Endless Summer: The Boys Next Door; Endless Summer (34 page)

I grabbed a few implements in case someone needed them, sat back down, and handed Rachel a butter knife. en I asked my brother, “What’d you find out about Adam?”

“Well,” he said between bites, “there’s some talk of military school.”

“What!” I shouted. “Adam would be the worst person in the world to go to military school.”

“I think that’s the idea,” my brother said. “You go into military school because you’re undisciplined and unmilitary. They make you toe the line.” I felt like my insides had been scooped out with the melon baller in front of me. Adam did not toe the line. at was why he was in so much trouble. But that was also one of the things I loved about him. A disciplined and military Adam would not be a new and improved Adam. It would not be Adam at all.

“But they’re not sending him yet,” McGillicuddy went on. “ey’ve talked about it before, and this latest problem”—he glanced at me, like I was the problem—“has brought up the discussion again. They won’t send him if he stays away from you.”

“They’re saying, ‘Stay away from your girlfriend or we’ll send you to military school’?” I asked. “That makes no sense.”

“It’s more like they’re saying, ‘We gave you simple instructions and you couldn’t follow them.’” I threw a potato chip at my brother. Rachel and Tammy ducked, as if people did not throw food at their tables. “You don’t have to act so smug about it,” I said. “You helped him polish the marks out of the boat faster. You sent him in my direction.”

“Isn’t the issue really that your parents are watching you all the time?” Tammy asked. “You could both quit the marina and get jobs at the same place somewhere else.” I frowned at her. I hadn’t thought of this. If I got a job on land, I might dry up. I couldn’t imagine a summer away from the lake. But to save Adam from military school, it would be more than worth it. I asked, “Like where?”

“You both have your lifeguard certification,” Tammy said. “You could work at the city pool or the country club.”

“Yeah!” I exclaimed. Work and water!

Rachel shook her head. “Adam wouldn’t be able to stay still in that lifeguard chair for more than five minutes.”

“Yeah,” I said. She knew this because she’d dated Adam. However, I did not want to be reminded of this at the present time. Waving away Tammy’s amateurish idea, I said, “I already wanted to talk to y’all about this, but military school makes it even more important. Adam won’t follow this order from his parents. ere’s my irresistible beauty and allure—”

Tammy laughed.

“—shut up, and then there’s the very idea of his parents telling him he can’t do something. It’s a perfect storm for Adam to self-destruct. I need to get us out of this mess before that happens. And I have a plan.” I explained my ingenious mission with Kevin Ye, ignoring Rachel when she choked on her lemonade at several points. I finished,

“Isn’t that a good plan?”

“No,” McGillicuddy spoke up, “but it’s consistent.”

I went on. “The problem with this plan—”

“The problem?” Tammy asked. “Like there’s only one?”

“—is that I ran it by Adam, and he does not like it.”

“You have got to be kidding,” McGillicuddy said flatly.

“It’s the Kevin Ye aspect. Adam doesn’t want me dating a felon.” Or his brother, or his other brother. “It could still work if I thought of someone who passed muster with Adam and horrified my dad at the same time.”

“What about Parker Buchanan?” Rachel asked. “Your dad must know him by reputation. Everybody in town’s heard that he made out with three different girls in the food court at the Birmingham mall and all their boyfriends tried to jump him in the parking lot.”

“That’s perfect!” I pounded my fist on the table. Rachel’s lemonade sloshed over the side of her glass. “Sorry.” I stood up to snag a towel.

“I was joking,” Rachel said.

My brother warned her, “Do not make jokes to Lori that you don’t want to be misunderstood and taken seriously.”

“Why is Parker perfect?” Tammy asked. “He’s a playboy who lives on the edge. Why would that be so scary to your dad? He sounds like a combination of Adam and Sean.”

