Текст книги "Endless Summer"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

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And because we both were in training for sports. Adam might start for the football team this year. I was just trying not to get kicked off the tennis team by an incoming freshman. My game was okay, but I was nowhere near as good as Holly and Beige, who had just graduated. Or Tammy, who would be a senior this year, and team captain.

Plus, there was an unfortunate incident last year. I didn’t train all winter, got to our first meet, overexerted myself, and barfed on the court. I went on to win the match 6–2, 6–1, but nobody seemed to remember that part. Since then, I’d made sure to stay in shape.

Today I held my own in push-ups. After about fifty, I was nowhere near my limit. Cameron’s grunting increased. I tried to concentrate on my own self, but Cameron was hard to ignore. His face turned very red. His arms trembled, and finally he collapsed on his bare stomach. My brother hadn’t trembled or grunted as much, but he took the opportunity to lie down on his stomach, too, hoping no one would notice as Cameron drew the fire.

Cameron cursed and said, “I don’t know why I can’t get my ass in gear today.”

Between push-ups, I breathed, “About twelve ounces too much frat party for both of you.”

Cameron scrambled toward me. I knew I was in trouble, but it was too late to get up and run. One solid arm circled my waist. With his other arm, he held my legs so tightly I couldn’t wiggle or, better yet, kick him in the gut. He took two steps toward the edge of the wharf.

I managed not to plead or scream. After almost sixteen years with boys, I had a lot of control over my natural girl-reactions. It wasn’t until he pitched me off that I remembered I did want to react like a girl today. Then, as I hit the water, I realized I hadn’t screened this swimming area for bryozoa. “Eeee—” I plunged in. Almost before my toes hit the bottom, I was pushing up through the water, toward the sunbeams and the platform on the back of the boat, which was less likely to harbor bryozoa than any part of the concrete wharf. Ugh, ugh, ugh, I could almost feel a heinous mass squishing past my skin—but I made it safely to the surface.

And slapped myself mentally as I climbed up on the platform. If I’d pulled off my new siren act, Cameron wouldn’t have tossed me into the lake. I would have been too delicate and too haughty. He wouldn’t have dared to touch me. On the other hand, he did recognize that I was a girl, on some level. If I’d been Adam, he would have just shoved me in instead of picking me up.

By the time I stood on the platform, I remembered I was now wearing a wet bikini. I collected myself enough to make jumping down into the boat look halfway svelte.

But nobody was looking at me anymore. Cameron and my brother stood over Adam and Sean still doing push-ups.

Adam, eyes on the concrete, kept pushing himself up in an even rhythm. Sean watched Adam with a little smile and gritted teeth, turning redder and redder. e bulging muscles of Sean’s tanned arms trembled.

Oh God, Sean was going to lose.

He fell on the concrete with a groan, followed by eleven choice curse words. Adam kept doing push-ups, probably because these games we played tended to change without warning. Sean might claim Adam was required to do five more push-ups per year younger. Adam was no fool. He made sure. Sean stood, and Adam was still doing push-ups.

“We’ve created a monster,” my brother said.

Adam did one last push-up for good measure and stood up slowly. He clapped his hands together to brush off the dust. And then– don’t do it, Adam, don’t make Sean any angrier than he already is—he gave Sean a grin.

“I don’t believe it!” shouted Cameron. “You know what else? Adam is taller! Stand back-to-back and let me make sure.” Sean refused to stand back-to-back with Adam. ey goaded him and called him names that I can’t repeat, but that had to do with Sean being a girl, the worst insult imaginable. So Sean and Adam stood back-to-back. Sure enough, Sean was more muscular and filled out, as always, but Adam was half an inch taller.

Adam turned and gave Sean that grim look with dropped jaw, trying not to laugh. “I’m the biggest.”

