What’cha got?”

The clerk/cook/janitor looked up from a NASCAR talk show on TV. “Cheese fries, homemade doughnuts.”

With me on his back, Adam couldn’t turn his head around enough to look at me, but he turned it enough to let me know I should choose from this array of delicacies.

“Strangely,” I said, “I have a taste for cheese fries.”

Adam reached into his pocket to pay. Putting me down on the bench beside the concession stand would have been miles easier. I was beginning to understand that he liked having me on his back. Holding my shoes in one hand, I grabbed the cheese fries with the other, and he carried a soda.

He walked to the bench, put the soda down, then put me down. I was still holding the cheese fries and my shoes. I tossed my shoes on the ground (oh well, so much for dazzling rhinestones) and picked up the soda so he could sit down, then handed it to him. It was like one of those problems on a standardized test at school. If Sean hooks up with everyone in school on Wednesday and Rachel on Friday, and Adam hooks up with Rachel on Thursday and Lori on Sunday, on what day does the nuclear war commence? One of those problems Adam would just draw an X through because he thought he would never encounter anything like it in the real world.

He crossed one leg over the other casually, as if he weren’t coated with mud up to his knees. Then he took a sip of the soda, handed it to me, and pulled out a cheese fry. I took a tentative sip of soda. Not that I thought he had germs—or really bad germs, anyway—but we’d never shared a soda before. We’d shared popcorn, of course, while we watched DVDs with the other boys. Once the scoop from my ice cream cone had plopped into the lake, and he’d shared his ice cream with me. This was probably kind of gross. Mrs. Vader and Frances had rushed at us when they saw me about to take a lick. I shouldn’t read too much into sharing a soda now, though. It was something people did when they went out.

“Mmph!” he hummed with his mouth full of cheese fry. Swallowing, he grabbed my bare foot and pulled it into his lap. “You painted your little toenails.”

I opened my mouth to explain proudly that the toe-nails in question represented hours of meticulous work. Well, maybe forty-five minutes while watching reruns of Deadliest Catch. I’d put the polish on and taken it off three times because it tended toward gloopy. Who knew beauty regimens would be so complex?

But when I looked up, my mouth just stayed open. He was staring at me with those light blue eyes. A chill hit me from nowhere. It made the hair on my arms stand up. It raced down my body to my toes, which he was stroking with one rough thumb. And so the chill moseyed back up my body again.

I took a slow, shaky breath through my wide open, ridiculously gaping mouth. Then I realized what the problem was. His resemblance to Sean was eerie sometimes, especially the light blue eyes. I managed to say, “You’re giving me the look again. Don’t look at me like that.”

Stubbornly he gave me the look for ten more seconds, so there. I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the look. I really enjoyed what it did to my skin. He was a superhero with Massage-O-Vision. I enjoyed it too much for comfort. He was just going to turn his Massage-O-Vision on Rachel when he got her back, so the pleasant pricklies I felt were pricklies on loan. He’d be horrified to know he was giving them to me. Besides, I wasn’t going to sit there and let him give me the look when I’d asked him not to give me the look.

Just as I was about to either pinch him or find the strength to look away, he let my toes go and turned away himself, gazing out over the splashing trucks. The mud sparkled in the artificial light. At first glance it might have seemed about as romantic as watching cement being poured, or a building being demolished by a wrecking ball. Nothing said romance like the scent of burning rubber. But to me, it started to seem very romantic. I almost wished Holly and Beige could see me now. Well, not really, because mud had splashed up on my calves. I scratched at a spot with my fingernail, and it smeared.

He asked, “Why does it have to be Sean?”

10

I snapped my head up and tried to gauge what he’d meant by this. I couldn’t tell, because he wouldn’t meet my gaze. Which was probably a good thing. I could feel myself flushing as my heart pounded.

I was attracted to Adam. Not as much as I was attracted to Sean, of course. That would never happen. But Adam had been so sweet and so fun, teaching me to drive. Tangling with me as we switched places in the truck didn’t hurt either. Or carrying me on his back. I really enjoyed him carrying me on his back.

Did he mean, Why does it have to be Sean instead of me? And if he did…

Good God, what was the matter with me? Adam didn’t like me that way. He just hated Sean. He wanted to know why I was so stuck on Sean, of all people.

And I didn’t like Adam that way, either. Not really. Flirting with him was fun, but that’s all it was, and I was getting carried away. I needed to remember I was on a mission. I would tell him the whole truth about the mission. I owed him that much, since he’d agreed to help me by faking a relationship with me.

I munched a cheese fry and thought about Sean sashaying his way through the school lunchroom last spring, Beige on one arm, Holly on the other. Everyone turned to watch as he passed. People called out to him from the tables. All he needed was the paparazzi behind him. Also Beige or Holly needed a very small dog that got sick when it ate too much protein. I said simply, “Sean lights up the room.”

Adam still wouldn’t look at me. He tried to shake one fry loose from a cheesy clump. “I can see why you’d want to watch him, listen to him. Not why you’d want to get together with him. He lights up the room so bright that you would just be sitting there blinking, blinded.” He gave up on freeing the fry and stuffed the whole cheesy clump in his mouth. Immediately he started picking through the pile for another, like he needed something to do with his hands.

“I’ve always wanted to be with him,” I said. “Yeah, logically I can see the drawbacks, but I don’t think you or anyone could argue me out of it. I need to find out for myself, because I’ve wanted this so long.”

“Always,” Adam muttered, tossing up a bit of fry and catching it in his mouth.

“Almost always. Actually, I can remember the very day it started.” The mud field in front of us dissolved into a sun-splashed view of the lake through shady branches. The roar of monster trucks faded, replaced by birds chirping, and my mother’s voice. “It was before Mom died. We were all really little. But I remember it so clearly. Your whole family was at my house for a cookout in the summer. I was with Mom and your mom up on the deck. I’d wanted to play with you boys, but Mom wouldn’t let me.

“Your mom said I was such a lovely little girl, so ladylike and polite. That’s what pricked my ears up, of course: the praise. But I kept playing like I wasn’t listening in. Then your mom said I didn’t always have to stay home. I was welcome to come over to your house to play whenever McGillicuddy came over. She called him Bill. Whatever. Now I was really paying attention, and holding my breath to see what Mom would say. All I’d dreamed about my whole little life was playing with y’all.”