“Yes, but he’s from Birmingham,” I pointed out as I wiped up the lemonade at Rachel’s place—or tried to, and ended up scooting the puddle into her lap. “Sorry. Maybe you should do this.” I handed her the towel and sat back down in my place. “You know how people around here feel about Birmingham. You don’t even have to explain that anything from Birmingham is more intense. If you wreck your car and people want to know how badly you were hurt, all you have to say is, ‘e ambulance took me straight to Birmingham,’ and everybody knows you went to the university hospital because you were at death’s door. If you’re going on a date and you say, ‘We went to Birmingham,’ people know your boyfriend took you to the fanciest restaurant in the state because he’s trying to get in your pants.” McGillicuddy cleared his throat. Next to him, Tammy took a huge bite of her sandwich. He must be taking her on a date to Birmingham sometime soon.

To cover his own embarrassment—or just to make sure he understood my plan, but I doubted this—my brother reached behind him and snagged the pad and pen on the counter beside the phone. He drew a little diagram. “So an ADHD boyfriend is bad, and a playboy ADHD boyfriend would be worse, but a playboy ADHD boyfriend from Birmingham is the top of this hierarchy.”

“at’s what I’m counting on,” I said. “I would not rely on Parker’s reputation alone. I would go out with him on a couple of dates, enough to let Dad know we’re getting serious, and then stage a Teen Crisis.”

Everybody cracked up but me. Tammy asked, “What kind of Teen Crisis?”

“I have no idea,” I said defensively. “You’ve been watching MTV longer than I have.”

“Are you just going to flirt with Parker and win him over,” Rachel asked, “or are you going to explain to him what you’re doing?”

“I’ll explain to him what I’m doing,” I said. “Otherwise I would feel awful. What if he fell for me for real?” Rachel and Tammy looked at each other.

“It is not beyond the realm of possibility,” I grouched.

“What makes you think he’ll do it?” Tammy asked.

“I’ll offer him something in return. I’ll take him around town, introduce him to people, show him where we hang out. I will leave out the part where I am extremely unpopular and kind of socially challenged. Do you think he might believe I’m popular?”

“Depends on how long you’re together,” Rachel said. “He’ll wise up eventually.”

My brother tapped the pen on the pad. “Won’t you feel guilty for lying to Dad?”

I did feel a twinge of guilt at that, but anger took over. “I won’t be lying to him. I will be going out with Parker. I might not be going out with him with romantic intensions, but I will not say I am. Dad will only infer this, and everybody knows you should not infer anything. You should get it in writing.” All this lawyer lingo reminded me that my brother was leaving behind incriminating evidence. I reached across the table, snatched the pad in front of him, and tore out the sheet where he’d made little notes about the plan. I tore out the sheet under that, too, in case the imprint of the pen was clear enough to show up if a paranoid father rubbed a pencil across it. I tore both sheets into a pile of tiny pieces while the three of them watched me as if I had completely lost my mind.

“e thing is,” I said, trying to sound sane, “I need to explain all this to Adam in private. I can’t get McGillicuddy to explain it to him. Something will be lost in the translation.”

“Well, excuse me that I can’t look at him all googly-eyed,” my brother said.

“And he’s liable to punch you,” I said.

“Very true,” Rachel agreed. I felt another twinge of annoyance that she knew Adam so well, or thought she did. at’s one of the reasons I’d asked her to help me plan, but the more helpful she was, the less sure I was that I wanted her help.

My brother’s eyes slid to Tammy for a fraction of a second, then back to me. He said, “Punch me? He can try.”

“Right.” I needed to keep my brother on my side. Best to support his machismo in front of Tammy. But he knew, and I knew, that asking Parker to help me and scaring my dad with Parker would not be nearly as difficult as persuading Adam to play along.

Friday night my family had Lori’s family over for dinner. My mom tried to pass it off as routine. She said we’d been so busy that we hadn’t invited them yet this summer, and now was as good a time as any. However, I was pretty sure she wanted to repair whatever I’d messed up with Lori’s dad. Sooner or later somebody would get another speeding ticket, and then what would my parents do? Pay for a lawyer?