“Ohhhhhh!” Cameron and my brother moaned like Adam had gotten in a good punch on Sean in one of their boxing matches. I’ll spare you the full five minutes of size jokes that ensued. Tammy and some other girls on the tennis team had told me they were so jealous of me growing up around boys, because I had a window into how boys thought. This, my friends, was the deep, dark secret. The size jokes went on and on as if I weren’t there, or as if I weren’t a girl. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

Sean smiled, wincing only a little when they shoved him. He would keep smiling no matter what they said to him. is was one of the many things I loved about Sean.

Surely the boys knew they couldn’t break him. They would try anyway.

I was a little concerned about what Sean would do to Adam later. Sean didn’t let Adam get away with stuff like that. But I supposed that was Adam’s business, the dumbass.

Disgusted, I sat in the boat with my back to them. When they ran out of size jokes for the moment—they would think of more as the afternoon went on, trust me—

they piled into the boat and proceeded to argue about who got to drive first. The consensus was that Sean could drive first as a consolation prize because he was a loser.

ere was no question about me driving. I got my boater’s license when I turned fifteen, just like they did. e problem was that I didn’t know my left from my right.

is was their fault, really. ey taught me to waterski when I was five years old. Nobody thought I’d get up and stay up on the first try, so I wasn’t properly instructed on the dismount. I couldn’t steer. Too terrified to drop the rope, I ran into the dock and broke my arm.

My right arm. At the time, my brain must have been designing the circuitry that told me left from right. Because since then, I’d never been able to hear Sean yell, “Go left!” or my brother holler, “Turn to the right!” without thinking, Okay. I broke my right arm. is is my right arm. ey want me to turn this way , by which time I had missed the turn, or run the boy I was pulling on the wakeboard into a tree. We found this out the hard way last summer, the first time I tried to pull Adam.

Sean started the engine and putted through the marina waters, and Adam had the nerve to plop onto the seat across the aisle from me. Sean reached the edge of the idle zone and cranked the boat into top speed. Adam called to me so softly I could barely catch his words over the motor, “Close your legs.”

“What for? I waxed!” I looked down to make sure. is was okay now, because Sean was facing the other way and couldn’t hear me in the din. Indeed, I was clean. I spread my legs even wider, put my arms on the back of the seat, and generally took up as much room as possible, like a boy. I glanced back over at Adam. “Does it make you uncomfortable for me to sit this way?”

He watched me warily. “Yes.”

“May I suggest that this is your problem and not mine?”

He licked his lips and bent toward me. “If it keeps Sean from asking you out, it’s going to be your problem, and you’re going to make it my problem.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, crossing my legs like a girl. “Thanks for staying out of my way. How the hell am I supposed to get Sean to ask me out when he’s all pissy?”

“You wanted me to lose to him at team calisthenics? That was too sweet to miss.”

“You didn’t have to win by quite so much, Adam. You knew I needed him in a good mood. You didn’t have to rub it in.” Adam grinned. “And you wanted me to stop growing?”

“Do not make a joke about your size. If you can’t think of anything to talk about except your large size, please say nothing at all.” So we sat in silence until Sean slowed the boat in the middle of the lake. McGillicuddy put on his life vest, sat on the platform, slipped his feet into the bindings of his wakeboard, and hopped into the water. He and Cameron had been the ones to discover wakeboarding, and they did it first while the rest of us were still waterskiing. To look at them today, you’d think they’d never gotten the hang of it. My brother face-planted twice in his twenty-minute turn. Cameron had a hard time getting up. Frankly, I was beginning to worry.

Since we were kids, we’d spent every summer afternoon skiing and wakeboarding behind the VADER’S MARINA boat as advertisement for the business. Sean had even convinced Mr. Vader to go all out with a boat made especially for wakeboarding, which made bigger waves. Bars arched over the boat for attaching the tow rope, and speakers on the bars blasted Nickelback like the music came on automatically with the boat motor. (Once I’d brought the first Kelly Clarkson album and asked to play it rather than Nickelback while we wakeboarded. They’d laughed in my face and called me Miss Independent for months.) We held a special wakeboarding exhibition when the lake was crowded on the Fourth of July and Labor Day. But our show during the Crappy Festival in two weeks was the most important, because sales of boats and equipment at the marina were highest near the beginning of the summer. Okay, it was actually the Crappie Festival. Crappie is a kind of fish, pronounced more like croppie. e Crappie Festival had a Crappie Queen and a Crappie Bake-Off and a Crappie Toss, in which folks competed to throw a dead fish farthest down the lake shore. Sean started calling it the Crappy Festival, which sounded a lot more fun.

