The Boys Next Door (The Boys Next Door 1)

“Stop the presses.”

“So we need to make up for lost time.” He body-slammed me against the wall and stuck his tongue in my mouth.

Well, I just let him do it. Why not? I let him slide his hands up and down my sides, too, in case that helped the cause. If he wanted to touch my boobs, I would need to take that under advisement, but otherwise I found I had a very high tolerance for a handsome ass of a boy using me as target practice.

Besides, out the corner of my eye, I could see Holly and Beige watch us from the end of the hall. They disappeared around the corner. Next a couple of guys from my algebra class walked very slowly by the opening, pretending not to watch us.

Sean came up for breath. I tried not to gasp quite as hard as I had after bashing my head and nearly drowning.

“How many gawkers is that?” he asked.

“Four,” I said. “Is that enough to spread it around the party? And how can you stand to kiss a girl like that when you don’t feel anything for her?”

He rubbed the back of my neck, like a lover. “I feel something for you. You clean up okay. Don’t you feel something for me?”

I shook my head. “I’m not feeling you, dog.”

“Don’t shake your head,” he said through his teeth. “We’re going into the party now. Don’t do anything negative. Agree with everything I say. Laugh a lot. Can you put your hands on my crotch?”

“Why, hell no, I cannot.” I didn’t remember anything like this happening in Pride and Prejudice. “Can I find Tammy, take her to the bathroom with me, and giggle about you?”

His eyes widened in admiration. “That would be awesome!”

I was getting good at this. I gave him a peck on his stylishly stubbly cheek, patted his ass, and walked into the living room.

Every head snapped up to watch me.

Including Adam’s. There were thirty-something people in the shadowy room, and I saw him right away. He sat on the couch with Rachel, exactly where Sean had sat with her the night he insulted me. Adam wasn’t wrapped around Rachel like Sean had been. He wasn’t touching her at all. He was talking to her. They could have been friends.

So they weren’t doing anything to make me jealous. All he did was look up at me with such fury in those blue eyes that I knew I was going to throw up.

“Help,” I croaked, putting a hand on Tammy’s shoulder.

She looked around at me. She looked at the boys she’d been talking with: Cameron and McGillicuddy. “Can Cameron help you?” she asked me coldly. “They’re his brothers, so he could help you better. Bill and I were talking.”

Hadn’t she heard Sean’s blitzkrieg rumors? I wasn’t pretending to hook up with Adam to get Sean. Surprise! I was pretending to hook up with Sean to get Adam, and if ever something was giggle-in-the-bathroom material, this was it. I was calculating how much of this to divulge to her while Cameron and McGillicuddy were listening, when something else clicked in my brain. “Are y’all going out?”

“Yes!” McGillicuddy beamed.

Tammy beamed too, then tried to hold the smile as she realized she’d been busted.

“So,” I said to Tammy, “when you told me you came to the last party to see me, really you were using that as an excuse to see McGillicuddy.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Tammy said distantly, a tone she’d never used with me before. The tone Beige used all the time. “I guess I didn’t understand you and I were that close.”

“I guess it was my mistake,” I said.

“I want to go back to college,” Cameron said. “Linear Differential Equations class will seem so relaxing after this summer.”

McGillicuddy frowned at Tammy, then moved toward me like he would pull me aside and talk to me. But McGillicuddy didn’t go out much. He’d actually asked someone out! I didn’t want to mess up this thing with Tammy for him. Not over some weird girl-jealousy that I didn’t even understand completely.

“I gotta do something,” I mumbled, pulling the skull and crossbones from my pocket. This took a couple of tries when my fist got stuck.

Across the room, Sean stood with some of his many friends. Down by his side, where the crowd couldn’t see, he motioned to me. Rachel and her friends were right behind him. If I went to him, he’d make sure they saw everything that counted.

From the sofa on the other side of the room, Adam glared at me.

