The Boys Next Door Page 5

  “Noooooo,” I said sarcastically. “I live on a planet far, far away. Women are from Venus. Come on.” I pulled her toward my house until she seemed to be keeping pace with me. Then I dropped her hand. I knew girls pulled each other by the hand and squealed a lot, but it was too weird for me to do it for long.

  Adam and Rachel were still making out. They’d moved behind the tree where I wouldn’t have seen them unless I’d been looking for them (which I was). I almost pointed them out to Tammy, then decided against it. I didn’t want to sound like a fifth grader: Wow, kissing!

  “You really do look cute,” Tammy said, “other than the—you know. Why the makeover?”

  I took a deep breath and readied myself for my next step into girldom: spilling a giggly secret. When we’d gotten far enough away from Adam and Rachel that they couldn’t hear me, I said, “I have a crush on somebody. I’m trying to get him to notice me.”

  “Sean Vader?”

  I stopped short in my garage, and Tammy ran full force into me. I shoved her and shrieked, “Why would you think that?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” she yelled back. “Maybe because you have told me this over and over!”

  I blinked. “I have?”

  “Maybe not in so many words.”

  Oh no! “So, I’ve been really obvious at school?” I tried to keep most of the horror from my voice.

  “Isn’t everyone?” She flipped her hair back over her shoulder with a tennis ace flick of the wrist that I would try later to reproduce (and fail). “Girls fall all over themselves when Sean comes around. He’s hot, and soooooo sweet.”

  “He sounds like fondue.” Mmmmm, fondue. I opened the door and led the way into my house.

  I didn’t think we were being quiet, particularly. High heels may have looked dainty, but they didn’t sound that way on a tile floor. Maybe it was just that my dad was so absorbed in the convo on his cell phone. For whatever reason, when we emerged from the kitchen into the den, he started, and he stuffed the phone down by his side in the cushions. I was sorry I’d startled him, but it really was comical to see this big blond manly man jump three feet off the sofa when he saw two teenage girls. I mean, it would have been funny if it weren’t so sad.

  Dad was a ferocious lawyer in court. Out of court, he was one of those Big Man on Campus types who shook hands with everybody from the mayor to the alleged ax murderer. A lot like Sean, actually. There were only two things Dad was afraid of. First, he wigged out when anything in the house was misplaced. I won’t even go into all the arguments we’d had about my room being a mess. They’d ended when I told him it was my room, and if he didn’t stop bugging me about it, I would put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers, maybe even hide some (cue horror movie music). No spoons for you! Second, he was easily startled, and very pissed off afterward. “Damn it, Lori!” he hollered.

  “It’s great to see you too, loving father. Lo, I have brought my friend Tammy to witness our domestic bliss. She’s on the tennis team with me.” Actually, I was on the tennis team with her.

  “Hello, Tammy. It’s nice to meet you,” Dad said without getting up or shaking her hand or anything else he would normally do. While the two of them recited a few more snippets of polite nonsense, I watched my dad. From the angle of his body, I could tell he was protecting that cell phone behind the cushions.

  I nodded toward the hiding place. “Hot date?”

  I was totally kidding. I didn’t expect him to say, “When?”

  So I said, “Ever.” And then realized I’d brought up a subject that I didn’t want to bring up, especially not while I was busy being self-absorbed. I clapped my hands. “Okay, then! Tammy and I are going upstairs very loudly, and after a few minutes we will come back down, ringing a cowbell. Please continue with your top secret phone convo.”

  I turned and headed for the stairs. Tammy followed me. I thought Dad might order me back, send Tammy out, and give me one of those lectures about my attitude (who, me?). But obviously he was chatting with Pamela Anderson and couldn’t wait for me to leave the room. Behind us, I heard him say, “I’m so sorry. I’m still here. Lori came in. Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try.”

  “He seems jumpy,” Tammy whispered on the stairs.

  “Always,” I said.

  “Do you have a lot of explosions around your house?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Not this early.” I passed through my bedroom, into my bathroom, and found the mascara in the drawer. Poised with wand to eye, I realized Tammy hadn’t followed me. I leaned through the bathroom doorway.

  She stood in the middle of my bedroom, gazing around with wide eyes. I hadn’t made my bed. In three years. And the walls were plastered with wakeboarding posters and snowboarding posters and surfing posters (I was going to learn to snowboard and surf someday, too). It all might have been overwhelming at first—not exactly House Beautiful.

  “Is this McGillicuddy’s room?” she asked.

  “What! No. McGillicuddy’s a neat freak. Also he collects Madame Alexander dolls.”

  She turned her wide eyes on me.

  “Kidding! I’m kidding,” I backtracked. Why did I have to make up stuff like that? My family was weird enough for real.

  She stepped over to my bookshelf to peer at the stacks of wakeboarding mags and sci-fi novels. Well, let her stare, the bi-yotch. I didn’t need her damn help. I swiped the mascara across my lashes and popped back out of the bathroom. “Ready?”

  She looked up at me guiltily like she’d gotten caught thumbing through my issues of Playboy (stolen from McGillicuddy, and more useful for learning what not to wear than teen fashion mags). But she hadn’t found those yet. Standing at my bedside table, she held the photo of my mother.

  She set the photo down and narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re not ready.” She came into the bathroom and explained the aesthetic we were going for was not clumps of lashes honed to points and sticking out from my eyeballs like the tentacles of a starfish. Somehow in the purchase of my fine cosmetics, I’d missed out on the idea of an eyelash comb. She used a regular hair comb to tease my lashes apart.

  We stomped back down the stairs (no cowbell, but I made air-raid siren noises to warn my dad) and waded across the yard. Adam and Rachel were still making out behind the tree, like they hadn’t seen each other for a year. Jeez, we’d just gotten out of school yesterday.

