The Boys Next Door (The Boys Next Door 1)

“Is it on MTV?”

“Yes!”

“Get out of my room.”

As he stood, I made a weak grab for The Hunt for Red October, but he dodged me. He closed the door behind him.

Adam was in love with me. He wasn’t just saying it to keep me with him while he made Sean jealous. He was in love with me.

Head throbbing, I looked around my room, which still reflected the boy I’d been before I started transforming myself. I hadn’t gotten around to a room makeover with purple flowers and a fuzzy pink ottoman. As the air-conditioning clicked on, the fighter jet models I’d built from kits swayed at the end of their strings near the ceiling. I was a little brother. I was a mess.

Adam had been in love with me, just like this.

And now he wasn’t.

It was a good thing Advil took care of my headache. If I’d had to stay out of work and spend the day at home, I would have driven myself insane (if I wasn’t already). As it was, I showered faster than usual to make up for lost time, taking care to keep my stitches out of the spray. I ate breakfast as usual, except Dad gave me a big hug and sobbed a little into my hair. As usual, McGillicuddy and I opened the door to hike across our yard and the Vaders’ to the marina—

—and there stood Sean with his finger on the doorbell. He asked me brightly, “Will you go to the party tonight with me?”

My brain said, Hooray! I’m going out with Sean! My time has come!

My body was strangely quiet. There was no happy skin. My brain reached down through my nerve endings to poke at my heart and make sure it was okay. My heart said, Eh. At this point I realized I did need to go back to the shrink. I sagged against the doorjamb, rolled my eyes, and uttered something very unladylike.

McGillicuddy stepped around me and wagged his cell phone between his fingers. With a pointed look at Sean, he told me, “Call me if you need me.”

“I could take you,” Sean shouted after McGillicuddy. “Bring it on.” His voice echoed around the garage. Then he turned back to me and sighed, “I was afraid you’d say that. Look, I told my dad we’d come to work a little late this morning because we’re going to fish your wakeboard out of the lake. Let’s talk.”

I followed him down to my pier, where he’d tied the wakeboarding boat. Clearly it did occur to him to dock in a certain place to save someone a long walk. Himself. Just not me. We stepped in, and I looked around on the floor. “Who cleaned the blood out of the boat for me? I was going to do it this morning.”

“Adam,” Sean said. “When we get to the pontoon boat, you’ve got to tell me this story. He was saying it was his fault and crying the whole time. Pussy.” He slapped his hand over his mouth. “Sorry. I almost forgot you weren’t a guy.” Before I could offer a choice response, he cranked the motor and the Nickelback.

As we zoomed toward the pontoon boat, I noticed that a dump truck had mistakenly unloaded a pile of soot onto the side of the bridge. The closer we got, the more clearly I could see it wasn’t a pile of soot after all but carefully applied spray paint marking out the letters AOAN LOVES LOKI. Adam had been busy. He must have gone out in the motorboat in the near-dark last night, or the near-dark this morning. He wanted to get the offensive words off the bridge as quickly as he could. They would have haunted him until he got rid of them. He hated me that much.

“Junior!” Sean stood in front of me, clapping his hands. “McGillicuddy Part Deux!” He’d stopped the boat next to the pontoon boat. “McGillicuddy left your wakeboard floating here, so let’s check under the pontoon boat first.” He handed me one of the oars that motorboats carry in case their engines stop when they run over logs. As we poked around under the pontoons, he asked, “Why’s Adam so pissed at you?”

“It’s complicated. We’ve only been going out to make you and Rachel mad.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him this. But my brilliant ploys had gotten me into this fix, and I’d lost hope they could get me out. Also, I must have bled out my last lick of sense. “I’ve sort of had a thing for you.”

He pulled his oar from under the boat and put all his weight on it, like he needed it to keep him from collapsing. “You? Have a thing for me?”

“Had.”

He made a face. “Ugh!”

