Endless Summer: The Boys Next Door; Endless Summer (8 page)

“No, I didn’t.” I made an effort to slow down my breathing through nose or mouth. My bosom was heaving, I tell you. I had a heaving bosom!

And Adam noticed. He focused on the V of the Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Top Meant for Another, and slowly, slowly dragged his light blue eyes up to meet my eyes. “I should have said something. I didn’t realize what was happening at first. And then, when I did, I was really enjoying myself.”

“Shut up. I didn’t think you were Sean.”

“You thought I was Sean, because I’m as big as him.” He winked at me.

There was no mistaking him for Sean now that I was staring up at him. I tried to figure out what had fooled me into assuming it was him without checking his face and the length of his hair. It could have been his height compared with the boys two years older than him. But something else was different about Adam. He was more confident. More relaxed. More tingle-worthy, like Sean had always been. Those friendly prickles spread across my chest again as Adam’s fingers moved a little, reminding me he still held my elbow.

I pulled reluctantly out of his grip. “It’s not funny, Adam. What if somebody tells Rachel?”

“She won’t mind. She knows we’re friends.”

From my end, the hug hadn’t felt like we were friends. It had felt like we were teetering on the very edge of friendship, about to tumble down a waterfall into depths unknown. With rocks hidden underneath the water. Hard ones.

Or I was about to take a tumble, by myself. He still stood in his living room like always, at the edge of his crowded party, laughing down at me, thinking, The Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Top has cut off the blood supply to Lori McGillicuddy’s brain.

I reached up to his neck. Surprise finally flashed in his eyes—ha!—but he let me pull the skull-and-crossbones pendant on the leather string out from under his shirt.

“You make sure this shows at all times,” I said. “It’s your cowbell. It tells me when you’re coming.” I patted his chest, which I should not have done if we really were just friends. As we’ve established, my brain was walking a few steps behind my body and couldn’t quite catch up. Face still burning, I took a few steps into the crowd. Where would Sean most likely be? Flirting with Holly and Beige simultaneously, pitting the best friends against each other to see what would happen. But no, they were dancing together at the edge of the crowd in the living room, without Sean.

I stopped suddenly.

Walked back to Adam, who was still watching me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You’re right,” I breathed, my words sinking into the pit of my stomach. “Rachel won’t mind us hugging.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s in the side yard, making out with Sean.”

By the time I’d kicked off my (dirty) heels and dashed after Adam outside, he’d already gotten himself pinned flat on his back under Sean on the pine needles. I winced as Sean shifted to get better leverage and pressed his forearm harder across Adam’s neck.

“Sean!” I hollered, running all the way around them, trying to find a way in. Sometimes I couldn’t pull Sean off Adam, or I even got hit myself. There was a time when I would have tried anyway, disregarding my personal safety. This was back when we were all very small and made of rubber. Nowadays, hollering was more effective, unless they were really into it, in which case nothing would work.

They were really into it. Adam managed to kick Sean off him and get in a blow to Sean’s chin. Usually they didn’t hit each other in the face because Mrs. Vader would see the bruises and they’d get in trouble. Adam must be angry enough tonight not to care.

Sean came right back with a punch to Adam’s gut. While Adam was absorbing that one, Sean pinned Adam’s arm high behind him, tripped him, forced him to the ground, and put one knee on his back. Tonight Sean was more aggressive than usual, intent on causing more pain.

Or—Something wasn’t right. Had they switched shirts? Surely not. Sean didn’t let Adam borrow his clothes. Slowly it dawned on me that Sean was Adam and Adam was Sean. For the first time ever, Adam was kicking Sean’s ass.

“Holy shit,” I said helpfully. “Adam, let him go.”

Adam looked up at me, blue eyes shadowed in the dark between the trees, skull and crossbones swinging at his neck.

This gave Sean the opportunity to buck Adam off. He snatched Adam down to the ground and punched him.

