The Boys Next Door

by Jennifer Echols

  The boys with bottle rockets had noticed us and shouted to us. They were shooting bottle rockets near us in the water. Sooner or later they would set a boat on fire. Yet I couldn’t tear my gaze away from Adam’s blue eyes so bright in the gray mist. He must have seen something in my eyes, too.

  “I’d better go change,” I said slowly. “For the party.”

  “Right,” Adam said, still holding my gaze.

  “So.” I laughed nervously. Dork. “I’ll meet you back here in a while. Beauty takes patience. Ha ha ha ha.”

  He shook his head. “We should go to the party like this.”

  “Like this? My hair is full of lake.”

  “You look great in a bikini. As you know.”

  I was glad the dusk hid my blushing face. Or maybe it made my blushing face stand out like it made other colors pop, because I was that fortunate. “What do you mean, as I know? I don’t know.”

  “If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be wearing a bikini to get Sean’s attention.”

  “Yeah. Fat lot of good it’s done me.”

  “You wouldn’t be flaunting it.”

  “Flaunting it! Are you sure? I have no idea what that would look like.”

  “Come flaunt it up at the house.”

  I wasn’t sure why this irked me. He’d told me I looked good. He’d told me I would look good to Sean. This is what we wanted. Anyway, I couldn’t stand out here and flaunt it for anyone in my bikini. I knew the night was hot and steamy, but the rain had done me in. I was freezing.

  “Cold again?” he asked me, stepping closer.

  I shivered some more. My stupid body had a mind of its own. “Toasty.”

  “Hold on.” He took the extra key to the warehouse from the ledge above the door and stepped inside. He came back out with his zip-up sweatshirt printed with the name of our football team on the front and his number on the back. He held it up like an old man holding up an old lady’s coat for her. I slipped my arms into the sleeves. Then he turned me around toward him. He pulled the hood up over my hair. Put the hood back down. Kissed me on the tip of my nose.

  Foop! A bottle rocket exploded in the water just below us, illuminating a blob of bryozoa clinging to the wharf.

  Adam took my hand, whispering, “We’ve got them right where we want them. Trust me.”

  He led me through the crowd in the yard, up the deck stairs, into his shadowy living room pulsing with music. Sean was surrounded by a group of people listening with open mouths to his puffed-up story of how he gave Rachel a wake-board. Even Holly and Beige exclaimed like they were happy for Rachel instead of grumbling internally that Rachel was another in a long line and Sean was just showing off. Two feet away, Rachel was surrounded by hoydens screeching about how lucky she was to have a boyfriend like Sean.

  From inside the dark room, the lights on the deck must have made Adam and me glow like a TV show. As we stepped through the door, everyone turned to stare at us.

  I backed the slightest bit toward Adam. He squeezed my hand.

  Then the floodgates opened. The girls who’d surrounded Rachel flocked to me to squeal about Adam spray-painting our names on the bridge. The boys with bottle rockets on the dock had seen it before the sun set and had spread the news around the party. The people who’d surrounded Sean moved to Adam and ribbed him about misspelling our names.

  Adam played this perfectly. He laughed it all off like he didn’t even care he was getting more attention than his stewing brother. He rubbed my shoulder and asked, “Aren’t you hungry? We haven’t eaten.” He peered over my shoulder at the spread Mrs. Vader had laid out on the bar. “Party food isn’t going to cover it.”

  “Starved.” I followed him around the bar that divided the living room from the kitchen. There were partial walls on either side, so the kitchen was a little more quiet. At least we could raise our voices over the beat of Splender without making ourselves hoarse.

  He opened the refrigerator door. “What’d they have for dinner? Chicken casserole.” He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t want the casserole of love, do you?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Hey, chica,” Tammy called across the bar.

  “Hey, chica,” I responded, and looked over Adam’s shoulder into the refrigerator again. Then I realized what I was supposed to be doing. I walked around the bar, screamed, “Tammeeeee!” and hugged her while jumping up and down. This was a lot easier in bare feet than it had been in heels, let me tell you.

