The Boys Next Door Read online

  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.

  “The 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.

  She beat me twice, and we passed at the net again. “I’ll admit it’s not much,” I said. “I need a new plan, also referred to as The Back-Up Plan When Stage
Three: Cleavage Has No Effect on Cradle Robbers. Any advice?”

  I won one game, and then she beat me again. As we approached the net, she suggested, “Make him jealous? I don’t know. I’m no good at being sneaky and going behind people’s backs.”

  I dropped my racket with a clatter on the court. “Don’t look now”—which of course was her cue to look—“but maybe my old plan worked after all! Sean dumped Rachel already, and the pink truck is coming for me!”

  The pink truck was an enormous pickup that used to belong to the marina, so old that the red paint had faded to pink and the VADER’S MARINA signs had peeled off the sides. Cameron had taken possession of the pink truck when he turned sixteen. We gave him no end of hell about it. Then, when he graduated from high school, his parents gave him a new truck to take to college, and Sean had inherited the pink truck.

  Sean, being Sean, had managed to make the pink truck seem cool. There were many rumors around school about the adventures of Sean in the pink truck with Holly or Beige. I had dreamed of my own adventures in the pink truck. Now my dreams had come true!

  Except that in my dreams, I was not a dork. “Sean came to pick me up!” I groaned. “This is terrible! What do I do?”

  “Act casual,” Tammy said in a level tone, watching the truck park just outside the high chain-link fence. “Interested, but not manic.”

  “How do I do that? I don’t know how to do that!”

  “Go hug him hello.”

  Just then a breeze kissed the back of my neck under my ponytail, reminding me how hot the night was, and how heavily I’d exerted myself chasing Tammy’s serves. “I’m sweaty.”

  “If he likes you, he won’t mind.” She led the way through the gate and headed for McGillicuddy’s side of the truck to distract him for me.

  As I walked toward Sean’s side, Sean opened the door and started to get out. I had to walk all the way around the big, heavy door to hug—“Adam!”

  He looked down at me, arms open wide for me because I’d been holding mine out. He dropped his arms when he saw the look on my face. “Nice to see you, too,” he said grumpily.

  I patted him lightly on one cheek—the cheek opposite the one with the blue bruise under his eye. The pats got harder until I was pretty much slapping him. “Why can’t you be Sean? Oh, God.” I knew almost before I’d gotten the words out that Adam didn’t deserve that. I stood on my tiptoes and slid my arms around him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  He didn’t say anything. But he did put his arms around my waist.

  I looked up at him. “It’s just…. Why are you driving Sean’s truck?”

  “It’s my truck.”

  Sean must have gotten a new truck for graduation, just like Cameron. And now Adam was driving the pink truck, because—crap. “Oh, Adam, I forgot your sixteenth birthday!”

  “I know.”

  Those two words told me he’d already thought everything I was thinking. Our birthdays were three weeks apart. We’d had a few birthday parties together when we were little. How could I have forgotten his freaking birthday? “I was preoccupied with finals,” I gasped, “and summer coming up, and—”

  “Sean. I know.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said sincerely. I hugged him as hard as I could, then started to pull back.

  His hands didn’t leave my waist. “I’m still kind of mad,” he said.

  Laughing, I tightened my hold on him. I felt him bend down and put his chin on my shoulder.

  On the other side of the truck, talking with McGillicuddy, Tammy raised one eyebrow at me.

  That’s when I had an Idea.

  I ran my hand down Adam’s side until I found his hand. “Let’s talk privately.”

  He looked down at his hand in mine like he couldn’t quite believe this was happening. I couldn’t either. “Okay,” he told our hands.

  I called across the hood of the truck, “Adam and I will be right back. We’re going to talk privately.”

  Tammy and McGillicuddy stared at us, then each other, then us again. Finally I pulled Adam away, swinging his hand like holding hands with him wasn’t the weirdest thing ever. We walked down the sidewalk, around the corner of the fence to the side of the tennis courts that faced the road. The very edge of the pool of light from the tennis courts touched us, so we could be seen from the road: very important to the plan.

  I backed him against the fence. I didn’t shove him or anything, but I’m sure he felt trapped against the chain links because I stood so close to him, and the determined expression on my face was so frightening.

  I squeezed his hand. “I still think Sean and Rachel’s little fling is fake. Sean’s trying to get revenge on you, and Rachel’s trying to make you jealous. She wants to heat up your romance for the summer. In two weeks, by the Crappy Festival, it’ll be over with Sean, and things will be back to normal.” And Sean would be free again. “But you need to up the stakes to keep her interested. To make sure she comes back and never leaves you. To teach her a lesson.”

