The Boys Next Door Page 4

  Sean grinned at them from the water. Even though his turn hadn’t been very long, clearly he’d had enough. He took off his life vest and tossed it up into the boat. Then he disappeared under the surface.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked, leaning over the side of the boat, searching for him beneath the water. If the tow rope had gotten tangled, he might need help. And someone would need to go in the water with him, perhaps accidentally sliding against him down where no one else could see.

  “Boo!” A handful of bryozoa rushed up at me from the lake.

  I screamed (for once I didn’t have to think about this girl-reaction) and fell backward into the boat. Sean hefted himself over the side with one arm, holding the bryozoa high in the other hand. It dripped green slime through his fingers. “Bwa-ha-ha!” He came after me.

  I squealed again. It was so unbelievably fantastic that he was flirting with me, but bryozoa was involved. Was it worth it? No. I paused on the side of the boat, ready to jump back into the water myself. He might chase me around the lake with the bryozoa, but at least it would be diluted. On second thought, I didn’t particularly want to jump into the very waters the bryozoa had come from.

  Sean solved the problem for me. He slipped behind me and showed me he was holding the ties of my bikini in his free hand. If I jumped, Sean would take possession of my bikini top.

  I had thought about double knotting my bikini. I’d hoped against hope that Stage Two: Bikini would work, and that Sean might try something like this. Of course, I didn’t really want my top to come off in front of everyone. Nay, in front of anyone. But I’d checked the double knots in the mirror. They’d looked… well, double knotted, for protection, sort of like wearing a turtleneck to the prom. I’d re-tied the strings normally.

  Now I wished I’d double knotted after all. Sean brought the dripping slime close to my shoulder. “Go ahead and jump,” he said, twisting my bikini ties in his fingers.

  “Sean,” came McGillicuddy’s voice in warning. This surprised me. My brother had never taken up for me before. Of course, none of the boys had ever crossed this particular line.

  But that was nothing compared with my surprise when the bryozoa suddenly lobbed out of Sean’s hand, sailed through the air, and plopped into the lake. Adam, standing behind him, must have shoved his arm.

  Which meant I owed Adam my gratitude for saving me. Except I didn’t want him to save me from Sean, and I thought I’d made that clear. Saving me from Sean with bryozoa… that was a more iffy proposition. I wasn’t sure whether I should give Adam the little dolphin look again when our eyes met. But it didn’t matter. When I turned around, he was already stepping over Cameron’s legs to return to the driver’s seat.

  Sean was watching me, though. And Sean wiped the bryozoa residue from his hand across my stomach. This was the third time a boy had ever touched my bare tummy, and I’d had enough.

  Through gritted teeth, like any extra movement might spread the bryozoa further across my skin, I told him, “I like you less than I did.” I bailed over the side of the boat—the side opposite where the bryozoa had returned to its native habitat. Deep in the warm water, I scrubbed at my tummy with both hands. A combination of bryozoa waste and Sean germs: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Leaning toward worst, because now I had slime on my hands. Or maybe this was psychosomatic. Holding my hands open in front of me in the water, I didn’t see any slime. I rubbed my hands together anyway.

  Something dove into the water beside me in a rush of bubbles. I came up for air. Sean surfaced, too, tossing sparkling drops of water from his hair. “You still like me a lot, though, right?”

  “No prob. Green is the new black.” Giving up on getting clean, I swam a few strokes back toward the platform to get out again. What I needed was a shower with chlorinated water and disinfectant soap. I might need to bubble out my belly button with hydrogen peroxide.

  “What if I made it up to you?” He splashed close behind me. “What if I helped you get clean? We don’t want you dirty.” He moved both hands around me under the water, and up and down across my tummy.

  It was the fourth time a boy had touched my tummy! And it was very awkward. He bobbed so close behind me that I had a hard time treading water without kicking him. I needed to choose between flirting and breathing.

  Cameron and my brother leaned over the side of the boat and gaped at us, which didn’t help matters. I’d been afraid of this. Flirting with Sean was no fun if the other boys acted like we were lepers. Well, okay, it was fun, but not as fun as it was supposed to be.