“Sean,” I said, stepping close over them again. They weren’t listening to me. I looked over at Rachel, who had her hands over her mouth and her toes turned in. She looked exactly like a James Bond girl from the pre-Halle Berry era, one of those ditzes who stood safely in the corner and never had a dagger when she needed one, like Honey Ryder, or Plenty O’Toole. “Rachel, a little help?” I called.

She stared at me with big doe eyes like she had no idea what I was talking about. She’d been with Adam for a month and she’d never seen one of his fights with Sean?

“Call Adam off!” I yelled at her. “Or Sean. Whichever one you can get!” Both.

“Sean, stop,” she said in a whiny little voice that couldn’t have reprimanded a Chihuahua.

“Forget it.” I knelt down on the pine needles and shouted directly at Sean and Adam, on their level. “I’ll go get your dad. Your dad will come down into your party and cuss at you and spit on the ground in front of your friends.”

They didn’t even slow down. Whoever was on top had the other in a choke hold so real, the victim was turning red.

“I’ll go get your mom!”

Adam gave Sean a final shake and stood up quickly, before Sean could catch his leg and pull him down. “What is the matter with you?” Adam screamed.

Yeah. What was the matter with Sean? He was making out with Rachel, that’s what. This was terrible! It blew my theory out of the water that Sean had never asked me out because I was too young for him. Rachel was a year younger than me!

Normally I would have given up, slunk home, and broken out the Cheetos. I would have immersed myself in I, Robot for comfort (again) and put it down after every paragraph to wallow in my own outrage and loss. He’d flirted with me just that afternoon! He’d wiped bryozoa on me!

Luckily, this was no normal night. Tonight I was on a mission. So I reasoned that all wasn’t lost. Maybe Sean had flirted with me because he was overcome by my charms and wit (ho ho), but he didn’t see me as the girlfriend type. After all, I’d never been anyone’s girlfriend. Rachel didn’t have this problem. Sean had watched Rachel go out with Adam for a month.

Sean stood up more slowly than Adam had, taking deep, ragged breaths, clearly hurting. I waited for Adam to decide Sean had had enough of his wrath for now, and turn to Rachel. I looked forward to hearing what Adam would call her, to save me the trouble. But he never even glanced in her direction. He said again, still to Sean, “What the hell is the matter with you?” His voice broke.

Now Cameron and McGillicuddy came jogging through the trees, with Tammy behind them, and more interested spectators from the party bringing up the rear. Even though the fight was over, McGillicuddy stepped between Sean and Adam. A smart move, because these things had been known to flare up again. Which was exactly what the ring of spectators hoped for. Tammy tried to catch my eye. I shook my head.

Cameron took Adam’s face in both hands and peered at the big smudge under his eye. He let Adam go and hissed at me, “Get rid of him in case Mom comes down.” I felt honored to be included in the intrigue. But why couldn’t Cameron ask me to get rid of Sean instead?

That was okay, for now. Adam needed me. I put my hand on his back and said, “Walk away.” We moved through the yard, toward the side of the house. A pine needle hung from one of his brown curls in the back.

After fifteen paces, his breathing had slowed almost to normal. I felt him start to turn. “Don’t look back,” I said.

He took a deep, calming breath through his nose. He was fighting the part of ADHD that made him short-tempered and impulsive. The part that made him attempt to smash his big brother’s face in.

“Try not to take it so seriously,” I said in what I hoped was a soothing tone. Which was hard for me. Generally I was about as soothing as body lotion with skin conditioners and ground glass, but this was important. “It’s probably a temporary thing. He’s mad at you for making the size jokes this afternoon—”

“I didn’t start the size jokes!”

“You finished the size jokes. So he seduced your girlfriend. She said yes because you’ve been together for a whole month. Maybe things have gotten into a rut.” We passed the corner of the house and reached the side yard, where no one lingering in the front yard could see us. I stopped him under the floodlight hanging from the eaves. “Let me look at your eye.” I reached up to cup his face in my hands, like Cameron had.