  Adam breathed faster. His blue eyes widened as it dawned on him what I was going to suggest. In fact, he looked close to panic. I almost backed down. I’d be pretty embarrassed if he ran screaming away and hitchhiked with someone on the road just to escape from me. But I had to salvage my chance with Sean. I’d never gotten as close to him as I had yesterday afternoon in the lake! So I pressed ahead.

  “You and I should pretend to hook up. That’ll show Rachel you’re not putting up with her bullshit. And it’ll show Sean I’m girlfriend material. We’ll drive them mad, I tell you, mad!” I made a joke out of it in case Adam burst into uncontrollable laughter at the idea of even pretending to hook up with me. Then I could say I’d been kidding all along. I knew Adam valued me as a friend. But I offered him a way out in case he thought I was a dog.

  He swallowed, still watching me, alarmed. “You want to hook up with me. To make Rachel jealous, so I can get her back.”

  “Right,” I said, wondering why this was so hard for him to understand. Maybe he didn’t watch as many MTV reality shows as I did.

  “You think that would work? It would make her jealous to see me with another girl?”

  “Sure.” It was looking more and more like my dog theory was correct. “Unless you think I’m the wrong girl for the job. I’m just suggesting you do this with me because I’m trying to hook Sean, too.” Did he think being with me would ruin his chances with Rachel or any other girl at our school forever, as surely as if he’d gone out with Godzilla?

  “Okay,” he said quickly.

  “Okay?” I had thought it would be harder to convince him. I’d missed something. Which, I’ll admit, was not all that unusual.

  “Okay, we’ll pretend to hook up.” He still watched me. His eyes traveled from my eyes to one of my ears, down my neck and further down to my cleavage (thank you sports bra!). He actually leaned back against the fence for better viewing of my legs beneath the micro-miniskirt. Then he met my gaze again. Like he was surveying what he had to pretend to hook up with, and it checked out, with no damage to his rep.

  I should have appreciated this. I passed inspection! But his gaze made me uncomfortable enough that the pesky tingle returned. Worse, he seemed to sense he was causing me to tingle. He made that face with his jaw dropped, trying not to smile. Then he gave up and broke into the broadest grin I’d seen on his face since—well, since yesterday afternoon, when he beat Sean at push-ups.

  A memory flashed into my mind of Adam, age eight, jumping off the roof because Sean dared him to. (Broken ankle.)

  I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

  Suddenly very nervous, I rubbed my tingling hands together and looked toward the road. “Should we drive to the movie theater parking lot where more people will see us together? We could pretend to k—” I looked back at Adam at that moment, and something stopped me in the way he watched me.

  “Iss,” he said, nodding.

  “And they’ll tell everyone. It’ll get
back to Sean and Rachel.”

  Now he was shaking his head no. “That’s not going to work. We can’t stage it so carefully. I’m an awful actor. Something tells me you’ll never win an Oscar, either.”

  “Hey—”

  “So we need to make it look natural. We need to act like we’re into each other all the time, without checking first to see if someone is watching.” His hand was trembling in mine. “Maybe this is the first time we’ve realized we’re into each other. And maybe this is our first kiss.”

  He leaned down. When his face got within a few inches of mine, I giggled. Not the fake giggle of a tomboy raised by wolves, either. A real, girly, high-pitched giggle that originated somewhere in my sinuses and made me want to slap myself. There was hope for me yet.

  “See?” he whispered against my lips. “This is what we’re trying to avoid. We need to act like we want to do this.” And he kissed me.

  There were still a few inches between our bodies. So there was no embrace. Only his lips, soft, warm, on my lips.

  Our fingers, interlaced.

  A tingle so strong, it turned into a vibration.

  A hick driving by on the road, hollering, “Get a room, Vader! Wooooo!”

  Adam laughed a little against my lips. I thought I detected the slightest shudder, like he felt the vibration too. Then he backed up and looked at me. “Is that what you wanted?”

  “Yes,” I breathed. “Is that what you wanted?”

  His smile faded. “Yeah. Come on.” He led me back up the sidewalk, toward Tammy and McGillicuddy still talking together but never taking their eyes off us. When we got close to the truck, Adam asked me, “Will you go out with me tomorrow night?”

  “I’d love to,” I said, focusing only on him like I had no idea my brother was staring a hole through my head.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven,” Adam said. “No, wait.”