I took a step toward Adam. The force of his glare was like a magnet turned the wrong way against another. I took another step toward him and felt the force in my stomach. I would never be able to reach him in the face of such force. Plus Scooter Ledbetter was trying to start a mosh pit in the center of the room. So I skirted the force like I was headed out the door to the deck. Then, when Adam bit his lip and looked down, I snuck past the repellant force and plopped next to him on the couch.

“Here.” I held out the skull and crossbones in my sweaty palm. Attractive! It didn’t matter any more. “Look,” I said in a rush, “I didn’t crash into the pontoon boat to get Sean. Even I am not that unbalanced.”

His mouth moved so little that I almost thought he used telepathy to tell me, “I don’t believe you.”

“No shit. And I’m sorry about the PDA with Sean. I don’t know what I was thinking, Adam. I want another chance with you, and I know that wasn’t the way to get it.”

“That’s okay,” he said so brightly, so unlike him, that I knew something evil was coming. “I like Sean taking my seconds.”

“See, that’s the problem,” I snapped, angry again despite myself. “You say you love me, but you’re always looking over your shoulder for Sean.”

“And you’re always looking over your shoulder for Sean. Or Holly, or Beige.” The Foo Fighters song booming through the room ended at the precise moment he said, “Or whoever’s made you change from what you were into a first-class bitch.”

Only a moment more of silence ticked by before Fall Out Boy started. But the damage was done. People at the edge of the crowd were slow to start dancing again. They thought we couldn’t hear them over the music as they yelled in clear voices, “Did you hear what Adam called Lori?”

I told myself he wouldn’t have said anything so horrible to me if he weren’t jealous. Of course, I’d told myself the same thing when Sean mentioned the shrink. But Sean was Sean, and Adam was Adam. And while I was trying to use my intimidating brain power to turn myself into water vapor and vanish into thin air, Adam snatched the skull and crossbones from my open palm. “I have just the use for this,” he said as he stomped out the door to the deck.

I left my sparkly shoes on the floor next to the couch. I knew that jig was up. But even in my bare feet, I didn’t make it outside before Adam was on the ground far below, halfway to the dock. Possibly he’d jumped over the deck railing.

I dashed down the stairs. Sean called to me from the deck above me. I dashed faster. This was no time to save face. I had a terrible feeling about that skull and crossbones.

Sure enough, by the time I’d pushed through the crowd in the yard and the wall of people on the dock, Adam was sitting with the boys playing quarters. I stepped forward to stop him. It was too late. Instead of a quarter, he bounced the pendant on the dock. And instead of ringing the cup, the skull and crossbones slipped between two planks, into the lake.

“Ohhhhhh!” said the other boys.

“Get it,” I told Adam.

He said thoughtfully, “No.”

I pictured it sinking through the water, but it wasn’t heavy enough to stay in one place on the bottom. The current would sweep it away if he didn’t hurry. “I bought it for you!” I shrieked.

“I wore it for you,” he said evenly. “And now I’m through with it.”

I shoved back through the wall of people, jumped into Mr. Vader’s personal fishing boat tied on one side of the dock, and grabbed a big waterproof flashlight. I didn’t have to push through the wall of people on my way back because they saw me coming and got out of my way. I walked straight through the game of quarters, scattering frightened boys. I sensed rather than saw Adam’s hand reach for my ankle and miss as I hopped into the lake in my adorable clothes.

The water was warm and black. Oops. I clicked the button on the flashlight and directed the beam underneath the pier. The water was only about eight feet deep here, so I was able to kick down to the rocky bottom, where I thought the pendant had fallen through.

In the eerie green light, I saw it glinting on a big branch the boys had lodged under the dock to attract fish. That was bad enough, because wood got slimy in water. But this was worse: the pendant glinted from its resting place in A GLOB OF BRYOZOA clinging to the branch. Ugh, ugh, ugh, and the pendant moved as the bryozoa bobbed in the current. Any second now, the skull and crossbones would tumble deep into the lake, lost forever.