I thought I would be glad for the chance to get close to Lori. It ended up being three courses of frustration. I’d felt exactly this way wakeboarding with her an hour before. I always looked forward to being near her, but when the time came, we were both scared to exchange more than a “hi” for fear authority was watching us.

Even worse, the longer this went on, the more shy I felt around her. Not shy, exactly—I was not shy, and Lori was so friendly that nobody could feel shy around her. It was more like I wanted to impress her as her boyfriend, and for about two days I’d felt confident I could do it. Now I was regressing back to the way I’d felt ever since I could remember, knowing I liked her more than she liked me, and deathly afraid to make a move for fear of messing things up with her. Or getting sent to military school.

So when she grinned and put up her arms to slide past me in the narrow space between the refrigerator and the island in the kitchen, I didn’t even put out a finger to stroke the strip of exposed skin between the hem of her tank top and the waistband of my jeans she’d cut off into shorts, with her pink bikini bottoms peeking out. I just looked longingly after her and took my second helping of catfish back to the table.

But after dinner, I got another chance.

“Run down the hill,” Sean said. “Hurdle the cooler. Get sprayed by the hose. Swing on the rope. Catch the ball.”

“Agreed,” Cameron said. “One, two, three…”

“Break!” the five of us shouted, raising our hands from the pile in the center. I walked to the end of the dock, where I had a clear shot to pass the football to whoever swung over the lake on the rope hanging from a branch of the enormous oak tree. Lori followed me, dragging the garden hose. I was a little surprised her dad didn’t complain about this, because she’d stripped off her tank top and my shorts to reveal her pink bikini underneath. Sean and McGillicuddy wandered over to sit with my parents and Lori’s dad and Frances under the tree. Cameron hiked up the yard to get a running start.

“Oh, God,” Lori said without looking at me, “what are they thinking, leaving the two of us alone out here on the dock together? We might talk or something.”

“That would be awful,” I said. “I might give you a hickey.”

She laughed, still watching for Cameron’s start instead of looking at me. “Just by talking to me?”

“I can talk really dirty. You’d be surprised.”

She turned red. I hoped her dad couldn’t see her blush from that distance. My mom had cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate him finally asking out Frances.

Maybe that would put him in a better mood about the hood next door making his daughter blush.

“How do you like Frances dating your dad?” I asked.

“I was excited about the possibility of getting a new mother, until she started acting like one.”

“Oh.”

“Speaking of bizarre dates,” Lori said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you something all week.” She was done with me. She was dating someone else. Maybe that’s why I’d turned shy around her the past few days. I’d been afraid of this, and I didn’t want to hear it.

Before she could spill to me, I said, “Here he comes.” Cameron barreled down the grassy hill. He leaped over the big cooler. Lori gripped the trigger on the hose and released the pressure that had been building up, catching him in the side of the face with a hard stream even from thirty feet away. He put up both hands to block the water and tripped over his own feet, nearly falling as the grass gave way to the sandy beach.

“Good shot,” I told her.

“Tomorrow night I’m going out with Parker Buchanan.”

Cameron jumped onto the rope. His momentum carried him far out over the lake. My stomach felt like it was going with him, swinging over a bottomless pit.

I waited until the precise moment to power the football out to him. He let go of the rope at the apex of his swing just as the ball hit him in the chest. He reached his arms around it a fraction of a second too late. The ball bounced off him and plopped into the lake at the same time he did.

Everyone made disappointed noises. Only Frances clapped for him, and when he surfaced, she called through cupped hands, “Good try, Cameron.” Frances had always employed positive reinforcement with kids, which is why my family found her so weird.

I took advantage of the commotion. Still watching Cameron floundering in the water, I asked Lori, “You’re breaking up with me?” If I’d been looking into her green eyes as I asked this, I probably would have broken down. As it was, only my voice broke. I hoped the splashing covered it up.