  Obviously I would need to give McGillicuddy the little dolphin talk. I wasn’t sure I could do this with Cameron—Cameron and I didn’t have heart-to-heart convos—but I might need to make an exception, if he continued to watch us like we were a dirty movie on Pay-Per-View (which I’d also seen a lot of. Life with boys).

  BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—

  Sean and I started and turned toward the boat. Still behind the steering wheel, Adam had his chin in his hand and his elbow on the horn.

  —EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

  Damn it! I turned around to face Sean and gave him a wry smile, but he’d already taken his hands away from my tummy. The horn really ruined the mood.

  —EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

  Sean hauled himself up onto the platform. I followed close behind him, and (glee!) he put out a hand to help me. Cameron and my brother yelled at Adam.

  —EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. “Oh!” Adam said as if he’d had no idea he’d been laying on the horn. He looked at his elbow like it belonged to someone else.

  I was in the boat with Sean now, and he was still holding my hand. Or, maybe I was still clinging to his hand, but this is a question of semantics. In any case, I pulled him by the hand past the other boys to the bow. We didn’t have privacy. There was no privacy on a wakeboarding boat. At least we had the boat’s windshield between us and the others.

  As I turned to sit down on the bench, I stuck out my tongue at Adam behind the windshield. He crossed his eyes at me.

  Sean sat very close to me again. He pretended to yawn and stretch, then settled his arm around my shoulders. I smiled at him and tried to think of something to say. After years of him being vaguely pleasant to me but basically ignoring me, it had never occurred to me that we had nothing in common but wakeboarding—and I suspected wakeboarding might be a touchy subject right now. We didn’t need to talk. He kept his arm around me for the short ride back to the marina.

  Instead of driving straight to the wharf where we usually parked the boat, Adam slowed at the marina dock so the boys could mock Mr. Vader, who hadn’t moved from the position he’d been in when I splashed him, except he’d started on another beer. The boys told him he was all washed up and he should enter a wet T-shirt contest with that figure, and so forth. My brother called to Dad, “Nice save, Pops.”

  “Hey.” Dad tipped his beer to us. “You’ve got to be fast with Lori around.”

  “I have to say, young lady,” grumbled Mr. Vader. “I was very impressed with all your shenanigans. Right up to the point I got doused. I want you to plan to close the Crappie Festival show until further notice.”

  Which meant, Until you screw up. That was okay. He’d told me I was better than the boys at something for once in my life! I turned to Sean and beamed so big that my cheeks hurt.

  Sean squinted into the sun, wearing that strange, fixed smile. Even my brother and Cameron gave each other puzzled looks rather than congratulating me again. Only Adam met my eyes. He shook his head at me.

  Oh, crap. Crappy. Holy Crappie Festival! I had upset the natural order. After Adam had already upset the natural order in team calisthenics. I should have thought all of this through better.

  Sean began, “But I didn’t even get a chance to—”

  “I saw what happened,” Mr. Vader told him. “You had your chance. The Big Kahuna has spoken.”

  “Race you to the wharf,” Adam called. Mr
. Vader said something to my dad, put down his beer, and tried to hurl himself up the steps to the marina faster than Adam idled the boat. The boys were doofuses, and it was genetic. Adam let Mr. Vader win by half a length, touching the bow of the boat to the padded edge of the wharf just after Mr. Vader dashed past. The boys howled, and someone threw a couple of dollar bills at Mr. Vader. He picked up each bill like it mattered and limped back down the stairs toward my dad.

  Then Sean jumped out of the bow to tie up the boat. He, Cameron, and my brother tried to trip each other as they took armfuls of equipment into the warehouse with them. No one gave me a single backward glance.

  Adam cut the engine. “Now you’ve screwed up.”

  “How?” I asked casually, stepping out of the boat. “You think Sean won’t want to go out with me now that I’ve taken his spot in the show?”

  Adam just looked at me. That’s exactly what he thought. I was getting tired of his warnings about Sean. I gathered my clothes and my backpack, turned on my heel, and flounced away. Which was fairly ineffective with bare feet, on a rough concrete wharf.