  “Hi there,” she said, wrestling me off her. “You’re insane. I’m so late. My mom made me play in a stupid tennis tournament in Birmingham today. Where is everybody?” She peered into the kitchen.

  “Don’t I count?” Adam asked from inside the refrigerator.

  “That’s Adam, right?” Tammy whispered.

  “Right,” I said. “Sean is holding court by the palm tree in the living room. The art geeks are outside in the grass.”

  “The football team is on the dock, shooting bottle rockets into the lake,” Adam offered. I knew where his heart was.

  “The trumpet line from the marching band is on the deck,” I said. “Who were you looking for?”

  “You!” Tammy said. She handed me a small present wrapped in Valentine’s paper.

  “Hey, thanks!” I said, ripping it open. “What’s it for?” My birthday was still a week and a day away, and I didn’t think anyone from school knew when it was. “How sweet!” I held up the eyelash comb, twirled it between my fingers, and slipped it into the pocket of Adam’s sweatshirt. I hoped I remembered to take it out again at the end of the night. If I didn’t, Adam would have some explaining to do next football season when it fell out of his pocket at practice.

  “It’s a hostess gift,” Tammy said. “You know, when you come to a party, you bring a present for the hostess.”

  “But I’m not the hostess. This isn’t my house.” I wondered whether she’d tripped over some tennis balls, hit her head, and forgotten she’d gone with me to my house last week, scaring the bejeezus out of the father figure.

  “You’re the hostess because you’re the girlfriend of one of the hosts,” Tammy said.

  Without meaning to, I glanced up at Adam. He’d closed the refrigerator door and leaned against it, watching me.

  “Or pretending to be,” Tammy added.

  Adam’s blue eyes widened at me. Something told me—and I am sure this was not feminine instincts, because we have established I did not have any of those—but something told me my explanation of how Tammy knew about the plot might go over better if I heated Adam up. I slid my arms around his waist and pressed close to him, backing him against the refrigerator. His eyes grew even wider.

  I gave him a coy half-smile that probably ended up looking like the first signs of a seizure. “You know how girls are. Girls can’t make a move without telling other girls about it.”

  “Yeah, girls are like that,” Adam told me, “but you’re not.”

  Tammy cleared her throat.

  Adam cleared his throat.

  I cleared my throat, removed my hands from Adam’s waist, and brushed imaginary dust off his bare shoulders, setting straight any oafish damage I might have done. From now on, whenever I got the idea that maybe he liked me a little, I would remember that he did not like me a little. I didn’t need to read his mind.

  “Heeeeeeey,” Tammy squealed. She must have seen Holly or Beige or a super-cute boy—but no, it was only McGillicuddy. They disappeared into the living room with their heads close together, shouting over the music. If she got rid of my approaching brother for me because she thought I needed some alone time with Adam to talk out our problems, she was wrong-o about me. Again. I started to follow her.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Adam said behind me.

  I looked toward the table in the kitchen. He’d set two of the places with knives, forks, spoons, and napkins. He’d placed a sandwich on each plate and sprinkled parsley flakes in a circle around it. Bam! He’d stacked the potato chips art
fully in dessert bowls. He’d even lit one of his leftover birthday candles between our places. It all would have been really cute if he’d meant it. It was still pretty cute as a farce to make Rachel jealous, I supposed, but I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Let me help you,” he said, pulling out a chair for me, as if I were a girl or something. Vivid imagination, this boy. I sat, and he scooted me up to the table.

  He took a bottle of soda from the fridge and held it in front of me, like he was a wine steward. I nodded that the year was okay. He unscrewed the cap and handed it to me. I sniffed it like a wine cork, nodded my approval again, and handed it back to him. He poured soda into wine glasses for both of us, then sat down with me.

  He took a gargantuan bite of his sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

  Oh, nothing. That’s what a girl would say, and she’d sulk for the rest of the night. But I wasn’t capable of keeping my mouth shut. “I’m confused.”