This should have been the low point of my life, the one I’d dreaded for over a decade: rejection by Sean. Now that it had finally happened, I didn’t feel humiliated. I was angry. “What do you mean, ugh? You flirted with me a couple of weeks ago, before your first party. Remember wiping bryozoa on me? That’s the mating dance of the brain-dead Vader brothers.”

“Oh, yeah! I’d forgotten all about the bryozoa.” He waved his hand in the air, dismissing the bryozoa incident like a pesky yellow jacket. “Adam was acting protective of you that day for some reason. I got the idea he might like you a little. So I figured I’d push his buttons. I can’t see myself really coming on to you, ever.” He shoved his oar under the boat again. “No offense.”

“None taken, you ass.”

He glanced sideways at me. “When I said ‘Ugh,’ I just meant, ‘Ugh, what could Buddy possibly see in little old me?’”

Sure you did. “I honestly can’t remember,” I said, poking my oar under the boat, too. “Anyway, Adam thinks I crashed into the pontoon boat on purpose so you could close the wakeboarding show again, and you’d like me better. I didn’t, but Adam thinks I did.” I ran my finger over the little dent my thick skull had made in the aluminum side of the boat. “I guess he was willing to take the fake love just so far.”

“So you’ve faked hooking up.”

I glanced toward the bridge, at the scribble that once had said AOAN LOVES LOKI. “Yeah.”

“You faked flirting with each other on the desk in the living room.”

“Yeah.” It hadn’t felt like faking, but what did I know?

“You faked making out on the end of the dock at the party last Friday? And disappearing into the lake? Because that was convincing.”

“Yes. I mean, we really made out, but we weren’t really in love.” At least, I hadn’t realized it at the time.

“That little shit!” he yelled so loudly that I worried about the innocent ears of Frances and the Harbarger children around the bend. I imagined Frances pretending she hadn’t heard a thing as the shout echoed around their fenced yard.

“Now why are you so pissed?” I asked.

“Because it worked! He stole Rachel from me!”

I stomped my foot on the floor of the boat, like a girl. “You stole Rachel from him in the first place, just to make him mad. Even if you thought you really liked her by the time she broke up with you, she only seemed like something you’d want because Adam had her in the first place.”

He brought in his oar again and leaned on it. “I may be shallow, Lori, but I’m not a monster.” He gazed downstream. “I don’t think your wakeboard’s under here. Maybe the current caught it.”

I looked downstream, too, in the general direction of the dam several miles away. My wakeboard had probably gotten stuck in one of the gates and cut off the power supply to the tri-county area. The way my morning was going, the hydroelectric police would be waiting for me on the marina dock.

“Let’s try one more place.” He cranked the engine, drove to the nearby bank, and cut the power again. As the boat drifted, we used the oars to shift the logs and leaves washed up against the edge of the woods. “You think I’m a monster,” he said quietly.

“I think we all are.”

A gust of wind blew us along faster. It swooped through the woods, swaying the trees and littering us with blossoms and leaves and delicate tree crap.

“Well,” he finally said. “I didn’t steal Rachel just to make Adam mad. I pretended that’s what I was doing. That’s what Adam would think anyway. But really, I’ve been into her for so long. I couldn’t stand the thought of going to college without finding out if she liked me, too.”

I was going to yell at him for being so selfish until it occurred to me that this was pretty much how I’d felt about him.

“I’ve seen the way she looks at Adam,” he went on. “Girls don’t look at me like that. They look at me, sure, but not like that.”

Cunning as Sean was about other people, surely he couldn’t be this obtuse about himself? In exasperation, I pointed out, “You don’t look at them like that.”

“I look at Rachel like that. And she says she can tell from the way I treat Adam that I have no soul. I could have sworn I did.” He laughed.

Rachel might have more sense than I’d given her credit for. She’d never actually insulted me, besides calling me a ‘ho to her friends when I did the secret handshake with Adam, which was understandable. I had no reason to dislike her, other than the obvious boy-ploys. And no reason at all to think she was stupid.

