The Boys Next Door

by Jennifer Echols

  All I knew for sure was that I stretched out on the backseat of Dad’s car and slept on the way home. When we got there, I wasn’t moving. They prodded me, but I could not see myself climbing the stairs to my room. I did not see why they couldn’t let me sleep in the car parked in the garage. The backseat felt delicious.

  McGillicuddy carried me up the stairs, and Dad tucked me into bed. Ahhhhhhh, bed had never been such a relief. Dad and McGillicuddy spoke softly in the doorway.

  Dad: “She didn’t even wake up. You be sure and come get her if there’s a fire.”

  McGillicuddy: “A fire. Right, Dad.”

  I laughed myself back to sleep. A fire. Really! In the last twenty-four hours, I’d been through everything bad I could imagine. What else could possibly happen?

  “Lori, when we’re old enough, I want you to be my girlfriend.” Sean kissed me. With his mouth still on my mouth, he pulled me off the bow seat and down into the floorboard of the boat, out of the wind.

  I broke the kiss to say, “I guess this means we’re old enou—”

  He cut me off by kissing me. His tongue circled deep inside my mouth, and I opened for more. When I got bored with this (the idea of getting bored with making out still caused me to laugh, ho ho), I lifted my chin so he could kiss my neck. Then I turned my head so he could kiss my ear. Wow, this was the best dream ever, and so long! Suddenly anxious, I peered into the back of the boat to see whether the other boys were watching us. The boat was empty.

  “Who’s driving?” I gasped.

  “You are,” Sean said.

  “Oh.” This made me a little nervous, but not nervous enough to wake up or anything. I turned my head so he could kiss my other ear.

  “Listen,” he breathed. “What’s that?”

  “The boat motor,” I murmured without thinking. “And Nickelback.”

  He propped himself up on his forearms and cocked his head to hear better. “Actually, I think it’s JoJo.” The skull and crossbones dangled above my eyes.

  “Adam!” I cried, sitting bolt upright in my bed. I peered over at the clock blaring “Too Little, Too Late.” No wonder the dream had lasted so long! My alarm had gone off, but I’d slept right through fifteen minutes of radio. The photo of my mother lay flat on the bedside table. McGillicuddy must have knocked it over by accident last night when he put me in bed.

  “Stupid subconscious!” I slapped myself in the back of the head. “Ow!” The shock of the slap rippled through my brain and into the gash on my forehead. I cupped my hand over the stitches.

  A soft knock sounded at the door. McGillicuddy leaned in without waiting for an answer. He glanced at the clock, then at me. “Breakfast is being served to the psych ward in the dining hall. You want me to send up an orderly to help you get out of bed?”

  I stuck out my tongue at him. I didn’t mind psych ward jokes from McGillicuddy. He was the only one who understood. Except—

  “Adam came to see you.”

  I took in a sharp breath. “When?”

  “Last night, and again this morning.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I wailed.

  “Because any other time in the history of your life, you would have snuck in my room and rearranged my sock drawer in revenge for waking you up. You know I need the argyles in the front.”

  “Well, what’d he say?”

  McGillicuddy gathered a year’s worth of wakeboarding mags and his copy of The Right Stuff and stacked them neatly on the floor so he could sit on the edge of my bed. “Last night he was just checking on you. This morning he came over to say he’s taking the day off work. But he wanted you to know, he’s through.”

  “He’s through? With what?” With Sean? Fighting with Sean?

  “With you.”

  Of course he was through with me. He’d told me as much while I bled in his lap yesterday. As long as I heard it with my own ears, I could hope I’d misread the whole situation. Hearing it from McGillicuddy made it real. Almost. “Are you making this up?”

  “No. He’s really mad at you. I’ve never seen him this mad. Not even at Sean.” McGillicuddy thumbed through The Right Stuff to make sure I hadn’t gotten marshmallow on it. “But I want you to know some good will come out of your crash. It’s inspired me to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

  “Remove your own appendix?”

  “Ask Tammy out.”

  My head hurt. “Tammy? Why?”

  “I think she’s been coming to the Vaders’ parties to see me. I know, I know, this seems as impossible to me as it does to you, but I really think she likes me.”