But the festival would be no fun at all if we kept wakeboarding like this! None of us had been out on the water since Labor Day last year, but come on. I never expected Cameron and my brother to be quite so awful on their first time out. And since Sean would be watching me now, I hoped I broke the cycle.

I strapped a life vest over my bikini. Such a pity to cover my shapely body (snort). en I tied my feet tightly into the bindings attached to my board. I hopped into the water, wakeboard and all, and assumed the position. I wished my brother would putter the boat away from me a little faster. e wakeboard floated on its side in front of me as I crouched behind it with my knees spread. Talk about needing to close my legs! e embarrassing stance had caused me to get up too quickly and face-plant more times than I cared to count, just to save myself a few seconds of the boys cracking jokes about me that I couldn’t hear.

Not today. I relaxed in the water. Anyone care for an eyeful? I parted my knees and gave Adam the okay sign. He was spotting. Sean and Cameron watched me, too, as concerned as I was that we all sucked and Mr. Vader would pull the plug on our daily outing. No pressure. When my brother finally got around to opening up the engine, I let the boat pull me up and relaxed into the adrenaline rush.

Wakeboarding was pretty simple. I stood on the wakeboard like a skateboard, and held onto the rope as if I were waterskiing. e boat motor left a triangular wake behind it as the boat moved through the water. I moved outside it by going over one of the small waves. en I turned back inward and used one wave as a skateboarding ramp to take off. I sailed over the wake, and used the opposite wave as a ramp to land.

After a few minutes I mostly forgot about the boys, even Sean. e drone of the motor would do that like nothing else: put me in this different zone. Even though I was connected by a rope to the boat and the outside world, I was all alone with myself. I just enjoyed the sun and the water and the wakeboard.

My intention all along had been to get my wakeboarding legs back this first day. Maybe I’d do tricks when we went out the next day. I didn’t want to get too cocky and bust ass in front of Sean. But as I got more comfortable and forgot to care, I tried a few standbys—a front flip, a scarecrow. ere was no busting of ass. So I tried a backroll. And landed it solidly.

Now I got cocky. I did a heelside backroll with a nose-grab. is meant that in the middle of the flip, I let go of the rope handle with one hand, reached down, and grabbed the front of the board. It served no purpose in the trick except to look impressive, like, is only appears to be a difficult trick. I have all the time in the world. I will grab the board. Yawn. And I landed it. This was getting too good to be true.

My brother swung the boat around just before we reached the graffiti-covered highway bridge that spanned the lake. Cameron had spray-painted his name and his girlfriend’s name on the bridge, alongside all the other couples’ names and over the faded ones. My genius brother had tried to paint his own name but ran out of room on that section of bridge.

McGILLICUDD

Y

Sean wisely never painted his girlfriends’ names. He would have had to change them too often. For my part, I was very thankful that when most of this spray-painting action was going on last summer, I was still too short to reach over from the pile and haul myself up on the main part of the bridge. I probably had the height and the upper body strength now, and I prayed none of the boys pointed this out. Then I’d have to spray-paint LORI LOVES SEAN on the bridge. And move to Canada.

It was kind of strange Adam hadn’t spray-painted his name with Rachel’s in the past few weeks. Maybe he didn’t consider it daring enough, if Cameron had managed to do it. Adam had painted in red letters in the very center of the bridge, WASH ME. e bridge was a big part of our lake experience. Wakeboarding underneath it would have been cool. But driving the boat under the bridge while towing a wakeboarder was dangerous. Adam had been the one to discover this (seventh grade).