“Is my mom going to notice?”

Yes, I thought. “I can’t tell,” I said. I didn’t want him dashing after Sean to get revenge. “Maybe if we cleaned it up.” He pulled off his T-shirt, wet the edge of it with the faucet attached to the house, and brought it to me.

“Sit down,” I said. “I can hardly see you way up there.”

We sat in the grass. I leaned close, tilted his face to the light, and wiped at the half-dried blood. He watched me with serious eyes.

And I felt that tingle again. The same pesky tingle I’d felt when I hugged him in the living room, when I thought he was Sean. Only I knew now he wasn’t Sean. And I’d seen Adam without his shirt a million times, including hours of no-shirt goodness that very afternoon. The tingle stayed.

This was only natural, I guessed. We both were still pumped full of adrenaline. We were excited about the fight and mad about Sean and Rachel, and jealous. I was leaning close to him, our lips almost touching. He still smelled like cologne, plus something sexier.

“Well?” His voice broke again. He cleared his throat and said in his deep boy-voice, “Well?”

“Well, it’s not coming off.” I gave the oozing blood one last gentle wipe and sat back on my heels. “I’m sorry about what happened.” He shrugged and kept giving me that intense, serious look. And I kept tingling. It was almost like he was sending me his adrenaline telepathically, and I could feel what he was feeling.

Which didn’t make sense. Because he ought to be heartbroken about Rachel. But this felt good.

“Ghe fireworks are starting without you.” I stood up quickly and held out my hand to help him up (for show only—he weighed twice as much as me). He put his shirt back on. Pity. Keeping my hand on his back, I steered him toward the muffled noise of explosions, down through the shadowy backyard to the dock.

Boys—mostly football players my age or a year older—lit bottle rockets and held them until the fuse sparked almost down to their fingers. At the last possible second, they tossed them into the black lake. A pause. Then deep under the surface, the water glowed bright green for an instant. The lake said foop.

Adam would probably ask me to help him collect the bottle rocket sticks off the lake bottom tomorrow, another one of his dad’s rules. I didn’t want to do this, because I’d had an unpleasant bryozoa scare climbing up the ladder of their dock last year. But I preferred the boys shooting bottle rockets into the lake to shooting them toward my yard, which tended to give my dad a nervous breakdown. And I couldn’t ask them to stop altogether. Adam got testy if he went more than a few weeks without setting something on fire.

The boys shouted greetings to Adam and shared their bottle rockets with him. He watched the sparks with delight and hardly a hint of evil. Then he handed me a bottle rocket and lit it for me with a lighter from his pocket. I finally relaxed. We forgot all about Rachel and Sean.

For a little while.

During the school year, Holly and Beige had said micro-miniskirts should be the official tennis team uniform because we could move better during games, and material wouldn’t get bunched between our legs like it did with shorts. I’d never had the material-bunching problem myself. I figured Holly and Beige made this up so they’d have an excuse to wear micro-miniskirts to class when we had a tennis meet right after school. Thank God they’d graduated and I was (mostly) rid of them. For me, tennis and fashion didn’t mix. Serena Williams I was not.

Normally I would have worn gym shorts and one of Adam’s huge T-shirts to play tennis with Tammy. However, the tennis courts sat between the high school and the main road through town, which also ran past the movie theater, the arcade, and the bowling alley. If Sean was out with Rachel, he would drive right by. So it was the official tennis team micro-miniskirt for me.

“Is that part of your makeover to catch Sean? Wearing that skirt when you’re not forced to?” Tammy asked as we passed each other, changing ends of the court. We were the only idiots playing tennis on a ninety-degree Saturday night, so we had the court to ourselves. Besides the ball bouncing and the rackets whacking, the only sounds were the cars swishing by on the road and the buzz of floodlights overhead. Still, the echo off the asphalt court made it hard for us to hear each other while we played. So we’d been carrying on a conversation like this for an hour, one sentence every two games when we traded sides.