  I tried to look without really looking and letting on to Tammy I was looking. Both Adam’s hands were on Rachel’s shoulders, holding her in place while he kissed her. Both her hands were under his T-shirt, on his stomach—his stomach hard with muscle, his smooth tanned skin… I couldn’t see this, of course, but I knew it was there.

  It had never occurred to me to be jealous of Rachel before. Suddenly I was burning with jealousy, sweating in the humid night. It must be that I saw Rachel as an understudy for Holly and Beige and all the girls at my school who knew what to wear and how to act or, if they didn’t, hid it well. I could totally see a third-grade girl feeling inferior to Rachel and wanting to be Rachel when she grew up. That third-grade girl was thinking someday maybe she could have a boyfriend like Adam, who loved her like Adam—

  “Argh!” I bellowed as I pitched face-first onto the pine needles. I must have gotten my heel caught in a snake hole.

  “Are you okay?” Tammy asked, holding out a hand to help me up. “Nice trick. You should put that in your wakeboarding routine.”

  “What? And steal Adam’s thunder?” I brushed myself off. Did I need to go home and change? I was new to this idea of a “wardrobe,” and my supply of Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Tops was limited. Fortunately, my denim miniskirt was made to look dirty. It was very me. And the wild pattern in my top probably concealed any decayed-leaf stains. Satisfied, I walked on with Tammy. I didn’t look back to see whether Adam had watched me fall. I hadn’t forgotten that stare of his.

  “Want to play tennis tomorrow night, after it’s cooled off a little?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I sa
id before I thought. Tammy and I played tennis all the time in school. Why not out of school, too? After I’d answered, I realized that of course Sean would ask me out for tomorrow night and I wouldn’t get to go with him! Right. I wasn’t lucky enough to have problems like that. Silly me. “You shouldn’t have to drive all the way down here to pick me up and then drive me all the way back.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Stepping onto the Vaders’ porch, I said, “McGillicuddy can come get me when we’re through.” My brother never had anything to do on Saturday night. It ran in the family.

  “McGillicuddy?” she asked.

  We walked back into the party. Fluttering my finely separated lashes, I could hardly believe my luck. Usually at parties I wandered in alone and hoped someone took pity and talked to me. Then, by degrees, I faded into the shadows. Tonight I was entering the party with someone.

  Of course, the instant we hit the wall of crowd and sound, she pointed across the dark room and shouted above the music, “I’d completely forgotten McGillicuddy was coming back from college! I’m going to say hi.” The two people I felt most comfortable hanging with, hanging with each other instead!

  Except for the kids from Birmingham and Montgomery who were vacationing on the lake with their parents and had wandered into the party, I knew all these people from school. I’d been in school with most of them since kindergarten. For some reason, this didn’t help, and possibly made things worse. I watched Tammy weave between knots of people to hug McGillicuddy. I thought about going after her. But then I might look like I didn’t want her to leave me by myself because I wasn’t good at talking to people at parties. Imagine!

  Suddenly things looked way, way up. I saw Sean in the darkness, next to the stairs, with his back to me. He stood a few inches taller than his friends who’d just graduated too, who surrounded him. Sean was always surrounded.

  As I crossed the room to him, folks kept stepping in my way, wanting to say hey and have conversations with me, of all things. The one time I wasn’t interested in being well-liked. Drat! I made nicey-nicey, go away, and resumed my uphill trek across the room, only to have someone else stop me.

  By the time I finally reached him, my heart pounded. But it was now or never. I made myself grin at his friends as I slid my hand across his T-shirt, feeling his hard stomach underneath the cotton. I almost flinched at how good and how intimate it felt, but through the marvel of my own willpower, I did not flinch. I laid my head playfully against his chest, as I’d seen girls do when they claimed to be just friends with a guy but everyone whispered something more was going on.

  I half-expected him to shout, “Get off me!” and shove me away. Not because Sean would ever do this to a girl—he had more charming ways of extricating himself from cretins—but because my life generally had been a long series of mortifications, and Sean shouting in alarm at my embrace would fit right in. The other half of me expected him to chuckle gently, but not make a move of his own quite yet. It might take him a while to get used to the new me.

  He didn’t chuckle. He didn’t shove me away. He did exactly what he was supposed to. He slipped his arm around my waist and drew me closer against his warm body. I felt him nodding at something one of the other guys said about baseball, but he didn’t say a word to me or anyone. As if a greeting like this from me were the most natural thing in the world. He smelled even better than usual, too, just a hint of cologne. A woodsy scent with undertones of musk and gunpowder.

  I snuggled against him, nose close to his warm, scented chest, and enjoyed a few more seconds of this tingling paradise. What heaven if my whole summer could be like this—

  His low voice vibrating through my body, he asked his friends, “Have you been watching the Braves? Awesome pitcher or what?”

  Oh God, I was hugging Adam!

  I jerked away from him. Almost instantly I realized I shouldn’t jerk away from him, because the situation would be slightly less mortifying if I pretended I’d known it was Adam all along.

  The damage was done. Worse, I didn’t have a chance to burst out the front door and run—not walk, run—all the way home, dash upstairs to the computer in my room, and book a one-way ticket to Antarctica, to join the commune there for teenagers too socially challenged for the chess club. Before I could take another step away, he caught my elbow.

  “Later,” he called over his shoulder to the guys. He pulled me into a corner and bent down to whisper in my ear, “You’re blushing.”

  I opened my lips. I didn’t seem to be taking in enough oxygen through my nose. “I’m sunburned,” I breathed.

  “You thought I was Sean.” The little dolphin was smiling, enjoying my discomfort too much for my taste.

  “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.”