  “It’s not really wine,” he said. “It’s Diet Coke. And if anyone ever serves you brown wine with a foamy head, send it back.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Science.” I took a dainty bite of my sandwich. Adam was a real gourmet. Peanut butter and strawberry jam. “I’m confused because I thought you said I was flaunting, and now I’m not even a girl? I thought you said I was a good flaunter.”

  “You are a good flaunter.” He swirled the Diet Coke in his glass and sniffed the bouquet.

  “Then why am I not a girl?”

  “You—Shit, I knew that’s what you were mad about. I didn’t mean it that way.” He leaned his head to one side and popped his neck. “You know as well as I do that you don’t act like other girls.”

  “I’m working on it, though.” I was working so hard! I felt like crying into my salt and vinegar chips, which was a step in the right direction.

  “But it’s good you don’t act like other girls. Of course, I don’t have any say in it, because you’re not after me. You’re after Sean.”

  “You wouldn’t have any say in it anyway, you patriarchal freak.” I chomped a chip and said with my mouth full, “Thanks for cooking dinner. I love it when the little missus makes a house a home.”

  He glared at me. “Eat up. We have work to do.”

  “What kind of work? Devious kissing work? May I point out that we both have peanut butter breath?”

  “Eat up,” he said again. Sean’s jovial voice escalated over the music in the living room, which made me want to speed up eating to get out of there, but also made the sandwich sit on my stomach like a rock.

  We went upstairs. Adam shared his bathroom with Sean and Cameron, and the bathroom looked it. He brushed his teeth, then sipped straight from a bottle of mouthwash. As he swished it around in his mouth, he nudged my bare tummy with his toothbrush and prompted, “Hm.”

  “You want me to use your toothbrush?”

  He spit in the sink. “You might as well. You’re about to do a lot worse.”

  At this point, I realized what I’d thought was stress and peanut butter indigestion was actually butterflies, which began dogfighting in my stomach at the idea that Adam and I were about to kiss some more. As I brushed my teeth with his toothbrush, I watched him watching me in the mirror. His muscled arms were folded on his strong, tanned chest. The bruise Sean had given him under his eye had almost faded, but the skull-and-crossbones pendant glinted dangerously.

  If his parents hadn’t been in the next room with the ten o’clock news turned way up over the music downstairs, I might have made a move on him right there in the bathroom. Yes, I know, odds were I would have tripped and knocked him down and made him hit his head on the toilet. I was so turned on, I was almost willing to take this chance.

  Instead, he took my hand again and led me down through the party, indoors and outdoors, to the end of the dock. The football team had run out of bottle rockets. The party had reached the stage where boys played quarters. The drinking game was run very professionally by experienced people. If Mr. Vader had found out, he would have shut down the party—because kids were drinking underage at his house, or because he would have known one of his sons had stolen beer from the marina. In any case, as a precaution, a wall of people stood across the dock, talking and flirting, shielding the boys playing quarters from the prying eyes of the Vaders in their bedroom.

  The wall of people included Sean and Rachel, facing each other and holding both hands like they were about to dance a polka. Rachel hadn’t taken the precaution of kicking her shoes off before she stepped onto the dock. She was likely to catch her heel between the boards and fall flat. (Shrug.) Rachel obviously valued beauty before balance.

  As Adam and I approached the wall of people, Adam aimed straight for Sean. He brushed against Sean harder than necessary as we edged through. I felt Sean and Rachel watching us, but I didn’t look back as we stepped over the boys sprawled in a circle around a cup of beer.

  We sat on the edge of the dock. The wood was still damp and cold from the rain. We slipped our feet into the lake, which felt like a warm bath compared with the cool air.

  “Do you want a beer?” Adam asked.

  “I don’t think I could handle it. I feel so high already.” The warm lake, the cool air, and Adam had my body going in a thousand different directions.

  Maybe he knew. He grinned at me and whispered, “I’m going to kiss you now. It’ll be a big one, so don’t hit me.” He leaned in.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, putting my hand on his chest to stop him. I wasn’t quite ready to kiss him with boys playing quarters right behind us, and with Sean and Rachel staring at us. We’d kissed before where people could see us if they wanted to look, but we’d never been this blatant about it. Besides, I had another concern. “I want to be prepared. Are you going to kiss me, or really kiss me?”