  I grunted a little with the increasing pain in my head. I didn’t want to tell him this, but it might save him some humiliation later. “McGillicuddy, you’re wrong. She’s been coming to the Vaders’ parties to see me. We’re friends.”

  He squinted at me. “Why do you think so?”

  “She told me so.”

  “Couldn’t it be one of those schemes, like you and Adam are pulling on Sean? She’s pretending to be your friend so she can see me without admitting that’s why she’s at the party.”

  “Tammy wouldn’t do that to me,” I said. My pulse began to race, and my head throbbed harder with every heartbeat. “What do you mean, one of those schemes like Adam and I are pulling on Sean?”

  “I figure if you can brain yourself on a pontoon boat just to get a boy to ask you out, I can ask a girl out and brave a little rejection.”

  Now I winced against the throbbing in my head. “Adam told you I crashed just to get Sean to ask me out?”

  “Yeah. He told me you’ve faked going out from the beginning. He’s really mad about you crashing.” McGillicuddy leaned across the bed and nabbed his copy of The Hunt for Red October, which I’d been telling him since last summer I did not borrow, when in actuality I had lost it under some (clean!) laundry and didn’t come across it until last week. “Adam and Sean have always fought,” McGillicuddy said, tucking the book under his arm for safekeeping. “But you’ve made it a million times worse. Can you imagine the five of us wakeboarding together for the rest of the summer?”

  “No,” I admitted. It sounded about as fun as getting a tooth pulled every afternoon. “But I didn’t start this in the first place. Sean did. Sean stole Rachel from Adam.”

  “Adam never liked Rachel anyway,” McGillicuddy said. “He was madder about the insult than the girl. He was in love with you. If it hadn’t been for you wanting to fool Sean, Adam would have simmered down eventually and let Sean have Rachel. We’d be back to normal by now.”

  “Reverse, please,” I said. “Adam was in love with—”

  “You. Where did I go wrong? I raised a little brother, not a femme fatale.”

  I didn’t quite get it. Could Adam have been telling me the truth about his plot? It seemed too good to be true, and too awful if I had screwed this up. “Did Adam say he’s in love with me?”

  “Was in love with you. Yes, that’s what he said. How the hell else would I know? I wish I didn’t. This place is getting to be like that awful girls’ reality show, what’s it called? The chicks in my dorm call dibs on the TV in the rec center and won’t let us watch basketball.”

  “Is it on MTV?”

  “Yes!”

  “Get out of my room.”

  As he stood, I made a weak grab for The Hunt for Red October, but he dodged me. He closed the door behind him.

  Adam was in love with me. He wasn’t just saying it to keep me with him while he made Sean jealous. He was in love with me.

  Head throbbing, I looked around my room, which still reflected the boy I’d been before I started transforming myself. I hadn’t gotten around to a room makeover with purple flowers and a fuzzy pink ottoman. As the air-conditioning clicked on, the fighter jet models I’d built from kits swayed at the end of their strings near the ceiling. I was a little brother. I was a mess.

  Adam had been in love with me, just like this.

  And now he wasn’t.


  It was a good thing Advil took care of my headache. If I’d had to stay out of work and spend the day at home, I would have driven myself insane (if I wasn’t already). As it was, I showered faster than usual to make up for lost time, taking care to keep my stitches out of the spray. I ate breakfast as usual, except Dad gave me a big hug and sobbed a little into my hair. As usual, McGillicuddy and I opened the door to hike across our yard and the Vaders’ to the marina—

  —and there stood Sean with his finger on the doorbell. He asked me brightly, “Will you go to the party tonight with me?”

  My brain said, Hooray! I’m going out with Sean! My time has come!

  My body was strangely quiet. There was no happy skin. My brain reached down through my nerve endings to poke at my heart and make sure it was okay. My heart said, Eh. At this point I realized I did need to go back to the shrink. I sagged against the doorjamb, rolled my eyes, and uttered something very unladylike.

  McGillicuddy stepped around me and wagged his cell phone between his fingers. With a pointed look at Sean, he told me, “Call me if you need me.”