My brother pointed the boat for the rail. A few summers ago, the boys had pulled the guts out of an old pontoon boat that also said VADER’S MARINA down the side.

ey anchored it near the shore and built a rail sticking out from it, topped with PVC pipe. You could really hurt yourself on this contraption (Adam: eighth grade) but my ride was going great, and I was in the groove. I zoomed far out from the wakeboarding boat, popped up onto the rail, slid across it on the board, and landed nice and soft in the water on the other end.

Adam raised both fists at me. (Nice, but no love from Sean?) If Adam yelled, I couldn’t hear him over the boat motor. What I could hear as my brother paralleled the shoreline was the ompsons and the Foshees, our neighbors hanging out on their docks. ey came out to watch us practice a lot of afternoons. Cha-ching! Two sales we’d as good as made for Vader’s Marina when their kids got a little older.

en came my family’s dock, the Vader’s dock at their house, and finally the marina. Dad had gotten home from work, I saw. He and Mr. Vader sat in lawn chairs on the marina dock, holding beers. I really shouldn’t have done this if I was trying to be ladylike. But the opportunity was too perfect to resist, and old habits died hard. I arced way out from the wake, aiming for the dock.

My dad saw me coming and knew exactly what was going to happen. He jumped from his chair and jogged up the stairs, toward the shore, so I wouldn’t ruin his business suit. His tie flapped over his shoulder. He didn’t warn Mr. Vader, who took a sip of beer as I slid past, spraying water probably fifteen feet in the air behind me.

e wall of water smacked right on top of him. I didn’t want to turn my head to look, lose my balance, fall, and ruin the effect (chicken salad on bikini, hello). But I saw him out the corner of my eye, T-shirt and shorts soaked, beer halted in midair.

Sean probably heard me cackling all the way up in the boat. Sex-y. I tried to calm myself and concentrate. I wanted to try an air raley, which I’d been working up to last summer but never landed. If there was one good reason for Sean never to ask me out, it was that he couldn’t shake the memory of me wiping out after an air raley. Done correctly, I would hang in the air behind the boat for a few seconds with the board above my head. I would then sail down the opposite wake and land sweetly. Done incorrectly, it was a high-speed belly flop.

When I busted ass (or tummy), Sean and the other boys would make fun of me for the rest of the boat ride, and would spread it around their party that night. But they were so far away in the toy boat, and the drone of the motor was like a bubble around me. Nothing could hurt me in here.

I gestured upward, which told Adam to tell my brother to speed up. Adam knew what I planned to do and shook his head at me. What a pain, to stop the boat and argue with him about it. He didn’t consult anyone before he tried a trick and busted ass. If we stopped, Sean would insist my turn was over, and I’d be done for the day. I wasn’t done. So I nodded my head vigorously. Adam shook his finger at me, scolding. Then he turned around and spoke to my brother.

e drone pitched higher as the boat sped up. I relaxed, relaxed, relaxed and let the boat and the wave do the work for me. My muscles remembered what they’d tried to do last summer, and this time they were able to do it. I caught miles of air, a huge thrill, and one glance at the boat: four boys with their mouths open. en I almost panicked as I lost my balance when my board hit its high point behind me. Almost—but I kept myself together. I rode gravity down the opposite wave.

Immediately I arced out and back to pick up speed, and did a 360 with a grab. Landed it. Then a 540. Landed it.

I thought I might be pushing my luck. I’d probably break my leg climbing back into the boat. Also, I didn’t want my arms to be so sore the next day that I couldn’t ride at all. I signaled to Adam that I was stopping and dropped the rope. The handle skipped away from me across the surface of the lake.

As the echo of the motor faded away and I sank into the warm water, I could hear them clapping for me. All four of them, standing up in the boat, facing me, applauding me and cheering for me. “Yaaaaaaay, Junior!”

I had never been so happy in my life.

