Текст книги "Endless Summer"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

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. ere 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. e 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. at 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. e 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. e 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.

en 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. at’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. e 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. en, Booty the Babysitter. en, Butt I Don’t Need a Governess. is 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. e 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. erefore 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. inking 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.

is shouldn’t have surprised me. ey’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. e 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. ere 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. is 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!”

“anks!” I watched her reaction to make sure she’d said what I’d thought she said. e 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! ank 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.

“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. ey’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. ere 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. ey’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. at 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 said 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. e 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. e 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.

e 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.

ere 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. ose 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, e 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.