The Boys Next Door (The Boys Next Door 1)

Adam and McGillicuddy had found all the escaped balls. They stood in the kudzu, oblivious to snakes, and threw tennis balls as hard as they could at each other. The balls bounced off their arms and chests, and they dove after the balls into the vines again. Typical. I turned back to Tammy. “You said yourself that Sean was fondue.”

“No, you said that.”

“You said girls fall all over themselves to get to Sean. They don’t do that for Adam.”

“But wouldn’t that be better? You’d have to share Sean. Adam would be yours.”

I’d thought girls giggled secrets to each other because they understood each other. Tammy didn’t understand me at all.

Adam had made a hangman’s noose out of a length of vine and was chasing McGillicuddy down the sidewalk with it. Both of them laughed like ten-year-olds. Adam really did look adorable when he smiled.

So, maybe Tammy was half-right. I knew Adam had been kidding about seven being lucky. I knew he was just playing the part with me, like we’d planned, so he could get Rachel back. But part of me, a tiny part about the size of a candy heart, wished he dreamed about getting lucky with me.

8

Sean had the nerve to smile down at me. His blue eyes were lighter than the sky behind him, a spooky blue. He shouted above the drone of the boat motor, “Lori, when we’re old enough, I want you to be my girlfriend.”

I tried to speak, spluttered, and spit out a lock of my hair the wind had blown into my mouth. I was nothing if not glam. “You’re old enough,” I told him. “And if Rachel is old enough, I’m old enough.”

He bent closer and said, “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

What a thrill! He’d asked me out! I was going out with Sean! Only, those were the words I’d heard. What he’d mouthed was something different. Like on one of those kung fu movies the boys loved to watch, with English words dubbed over the Chinese sound, and the characters’ mouths never quite matching up.

“Bastard!” I sat straight up in my cold, wet bed. I wiped and wiped with my palms, but I could not get all my hair out of my mouth. Then I realized what I’d said out loud. “Sorry, Mom,” I told her sweet sixteen photo on my bedside table. My alarm clock blared Avril Lavigne, “Keep Holding On.”

Right! I vowed to move things along with Sean that day at work. I would make sure he knew I was part of the hot scene. Unfortunately, the instant I stepped into the marina office, I was presented with an obstacle to this goal in the form of a seething matriarch with pinstriped hair.

“Lori!” she roared, spinning around in her office chair.

“Good morning, boss!” I said brightly, giving her a wave.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “It was bad enough when Adam told me yesterday that Sean stole Rachel from him. He wanted me to ground Sean, or take away his Wii.”

“Ground him for how long?” If Sean was grounded, he wouldn’t even be able to pick Rachel up and drive her back to his own house. He could only see her if her mom dropped her off. Talk about embarrassing. Sean didn’t like to be embarrassed. Instant breakup! On the other hand, if he were grounded for the whole summer, even after he broke up with Rachel, he could never go out with me.

“I can’t ground him,” Mrs. Vader squealed. “I can’t ground a legal adult. And I can’t ground one son for stealing the other’s girlfriend. But I’ve got to do something. Adam’s cheekbone is blue. Sean is holding his jaw at a funny angle and won’t let me look at it. The physical fights are bad enough. They can’t torture each other psychologically, too!”

Of course they could. They’d been doing it for years. Obviously Sean was careful not to call Adam ADD when their mother was around. Somehow I didn’t think pointing this out would help my current situation, so I nodded like I understood her plight. “Do I have gas?”

She folded her arms. “And this morning Adam told me he’s going out tonight. With you.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I sang, sweeping my hand down my body in the all this can be yours gesture.

“You were after Sean,” she spat.

“Who, me?” Yes, I actually said, Who me? I was beginning to see Adam’s point about me never winning an Oscar. “I was after Adam.”

“You were after Sean. You watched him moonily all day Friday. You took an hour and a half for lunch, waiting for him to show up.”

I raised my chin haughtily. “You people are slave drivers. Can’t I have a break to watch What Not to Wear?”

“Besides,” she said more calmly, examining me too closely for comfort, “if you and Adam really were about to start going out, Adam wouldn’t have complained to me just yesterday about Sean stealing his girlfriend. He’d be happy to have you, and he’d forget all about her.”