And it got better.

I bent over in the water to loosen the bindings, slipped my feet out, and kicked my way back to the boat with my board floating in front of me. As I pulled myself up on the platform, Sean put out one hand to help me—totally unnecessary, since I’d climbed up on the platform a thousand times before with no help.

“I taught her everything she knows,” he said loudly enough for the other boys to hear, but looking only at me. He gave me his beautiful smile, a secret smile for the two of us to share, and sat down again.

“That’s bullshit,” Cameron said.

“I was the one who helped her most with the air raley last summer,” my brother said.

“Tough act to follow,” Adam told me, shrugging on his life vest. I would have treasured this comment forever if I hadn’t been high on Sean.

But I was. So I peeled off my life vest and dropped it on the floor of the boat, sat daintily in the seat where Adam had been, and crossed my legs. Like my fingers had a mind of their own, they bent inward and rubbed my palm where Sean had touched me. I tingled all over again at the thought. Or maybe I tingled because my body was still jacked from how hard I’d worked my muscles out on the water. Either way, I felt so lovely and sated just then, with the sun in my eyes. I wished Adam weren’t jumping in for his turn.

Because watching Adam wakeboard was not relaxing. He wasn’t careful when wakeboarding. Or in general. He was the opposite of careful. His life was one big episode of Jackass. He would do anything on a dare, so the older boys dared him a lot. My role in this game was to run and tell their mom. If I’d been able to run faster when we were kids, I might have saved Adam from a broken arm, several cracked ribs, and a couple of snake bites.

Knowing this, it might not make a lot of sense that Mr. Vader let us wakeboard for the marina. But we’d come to wakeboarding only gradually. When we first started out, it was more like, Look at the very young children on water skis! How adorable. One time the local newspaper ran a photo of me and Adam waterskiing double, each of us holding up an American flag. It’s okay for you to gag now. I can take it.

But Mr. Vader was no fool. He understood things changed. After the second time Adam broke his collarbone, Mr. Vader put us under strict orders not to get hurt, because it was bad for business. Customers might not be so eager to buy a wakeboard and all the equipment if they witnessed our watery death. To enforce this rule, the punishment for bleeding in the boat was that we had to clean the boat. Adam cleaned the boat a lot last summer.

At the end of the rope, Adam signaled that he was ready to go. I told Cameron, who was driving now. He started too slow, and Adam tried to get up too fast. “Down,” I called.

“Come on, LD,” Sean muttered as if Adam were right in front of him. Even though I’d heard this joke one billion times and didn’t think it was funny, I made sure to look over at Sean and laugh until he saw me laughing. He laughed too.

Adam had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. is was why I didn’t see a lot of him during the school year. I was in all the advanced classes, and he definitely was not. Sean had lots of fun with this. e boys actually called Adam ADD to his face. ey called him LD (for Learning Disability). ey called him SAS (for Short Attention Span) and Sassy and Sassafras. ey told him the short bus was coming for him. He had a prescription to help him concentrate in school, but he refused to take it because it made him feel dead. In other words, he was perfectly happy with ADHD. Or he would have been, if the boys had left him alone about it.

Sometimes I thought he took stupid risks to make up for being slow in school. Or maybe he was just like that. e skull-and-crossbones pendant was perfect for him.

The boys told him if he improved his grades, when he graduated he could apply to pirate school.

Cameron brought the boat around and straightened the rope. I told him Adam was ready to go. is time they got it right. Adam got up. Immediately he told me to speed up, and I told Cameron. Adam did a tantrum to blind, which meant he backflipped where he couldn’t see and ended with his back to the boat. He preferred tricks with a blind landing. He told me to speed up again, and I told Cameron. Adam did a turn to blind, touched down on the edge of his board, and miraculously managed not to fall.

“Good save!” McGillicuddy shouted from the front of the bow.

“Dumb luck,” Sean said.