  He cocked his head at me, perplexed, with those little frown lines between his eyebrows. “What would be the point of kissing you if I didn’t do it right?”

  “Ohhhhhh!” said the boys behind us. There was nowhere in my life I could get away from boys saying, “Ohhhhhh!” I glanced behind us to make sure the boys were talking about beer, not us. Indeed, when the boys’ quarters hit the cup and they chose someone to drink, all of them seemed to be ganging up on Scooter Ledbetter. I hadn’t seen his monster truck in the Vaders’ driveway, so at least he wouldn’t be driving home.

  Sean had moved Rachel in front of him and held her with his arms crossed over her boobs. So he could watch us over her head without her knowing. Of course, she was staring at Adam, too. I rolled my eyes at both of them, like I was so tired of them watching us. I almost burst into laughter at the thought, but managed to turn back to Adam in time.

  I told him through my teeth, “We’ve been kissing all week without, you know. Really kissing.”

  “That was before Sean gave up a wakeboard for Rachel. Step up your game.”

  I was running out of excuses. “Look,” I whispered, “when we do this stuff, we’re trying to make them jealous, but it’s also my first time for real. You know?”

  His blue eyes focused on me. We were almost nose to nose, and our shoulders moved quickly in time with our breathing, in time with each other. “I know.”

  “And when I fantasize about kissing”—kissing Sean, I meant, but I wasn’t going to say this—“our mouths are closed.”

  “This isn’t your fantasy.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. True, I’d never fantasized about this particular scenario, but maybe that was because I’d never imagined it. I had to remember that this was Adam Adam Adam, and if I could replace him with Sean from my fantasies, the warm pricklies I was feeling would make a perfect dream. Except I would probably wake up.

  Adam moved in again. One more time my brain knew this would make Sean jealous, but my body sounded the alarm. I put my hand on Adam’s chest and whispered, “Give me a break. I had a bad experience with this.”

  He looked hurt, which didn’t make sense if we wer
e only friends. He was putting on a good act. “With who?”

  “The only person I’ve ever kissed, besides you, is Cameron.”

  “You kissed Ca—”

  I hadn’t expected his reaction to be that LOUD. I reached out and grabbed the back of his hair, which turned his head away from the crowd and also shut him up right quick.

  I put my forehead to his forehead and whispered like a lover, “I was eleven. We were in the warehouse and he grabbed me. Very sloppy. Don’t tell McGillicuddy.”

  Adam blinked. I felt his eyelashes on my eyelids.

  “Very, very sloppy,” I said. “We still can’t look each other in the eye.”

  I let go of his hair so he could look me in the eye. “Let me shrug that off.” He shook violently like he’d caught a sudden chill. “Okay. I’m going to really kiss you, but it’ll be subtle.” He moved toward me one more time. “And don’t tell me to back off. It’s starting to look like we’re not really in love.”

  I closed my eyes automatically as he kissed me, and the word love blinked red and then black on the insides of my eyelids. His lips were warm. Was that all? I opened my eyes.

  His eyes were still closed, and he came in again.

  I closed my eyes. He kissed me like before, only I felt his tongue between my lips, opening them. His tongue was inside my mouth (ADAM VADER’S TONGUE WAS INSIDE MY MOUTH) not very far, and then out again.

  I thought that was it, and opened my eyes. And closed them as he kissed me once more. Now I was getting it. You didn’t just sit there with your lips locked with the boy’s lips and the boy’s tongue turning flips at the back of your throat (cough Cameron cough). There was constant movement and change. It was an activity, and probably one the girl could participate in, too. As Adam pulled away, I said, “Let me try.”

  He kissed me and whispered against my lips, “Be my guest.” His low voice made me shiver.

  I kissed him. Strange that the lips were so soft in such an edgy boy. I kissed him again and very gently pressed my tongue into his mouth.

  He gasped. I mean, I wasn’t sure, because it was in the middle of the kiss. But he seemed startled. He inhaled sharply through his nose. Then he was kissing me, deeper this time.