Good point. Where was Adam to take some of this heat? I looked around futilely for him. Then I told part of the truth. “It’s the principle of the thing. Adam’s also mad Sean broke his remote-control pickup that he got for Christmas six years ago.”

She went limp with exasperation. “Adam broke that! Adam said Sean broke it on purpose, Sean said Adam broke it, and I believed Sean.”

“Exactly.”

She stared me down, waiting for me to crack, while I tilted my head this way and that way and fluttered my eyelashes at her. Finally she nodded at the door and said, “You’re in the warehouse. With Sean.”

A torture worse than death, ho ho. A second chance to move things along. Sean and I helped the full-time workers take boats out of storage. Mostly we found the boats that needed to be brought down, cleaned the seats, and topped off the fluids in the engines. As we finished each boat, Cameron and my brother delivered it across the lake. Adam had gas. More than throwing me with Sean for spite, I think Mrs. Vader was trying to keep Sean and Adam away from each other.

I did my best with Sean, but it wasn’t good enough. He treated me exactly like he always had, except for two days before in the boat. He would do things that were so, so sweet, like get me a soda from the office when he got one for himself. But then he spoke to an old lady customer in the same loving tone he’d used on me. Also his mother.

Maybe he didn’t know yet that Adam and I were going out. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Vader had shared this tidbit with him if she thought it would add fuel to the fire. So Sean didn’t understand he was supposed to realize I was girlfriend material and feel jealous. Skilled though I was in the womanly arts of manipulation and talking smack, I couldn’t quite figure out a way to pass this info along to him without coming out and telling him, which would blow my cover. So I was super-sweet right back to him and traipsed around the warehouse in my tank top and generally acted like he and I were just friends. Ha!

Late in the afternoon we went wakeboarding. Yesterday we’d skipped calisthenics for the first time ever, and we had no taste for them today either. My brother didn’t announce it was time for calisthenics, and neither did Cameron. Sean and Adam just glared at each other as they threw life vests at each other to pitch into the boat.

I think we all were a bit on edge by the time we launched. But Sean spotted first and Adam sat way up in the bow, so we began to relax. After all, Sean and Adam weren’t likely to get into it on the boat. Cameron and my brother were there to pull them off each other. My brother was bigger than any of them.

As for me, I wanted so badly to sit across the aisle from Sean. He might scoot over and share my seat with me, like two days before. But no, he would never do this and mess up his “relationship” with Rachel—not while it was having the desired effect on Adam.

Subtlety and patience were not a couple of my strong points. Perhaps you have figured this out. However, I managed to keep my eyes on the prize, which meant bypassing the seat next to Sean and hunkering down against the wind in the bow with Adam. Problem was, Sean’s seat faced backward so he could spot for my brother wakeboarding. He didn’t even see the knee-weakening look Adam gave me as I sat down.

But Cameron in the driver’s seat could see us, and Sean might be so gracious as to turn around once in a while. I wondered what Adam would want to do with me. Whether he would try to touch me, and where. Maybe he was thinking the same thing I was thinking: it was a bit early for PDA in our faux couplehood. If we suddenly fell in love after almost sixteen years of being friends, it would be obvious we were faking to show Sean we didn’t care about him and the treacherous Rachel.

For whatever reason, Adam didn’t touch me. He was content to watch me, darkly. I had no idea why he was looking at me this way. Clearly we were not thinking the same thing after all.

Then I had another problem. Adam had told me two days before that I’d screwed my chances with Sean by taking his place in the wakeboarding show. Maybe I should face-plant an air raley so Sean wouldn’t think I was rubbing it in. But you know what? I was still so thrilled with my great runs two days in a row, I wasn’t willing to throw it for a boy. Even a boy this important. Maybe this was something I could work on as I matured.

Sean had another bad run. Adam did too—ouch!—but at least he enjoyed it. I had another run so fantastic, I decided I’d work on an S-bend the next day. Ideally this would involve landing the S-bend, unlike some adrenaline junkies I knew.