  “I could take you,” Sean shouted after McGillicuddy. “Bring it on.” His voice echoed around the garage. Then he turned back to me and sighed, “I was afraid you’d say that. Look, I told my dad we’d come to work a little late this morning because we’re going to fish your wakeboard out of the lake. Let’s talk.”

  I followed him down to my pier, where he’d tied the wakeboarding boat. Clearly it did occur to him to dock in a certain place to save someone a long walk. Himself. Just not me. We stepped in, and I looked around on the floor. “Who cleaned the blood out of the boat for me? I was going to do it this morning.”

  “Adam,” Sean said. “When we get to the pontoon boat, you’ve got to tell me this story. He was saying it was his fault and crying the whole time. Pussy.” He slapped his hand over his mouth. “Sorry. I almost forgot you weren’t a guy.” Before I could offer a choice response, he cranked the motor and the Nickelback.

  As we zoomed toward the pontoon boat, I noticed that a dump truck had mistakenly unloaded a pile of soot onto the side of the bridge. The closer we got, the more clearly I could see it wasn’t a pile of soot after all but carefully applied spray paint marking out the letters AOAN LOVES LOKI. Adam had been busy. He must have gone out in the motorboat in the near-dark last night, or the near-dark this morning. He wanted to get the offensive words off the bridge as quickly as he could. They would have haunted him until he got rid of them. He hated me that much.

  “Junior!” Sean stood in front of me, clapping his hands. “McGillicuddy Part Deux!” He’d stopped the boat next to the pontoon boat. “McGillicuddy left your wakeboard floating here, so let’s check under the pontoon boat first.” He handed me one of the oars that motorboats carry in case their engines stop when they run over logs. As we poked around under the pontoons, he asked, “Why’s Adam so pissed at you?”

  “It’s complicated. We’ve only been going out to make you and Rachel mad.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him this. But my brilliant ploys had gotten me into this fix, and I’d lost hope they could get me out. Also, I must have bled out my last lick of sense. “I’ve sort of had a thing for you.”

  He pulled his oar from under the boat and put all his weight on it, like he needed it to keep him from collapsing. “You? Have a thing for me?”

  “Had.”

  He made a face. “Ugh!”

  This should have been the low point of my life, the one I’d dreaded for over a decade: rejection by Sean. Now that it had finally happened, I didn’t feel humiliated. I was angry. “What do you mean, ugh? You flirted with me a couple of weeks ago, before your first party. Remember wiping bryozoa on me? That’s the mating dance of the brain-dead Vader brothers.”

  “Oh, yeah! I’d forgotten all about the bryozoa.” He waved his hand in the air, dismissing the bryozoa incident like a pesky yellow jacket. “Adam was acting protective of you that day for some reason. I got the idea he might like you a little. So I figured I’d push his buttons. I can’t see myself really coming on to you, ever.” He shoved his oar under the boat again. “No offense.”

  “None taken, you ass.”

  He glanced sideways at me. “When I said ‘Ugh,’ I just meant, ‘Ugh, what could Buddy possibly see in little old me?’”

  Sure you did. “I honestly can’t remember,” I said, poking my oar under the boat, too. “Anyway, Adam thinks I crashed into the pontoon boat on purpose so you could close the wakeboarding show again, and you’d like me better. I didn’t, but Adam thinks I did.” I ran my finger over the little dent my thick skull had made in the aluminum side of the boat. “I guess he was willing to take the fake love just so far.”

  “So you’ve faked hooking up.”

  I glanced toward the bridge, at the scribble that once had said AOAN LOVES LOKI. “Yeah.”

  “You faked flirting with each other on the desk in the living room.”

  “Yeah.” It hadn’t felt like faking, but what did I know?

  “You faked making out on the end of the dock at the party last Friday? And disappearing into the lake? Because that was convincing.”

  “Yes. I mean, we really made out, but we weren’t really in love.” At least, I hadn’t realized it at the time.

  “That little shit!” he yelled so loudly that I worried about the innocent ears of Frances and the Harbarger children around the bend. I imagined Frances pretending she hadn’t heard a thing as the shout echoed around their fenced yard.