I smiled at Sean. I would feel guilty later about laughing, as I always did when I laughed at Sean’s mean jokes. But while I was there with him, he was so charming, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

When I looked back at Adam again, he was in the middle of a 540 to blind, which was fine, but for the love of God, he hardly had time to land before he hit the rails on the pontoon boat. I waved to get his attention, then swiped my finger across my throat: cut it out. He signaled for me to speed up.

I told Cameron, “Adam would like to spend this summer in traction. Speed up.”

I turned back around in my seat to watch Adam again. Sean was leaning toward me in his seat, watching me. “Cold?” he asked me.

Pardon? Yeah, the ninety-degree afternoon and ninety-percent humidity always gave me a chill I couldn’t shake. But one delicate, haughty brain cell in the back of my mind told me he was flirting with me and I should feign helplessness.

“I’m freezing!” I squealed. And just like that, Sean Vader moved across to my side of the aisle and scooted against me in my seat until I made room for him. He put his hot bare arm around my bare shoulders. And I fainted.

No, I didn’t really. But I did feel dazed, perhaps from the hyperventilation. Suddenly I realized Adam had been gesturing wildly at me for several seconds without it even registering with me. He signaled me to slow down. I told Cameron.

Adam did a front flip. Sean said in my ear, “Gosh, I’ve never seen anyone do that before. Makes me want to buy a wakeboard from Vader’s Marina!” I giggled. Adam signaled me to slow down more, and I told Cameron.

Adam did a back roll with a grab. Sean put his free hot hand on my bare knee and whispered, “You don’t believe Adam’s bigger than me, do you?”

is time I missed a beat. I was used to locker room humor. But Sean directing locker room humor at me, flirting with me? It seemed unlikely that Stage Two: Bikini had worked so quickly. Was I reading him wrong? Adam gave me the thumbs-down, and I told Cameron to slow the boat one more time.

Just as I turned back around, Adam launched into what could only be an S-bend, which was absolutely impossible to land with the boat going this slowly.

Sean, McGillicuddy and I all swore at once, and watched Adam’s long, slow death-splash with interest and resignation.

“Down,” I called to Cameron.

Sean gave me the funniest look that said no shit. I laughed out loud. He smiled again as he found his board and slipped over the back of the boat to the platform.

Adam emerged from the depths, vaulted over the side of the boat, and stood close to my seat so he dripped on my formerly comfy, sun-dried self. He commented, “S-bend or what?”

“Or what?” Cameron said. “What the hell were you doing, trying it that slow?”

“Sometimes I want to try new things,” Adam said. “Sometimes I want to do things I know are bad for me, just for fun and profit. Don’t you, Lori?” I gazed way up at him and gave him a look that said, Stay out of my net, little dolphin. He grinned right back at me, defiant.

“Yeah, Adam,” I said. “Sometimes I like to stick my finger in a light socket to see what will happen.” He pointed at me. “Exactly.” Without another word to me, he took off his life vest and handed it to Sean.

Sean got up on his first try without any trouble. He never attempted any tricks he couldn’t do perfectly. We always ended the exhibitions with him. We could count on him to do impressive moves, but nothing he couldn’t land.

at’s why I watched in disbelief when, after a few textbook flips, he launched an air raley. Surely he wasn’t doing it just because I’d landed one. Or maybe he was, and this was his way of teasing me. Anything I could do, he could do better.

Except he couldn’t. He panicked at the peak of the trick. Overcorrecting, he did lose his balance. He face-planted in the lake, rocking the pontoon boat with the splash.

“Down,” called Cameron, who was spotting.

“I’ll say,” agreed my brother.

Adam, who was driving now, brought the boat around. When he cut the motor and the Nickelback, he, Cameron and McGillicuddy hooted and clapped for Sean almost as hard as they’d clapped for me. I wished they would quit. I didn’t want Sean mad. Flirting with him was turning out to be a lot harder than I’d thought.

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. en 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. ey’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. is 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. is was the third time a boy had ever touched my bare tummy, and I’d had enough.

rough 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.