My breath was gone. I swam toward the surface to collect one more breath. I didn’t expect half the school to be peering over the side of the dock, watching for me in the darkness. That was okay. I was on a mission to PLUNGE MY HAND INTO THE BRYOZOA OH MY GOD. I took my breath and dove back down—

And someone on the dock grabbed me around the waist. Someone strong who wasn’t dislodged from the dock when I struggled. Adam lifted me backward out of the water.

“Let me go!” I hollered, not looking at him, still leaning toward the water and trying to struggle free. The flashlight clattered to the dock. “I saw it. I can still get it. Let me go!”

“You’re not supposed to get your stitches wet,” he said.

I wanted to point out that he would not know this, since he didn’t stick around the emergency room long enough to hear what the doctor had to say. Then I remembered Adam had a lot more experience with stitches than I did.

And then, out the corner of my eye, I saw a blur, and Adam was gone. An enormous splash backed everyone away from the water. Adam and Sean flailed in the lake.

“Get their parents,” I said over my shoulder. If Cameron or McGillicuddy had been there, they would have stepped forward before now. And Sean’s friends and Adam’s friends never intervened, like fights between brothers were somehow sacred. I watched Adam and Sean in the water to make sure neither of them went down for too long—though there wasn’t much I could have done if they had. Nothing seemed to be happening behind me. The crowd watched the show as attentively as I did. I turned around and screamed, “Go get their parents!” Three people ran up the dock and through the yard.

I jumped out of the way as one of the boys hauled himself up the ladder. He snapped his legs up before the other boy could drag him back into the lake. But then the second boy grabbed the top of the ladder, swung himself onto the dock, and tackled the first.

There didn’t seem much point in explaining to Adam that Sean had only attacked him because Sean and I were pretending to be a couple and trying to make Adam jealous. After one of them had hit the other, it didn’t really matter why anymore, at least not to them. I bent as close to them as I dared and hollered, “I’ve already told your parents.”

“Sean, stop,” came Rachel’s voice from the crowd, ever-helpful.

I expected them to roll toward me. I’d have to jump out of the way as they wrestled on the dock and caught each other in various choke holds. Instead, the boy on top punched the one on bottom, a pop to the nose. The fight came to an abrupt stop.

The crowd gasped. They murmured, “No, that’s Adam on top. Adam kicked Sean’s ass.”

Adam sat on Sean’s chest, his right fist clenching and unclenching. I couldn’t see his face or Sean’s in the dim light, but I could tell from the way they held themselves that they were giving each other the evil eye. And I knew I shouldn’t be worried anymore about pulling Sean off Adam, protecting Adam from Sean.

Adam said so quietly I could hardly hear him over the waves lapping against the dock, “Don’t you ever hit me again.”

The murmur up the hill increased, and the crowd in the yard began to part. Mr. Vader was coming. But it was Mrs. Vader who came running in her bathrobe.

“Sean!” she called when she hadn’t even hit the dock yet. “Sean, get off him!” As the crowd slowed her down, she said, “You two have got to stop doing this. You’re going to kill each other.” She made it through the wall of people and stopped short.

“I’m through,” Adam said. He eased off Sean and stood up.

Sean sat up, looking down. His nose streamed blood.

Mr. Vader said behind us, “Hey. Is that my beer?”

I’d seen enough. I pushed my way through the crowd, up the pier, into the grass. Knots of people followed me with their eyes, turning as I passed. Cameron, McGillicuddy, and Tammy jogged down from the house. Tammy called to me. I shook my head and kept going. They didn’t come toward me. They must have seen the expression on my face.

When I reached the darkest shadows of the trees between our houses, I looked back. Mrs. Vader stood in front of Adam in their yard, with her hands on her hips. He shivered in his soaked clothes. She put out her arms for him. He walked into her embrace and put his head down on her shoulder. She rubbed his back to warm him.

Furious as I was with him, I hoped he didn’t get in too much trouble—about the beer, and especially about the fight with Sean. I hoped his parents understood this fight was inevitable, with or without Rachel and me and MTV reality shows. And that tonight was the first night of the rest of his life.

19

It was not, however, the first night of the rest of my life. It was night 5,843, and felt like it.