And Sean didn’t seem to mind I did well and he didn’t. He was his usual pleasant self, a bit too distant for my taste, same-old, same-old. He must have really been basking in the fact that he’d gotten Adam’s goat. I mean, girlfriend. That was okay. I would get Sean in the end.

I was feeling very hopeful about the whole situation when we docked at the marina. Maybe it was the sun again, or the lingering glow from my good run. But when Adam helped me out of the boat and we did the secret handshake, I didn’t even care it was a complete waste of handshake because Sean had already gone into the warehouse and didn’t see it happen. Doing the handshake made me feel like somebody valued me enough to do a secret handshake with me.

“By the way,” I said during the high-five, “what was up with the look you kept giving me in the boat?”

“What look?” Adam asked, blushing. He knew what I meant.

“This look.” I showed it to him.

He squinted at me. “I’m not a doctor, but I’d say either indigestion or a stroke.”

We laughed, touched elbows, and parted ways on the wharf. I sauntered to my house, taking big sniffs of the hot evening air scented with cut grass and flowers, not minding too much that I had to spend a few minutes blowing a gnat out of my nose. I wished Sean had asked me out like he was supposed to. But if I had to go on a fake date to get him, there was no one I’d rather go on a fake date with than Adam. I might even enjoy it, as friends.

After supper with Dad and McGillicuddy, and a luxe beauty routine that included teasing my mascara-coated eyelashes apart with the comb attachment to McGillicuddy’s electric razor, I was ready. An hour early. I peered out my bedroom window at Adam’s house and wondered what he was doing right now. Getting ready himself? Taking a shower?

Even though the picture of him in the shower was all in my head, I took a step back from the window at the force of the picture, and the realism. I must be picturing Sean in the shower, because the boy in the shower wasn’t wearing a skull and crossbones.

Adam wore the skull and crossbones while wakeboarding and swimming. He must wear it in the shower too. Or did he? In all the times over the years we’d worked together at the marina, when he’d bent down and the pendant had swung from the leather string, I’d never noticed a dirty patch in the shape of a skull and crossbones on his neck. Okay, I couldn’t stand another hour of torturing myself this way.

I said ta to my dad and waded in my high heels down my yard to the dock. Then I untied the canoe and set off across the lake. Crossing the lake in a canoe, a sailboat, or anything without a motor could be harrowing. The lake was about a half mile wide at this point, and a canoe crossing the traffic pattern was likely to get T-boned by a speedboat driven by someone from Montgomery who didn’t understand boating laws and was drunk to boot. But the busiest part of the day was over, and I paddled fast.

On the other side, I tied up to the Harbargers’ dock. Funny that the kids weren’t swimming. They’d probably been swimming all day and had brained each other several times with plastic shovels and nearly drowned once, and their nanny was about damned tired of it and had made them get out of the water. I was all too familiar with this scenario.

Sure enough, as I waded up their yard, I heard the kids laughing behind the fence. Even I, the Great Lori, Number One Seed Wakeboarder on the Vader’s Marina Team, didn’t think I could scale a wooden fence wearing high heels. Pitching one shoe over and then the other, I jumped up, grabbed the top of the fence, and hoisted myself up.

The kids were making castles in the sandbox. Really just mounds of sand, but I’m optimistic. Frances sat cross-legged in the grass nearby, wearing her summer hippie uniform: tie-dyed T-shirt, hemp shorts, bare feet. (Stuck in the grungewear of her college days, she also had a winter hippie uniform that involved wool and Birkenstocks.) She and the kids stared up at me.

I dropped down on their side of the fence, walked over, and sat on the edge of the sandbox. “Whatsamatter?” I asked the kidlets. “You’ve never seen such a vision of loveliness?”

“There’s a gate, you know,” Frances said.

“I didn’t notice.”

“It’s on the other side of the house, off the driveway, where people usually put gates.”

“I got in, didn’t I? God, you always want me to do things your way.” This was sort of unfair. Frances had been pretty hands-off as governesses went. Like I had anyone to compare her to. “Well, this time I’ve definitely done something that isn’t covered in the child care manual. Go ahead, ask me what happened at the party. Ask me what happened the night after the party. Ask me where I’m going now, dressed to kill.”