“But over the last couple of weeks,” Sean continued, “I’ve seen how good you and Adam are together. And how good Rachel and I are together. Maybe Adam and Rachel are good together, too, but if they are, I’d like to rip Rachel’s heart out and throw it down in the driveway and drive back and forth over it in my truck a couple of times and give it back to her. I know you feel the same way about Adam.”

I stared at him and wondered what my mother had been thinking.

“I don’t think we need to worry about that, though,” he said. “Rachel wants to get back with Adam, but Adam doesn’t want Rachel, if you can believe that! He called her last night after he dried up and had this, like, reasonable, adult conversation with her. He told her it was over between them, and not just because she’d made out with me when I snapped my fingers. He went out with her in the first place to make you jealous.”

None of this sounded like something Adam would share with Sean on purpose. McGillicuddy, maybe, or Cameron, but not Sean. “Did you listen in on this conversation?”

Sean gave me this how dare you insinuate such a thing look. Which told me, yes, he had listened in on this conversation.

He went on, “So we know they won’t get back together. If they do look like they’re getting back together at the party tonight, Adam will be faking. All we have to do to get him back with you is convince him you’re better than nothing. Which…” He looked me up and down, then shrugged.

The wind gusted again, lifting sections of his light brown hair, and flattening his T-shirt against his strong chest. He was a lot like Adam, and completely different. I said, “You are a sad, sad little man.”

“I am what I am. So, I know this will sound kind of gross, but will you make out with me at the party?”

I poked at the shoreline with my oar. “This is a bad idea. It was a bad idea the first time I had it, and it’s a bad idea now.” But I might as well try something to get Adam back, right? I’d hit bottom. Nothing we did could make things worse.

“If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me. Lori, I’m in love with Rachel. That’s never happened to me before. I’m not willing to let that go without a fight. And if you feel the same way about Adam, seems like you wouldn’t let it go, either.” He took a few steps closer to me in the boat. “He holds a grudge, you know.”

I snorted. “I know.” Nothing had ever been more obvious.

“You can’t just hope he’ll come around someday. He won’t. You have to bring him back. Hey, what do we have here?” He leaned way over the side of the boat, grabbed a flower-printed edge underneath a log, and brought up my dripping wakeboard. Handing it to me, he said, “Your chariot, mademoiselle.”

It was exactly like something Adam would say. I clung to the wet wakeboard and squeezed my eyes shut to keep from crying. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. Okay.”

It all would have been hilarious if it hadn’t sucked.

18

And I couldn’t go through with it. When McGillicuddy said he was heading for the party, I stayed behind. I actually started the enormous project of picking up all the books and magazines scattered three deep on the floor of my room. After about an hour and hardly any progress, I realized that by shelving them, I was messing up a filing system I didn’t even know I had. Books I wanted to read again were thrown on one side of my bed. Bad books were abandoned by the window. Wakeboarding mags were strewn from my dresser to my desk in approximate order of how hot the boys were in them, and so forth. I gave up and sat downstairs in the den with my dad for a long time, watching Dirty Jobs.

My cell phone rang. I pried it from the pocket of my tight miniskirt. I knew girls were supposed to carry purses instead of stuffing everything in their pockets, but I needed to ease into this transition over the coming year. Sirens weren’t built in a day. “Hello?”

Sean was on the other end of the line, making chicken noises.

I hung up and said bye to my dad. Again, I didn’t notify him what was going on with my many suitors. I figured the situation would change anyway in the next fifteen minutes or so.

Sean stood in the doorway of the Vaders’ house, letting all the air-conditioning out into the hot night. Waiting for me. “Where have you been?”

“Duh, I’ve been next d—”

He grabbed me, pulled me into the foyer, and slammed the door. “Rachel and Adam are inside talking. To each other! And I’ve told everybody here that you and I are together. When you didn’t show up, it looked like you didn’t love me as much as I love you.”