  “You’ll see at the party tonight,” Adam called after me.

  “No, you’ll see,” I threw over my shoulder. Sean and his pride would prove no match for Stage Three: Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Top.

  As I walked home, balancing on the seawall that kept the Vaders’ yard and my yard from falling into the lake, my cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my backpack without hurrying. The only people who ever called me were my dad, my brother, assorted Vaders to tell me to come early or late to work (including Sean, but he always sounded grumpy that he had to call me, so it wasn’t as big a thrill as you’d think), Tammy to tell me to come early or late to tennis practice, and Frances. I glanced at the caller ID screen and clicked the phone on. “What’s up, Fanny?”

  From the time Mom died until I was eleven, Frances the au pair had hung out in the background of my life. Once Sean overheard someone calling her Fanny, which apparently is a nickname for Frances. We found this shocking. I mean, who has a nickname that’s a synonym for derrière? Who’s named Frances in the first place? So the boys started calling her Fanny the Nanny. Then, Booty the Babysitter. Then, Butt I Don’t Need a Governess. This had everything to do with the nickname Fanny and the fact that she tried not to get upset at being addressed in this undignified manner when she was trying to raise compassionate, responsible children. It had nothing to do with her having an outsized rumpus. Frances had a cute figure, if you could see it under all that hippie-wear.

  “I’m on the dock,” she said.

  I peered the half-mile across the lake and waved to her. I could hardly make her out at that distance, against the trees that sheltered the Harbargers’ house, where she nannied now. I could only see her homemade purple patchwork dress, which was probably visible from Mars.

  “The children and I watched the last part of your wakeboarding run,” she said. “You’ve improved so much since last year!”

  “Thanks! But that’s not why you called. You’re dying to know what happened with Sean.”

  Frances was in on my Life Makeover. Not the fashion part—sheesh, look at her. She hadn’t even given me advice on what to do. I wandered into the Harbargers’ house every week or so and told her how my plan was shaping up, and she told me I was being ridiculous and it would never work. I guess I went to her because I wanted to hear some motherly input. We had the perfect relationship. She wasn’t really my mother, so I could listen to her input and then do the opposite. The difference between me and girls with mothers was that I didn’t get in trouble for this.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “When Sean saw you in a bikini, he acted incrementally more cozy to you. Therefore you expected him to profess his love. You honestly did. And he didn’t do a thing.”

  “Rrrrrnt!” I made the game-show noise for a wrong answer. I told her what had really happened.

  “What?” she said when I told her Adam beat Sean at calisthenics. “What?” she said when I told her I landed the air raley. “What?” she said when I told her Sean wiped out. As I got to the part about Sean touching my tummy repeatedly, she interrupted me so often that I had to pitch a frustrated fit. I threw the phone down to the grass, cupped my hands around my mouth, and hollered across the lake, “LET. ME. FINISH!” Inish, inish, inish, said my echo. I picked up the phone and told her the rest of the story, ending with my plan to implement Stage Three that night.

  “But you don’t really think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will solve all your problems, do you?” she asked.

  “Of course not. I think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will show Sean I’m ready for him.”

  “Lori, no girl is ever ready for a boy like Sean. How were finals?” Clearly she wanted to change the subject to impress upon me that boys were not all there was to a teenage girl’s life. As if.

  “Finals?” I asked.

  “Yes, finals. To graduate from the tenth grade? You took them yesterday.”

  Wow, it was hard to believe I’d played hopscotch with the quadratic equation only twenty-seven hours ago. Thinking back, it seemed like I’d sleepwalked through the past nine months of school, compared with everything that had happened today.

  Time flew when you were having Sean.

  Mr. Vader let the boys throw a party at their house every Friday night during the summers. He reasoned that if they were home, they weren’t out drag racing the pink truck against Mrs. Vader’s Volvo. So I’d been to a million of these parties. It should have been old hat. Yet it was new hat. I had put on my seductress bonnet. Ha! Not really. This would have dented my hair, which I’d blown out long, straight, and bryozoa-free.