  “Now why are you so pissed?” I asked.

  “Because it worked! He stole Rachel from me!”

  I stomped my foot on the floor of the boat, like a girl. “You stole Rachel from him in the first place, just to make him mad. Even if you thought you really liked her by the time she broke up with you, she only seemed like something you’d want because Adam had her in the first place.”

  He brought in his oar again and leaned on it. “I may be shallow, Lori, but I’m not a monster.” He gazed downstream. “I don’t think your wakeboard’s under here. Maybe the current caught it.”

  I looked downstream, too, in the general direction of the dam several miles away. My wakeboard had probably gotten stuck in one of the gates and cut off the power supply to the tri-county area. The way my morning was going, the hydroelectric police would be waiting for me on the marina dock.

  “Let’s try one more place.” He cranked the engine, drove to the nearby bank, and cut the power again. As the boat drifted, we used the oars to shift the logs and leaves washed up against the edge of the woods. “You think I’m a monster,” he said quietly.

  “I think we all are.”

  A gust of wind blew us along faster. It swooped through the woods, swaying the trees and littering us with blossoms and leaves and delicate tree crap.

  “Well,” he finally said. “I didn’t steal Rachel just to make Adam mad. I pretended that’s what I was doing. That’s what Adam would think anyway. But really, I’ve been into her for so long. I couldn’t stand the thought of going to college without finding out if she liked me, too.”

  I was going to yell at him for being so selfish until it occurred to me that this was pretty much how I’d felt about him.

  “I’ve seen the way she looks at Adam,” he went on. “Girls don’t look at me like that. They look at me, sure, but not like that.”

  Cunning as Sean was about other people, surely he couldn’t be this obtuse about himself? In exasperation, I pointed out, “You don’t look at them like that.”

  “I look at Rachel like that. And she says she can tell from the way I treat Adam that I have no soul. I could have sworn I did.” He laughed.

  Rachel might have more sense than I’d given her credit for. She’d never actually insulted me, besides calling me a ‘ho to her friends when I did the secret handshake with Adam, which was understandable. I had no reason to dislike her, other than the obvious boy-ploys. And no reason at all to think she was stup
id.

  “But over the last couple of weeks,” Sean continued, “I’ve seen how good you and Adam are together. And how good Rachel and I are together. Maybe Adam and Rachel are good together, too, but if they are, I’d like to rip Rachel’s heart out and throw it down in the driveway and drive back and forth over it in my truck a couple of times and give it back to her. I know you feel the same way about Adam.”

  I stared at him and wondered what my mother had been thinking.

  “I don’t think we need to worry about that, though,” he said. “Rachel wants to get back with Adam, but Adam doesn’t want Rachel, if you can believe that! He called her last night after he dried up and had this, like, reasonable, adult conversation with her. He told her it was over between them, and not just because she’d made out with me when I snapped my fingers. He went out with her in the first place to make you jealous.”

  None of this sounded like something Adam would share with Sean on purpose. McGillicuddy, maybe, or Cameron, but not Sean. “Did you listen in on this conversation?”

  Sean gave me this how dare you insinuate such a thing look. Which told me, yes, he had listened in on this conversation.

  He went on, “So we know they won’t get back together. If they do look like they’re getting back together at the party tonight, Adam will be faking. All we have to do to get him back with you is convince him you’re better than nothing. Which…” He looked me up and down, then shrugged.

  The wind gusted again, lifting sections of his light brown hair, and flattening his T-shirt against his strong chest. He was a lot like Adam, and completely different. I said, “You are a sad, sad little man.”

  “I am what I am. So, I know this will sound kind of gross, but will you make out with me at the party?”

  I poked at the shoreline with my oar. “This is a bad idea. It was a bad idea the first time I had it, and it’s a bad idea now.” But I might as well try something to get Adam back, right? I’d hit bottom. Nothing we did could make things worse.

  “If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me. Lori, I’m in love with Rachel. That’s never happened to me before. I’m not willing to let that go without a fight. And if you feel the same way about Adam, seems like you wouldn’t let it go, either.” He took a few steps closer to me in the boat. “He holds a grudge, you know.”