  We’d had a lot of rain in May, which made the lake full, the grass lush, the trees happy, and the ground soft. Walking through my yard into the boys’ yard in high heels was like wading in the lake where the sand was deep, feet sinking with every step. I felt like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (tenth grade English) hiking through pastures to a house party, her petticoat six inches deep in mud. Wait a minute—oh crap, I’d forgotten my petticoat.

  And what ho, cheerio, here was Mr. Darcy getting his groove on with Miss Bingley under a massive oak tree. Actually, it was only Adam and Rachel.

  I did a double take. Adam pressed Rachel against the tree, kissing her. Deeply.

  This shouldn’t have surprised me. They’d been together for a month. He was my age, and she was a year younger, so neither of them had a driver’s license. But they met at the arcade or the bowling alley. I’d even seen them kiss before, a quick peck. I’d just never seen them kiss like this.

  Knowing Adam, I would have thought his love life would be like every other part of his life: dangerous. It started that way. Since middle school, he’d followed in Sean’s footsteps, coming on to a different girl every week. I had imagined this would continue as Adam got older. The only difference between Adam and Sean would be that Adam would get in a lot of fistfights with the girls’ ex-boyfriends in the movie theater parking lot, and occasionally I would hear a rumor about a drive-by that he would swear wasn’t true.

  Instead, he’d been with Rachel for a month. A whole month. It seemed stable. Even boring. Well! Maybe her own budding womanhood had brought out the pirate in him. Yaaarg.

  He broke the kiss, turned, and stared at me as if I had no right to watch what was going on in a public place. That’s when I realized I was staring at them. Standing still in the middle of the yard, just staring, my heels settling in the dirt. Watching him kiss Rachel bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. There was nothing to do but wade to the front porch of his house.

  I rang the doorbell.

  Nothing happened.

  After a few minutes, I pressed my ear to the door and rang the doorbell again. I definitely heard the chime of the doorbell inside, the bass beat from the stereo, and laughter. Why didn’t someone come to the door? Maybe they had a closed-circuit camera on me right now and
everybody at the party was watching me on TV, taking bets on how long I’d stand there before wading home. I peered into the top corners of the porch for a camera.

  Why hadn’t I dispensed with the last three coats of eye shadow and gone with my brother to the party when he told me he was leaving the house, like usual? He was a dork, but at least he was totally comfortable in social situations, like Dad. Comfortable, or oblivious, which amounted to the same thing.

  The door swung open, revealing Ashton Kutcher. Just kidding! It was actually my tennis team captain, Tammy.

  “Tammeeeee!” I squealed, hugging her. This was what girls did.

  “Loreeeee,” she said in her husky, low-key voice, playing along. “I figured someone had better open the door, because you obviously weren’t going to. Why’d you ring the doorbell? No one’s ringing the doorbell. They just walk in. Besides, don’t you practically live here?”

  Did I? I supposed I knew the territory, and always hoped someone in the house noticed me. This sounded less like I was a member of the family and more like I was a stray dog. I changed the subject. “What are you doing here? Are you friends with Sean or Adam or Cameron?”

  She knitted her eyebrows at me. “I’m friends with you.”

  “Right!” I said. Was she? I fought the urge to look behind me, like she’d actually been talking to someone over my shoulder the whole time.

  “You look great!” she said, pulling me through the doorway and into the brighter light of the foyer. “Cute top, and your eye shadow looks great!”

  “Thanks!” I watched her reaction to make sure she’d said what I’d thought she said. The stereo was loud, and you look great was not something I heard every day, or every year.

  “You weren’t planning to wear mascara?” she asked. “Usually when people wear shadow and liner that heavy, they wear mascara with it.”

  “I do have some! I forgot! Thank you!” I grabbed her hand. She flinched. I didn’t let go. “Will you come with me to my house to make sure I put it on right? I’m serious.”

  Her eyes moved past me out the door, toward my house. “You live next door, right?” Clearly she didn’t want to venture too far from the party with a weird-eyed lunatic such as myself.