The Boys Next Door

by Jennifer Echols

  I stalked down the sidewalk outside. Tammy scampered to keep up with me. “Are you really fired?”

  “Of course not,” I sighed. “She fires me about once a week in the summers. I guess I’ll take the rest of the day off, though. What’s all this for?” I slowed to a stop at the edge of the enormous crowd. The air smelled like hamburgers and funnel cakes. People stood or sat together on towels, picnicking. I could hardly see a bare patch of grass or wharf, but it wasn’t quite time for the wakeboarding show.

  “They’re crowning the Crappie Queen!” Tammy said.

  “If you’re going to hang around here, you need to use the correct pronunciation. It’s Crappy Queen.”

  “It’s Rachel.”

  Sure enough, down on the wharf, Mr. Vader was calling Rachel forward as the new Crappy Queen. There was some justice in the world.

  And then I changed my mind. Instead of the evening gown I’d seen at Crappy Festivals past, Rachel skipped onto the wharf in cutoff jeans pulled over her bathing suit, and bare feet. She grinned while the outgoing Crappy Queen pinned a tiara in the shape of a fish into her hair. Maybe old Rachel was all right after all.

  “Pardon,” McGillicuddy said right behind me. He shoved me off the sidewalk. I shoved him back, then realized that when he pushed me, he’d tucked another rose into my bouquet. Walking backward down the hill, he blew a kiss at Tammy. Tammy giggled and blew him a kiss back.

  Another voice behind me said, “A-choo!” SOMETHING FLEW INTO MY BOUQUET. I almost dropped my beautiful roses to avoid further contact with nastiness. But it was only Cameron, pretending to sneeze another rose at me.

  “Racking up, aren’t you?” Tammy asked, and I had to grin.

  Right after Cameron came Sean. His nose was only a little blue. I could hardly tell it had bled the night before. Sean was like that. And he held a rose between his teeth.

  I smirked at him. “Don’t tell me. You want me to come and get it.”

  “Oh no,” he said through a mouthful of stem, holding up his hands in warning. “Adam would kill me.” He handed me the (spitty, ew) rose. “Did Dad crown Rachel the Crappy Queen yet?”

  “Yes,” Tammy and I said together.

  Sean’s face fell. “Oh!” He ran down the sidewalk. At the bottom of the hill, he caught Rachel by the arm and talked to her for a few seconds. His face fell further, and she shook her head. He walked away after the other boys, toward the wakeboarding boat. I almost felt sorry for him.

  “I’m going to congratulate Rachel on her coronation,” I said to Tammy.

  “You aw?” Tammy said with her mouth full of candy bar. “Uhhh—”

  “Come with me, because you’re my friend and help me without question. I may need someone to call 911 if she breaks my arm.”

  “I’w be wight behiwd woo.”

  I maneuvered down the hill through the crowd, using the roses to clear the way in front of me. Now Rachel talked with an elderly couple, which might make her less likely to deck me. “Rachel!” I squealed, jumping up and down, spilling petals. “Congratulations!”

  She stared at me like a fish out of water, but the elderly couple thanked me in the manner of clueless grandparents, which got us out of that embarrassing little moment.

  “I need to tell you a couple of things,” I said, hugging the roses to my chest and putting my other arm around her.

  “Come this way,” Tammy said, moving along the seawall. Rachel looked back to signal the elderly couple to save her, but I moved in, blocking her view. What a team Tammy and I made. Beyond the crowd, Tammy sat on the seawall with her legs hanging over. I did the same, and Rachel sat between us.

  “It wasn’t my idea to enter,” Rachel spoke up defensively. “I caught a two-pounder, and my granddaddy said we could not let the mayor’s daughter win again this year with only a one-pounder and a plastic minnow.”

  Rachel rose further in my opinion.

  “I don’t need to tell you how bizarre that is,” I said. “Obviously you have a sixth sense about these things.” I nodded toward Sean cranking the boat and backing it away from the wharf. My brother was in the bow, Cameron sat further back, and Adam was bent below the side of the boat, gathering something. “I needed to tell you Sean is really in love with you.”

  Now she looked toward the boat puttering across the inlet. “How do you know? You can just tell, right? You can tell by the way he acts? After the last couple of weeks, I’ll never be able to trust that again.” She tried to sound tough, but her delivery was stilted, and her eyes rolled for emphasis at the wrong place. I’d never actually talked to her before—I’d only watched her from afar—or I would have noticed this. She came off as a lot younger and more unsure of herself than I’d expected. Which made me like her even better.

  “I know because he told me,” I said. The boat pointed in our direction, almost like it was heading for us rather than the open water. “I also needed to tell you your wake-board bindings came in at the showroom this morning.”

  “Oooh, I forgot Sean gave you a wakeboard!” Tammy said. “I wish I could learn.”

  “It’s fun,” I said. Maybe McGillicuddy could take Tammy out wakeboarding. Maybe Sean could invite Rachel again and hope she showed up this time. Of course, both Sean and McGillicuddy would have to fight the boys every step of the way. We were good together, but it would be nice to wakeboard with other people once in a while, without a freaking outcry and rumors of mutiny.

  “Hey,” I said suddenly. “I have a boat.” There it was, tied on the side of the dock in front of my house. We hardly ever used it because we were always in the Vaders’ boat. I nudged Tammy. “If you want, come over after I get off work tomorrow, and I’ll teach you to wakeboard.” I turned to Rachel. “You too, Miss Crappy.” Of course, they probably didn’t have boaters’ licenses, which meant I’d have to drive. They’d be learning to wakeboard, so I’d just take them around in slow circles. Surely I couldn’t mess that up. They wouldn’t suspect a thing.

  “That would be great!” Tammy exclaimed. She touched Rachel’s bare toes with her toes. “I’ll pick you up, Your Crappiness.”

  In case Tammy got the wrong idea, I warned her, “McGillicuddy won’t be with us. He’ll be with the boys. This will be a girl trip.”

  “I know,” she said, as if she did really know and wasn’t trying to get out of it.

  “But we could cruise by the warehouse very slowly like we need to borrow another tow rope,” I said. “I have become an expert at seduction.”

  Rachel snorted, then gave up suppressing it and proceeded to laugh her ass off. The Crappy Crown detangled itself from her hair and would have fallen in the lake if I hadn’t caught it for her. Finally she calmed enough to cough out, “I don’t know. I’m not very graceful.”

  “Who am I,” I asked, “Michelle Kwan?”

  “Not hardly,” Tammy said at the same time Rachel said, “I see your point.” But neither of them was looking at me. They watched the wakeboarding boat float right in front of us, full of boy.

  Specifically, full of Adam. He stood in the bow, one arm cradling a bouquet of roses—a funny contrast, this muscular football player carrying pink flowers. He held his other hand out to me.

  McGillicuddy leaned over the bow, too, and caught the seawall, holding the boat there so it didn’t scrape against the wall and didn’t drift away. The boys had planned ahead. For once.

  Ninety-nine percent of me leaped up immediately and knocked Adam over, hugging him. One percent was still bitter about the bitch comment, and angry that I’d been tricked into coming out here to wait like some airhead flirt for Adam to happen by. This one percent was heavier than the rest combined and anchored me to the seawall. I elbowed Tammy. “Traitor.”

  “I was helping you without question,” she said.

  “And your mom!” I yelled to Adam. “Did you ask your mom to get me out here?”

  “I told her to fire you if she had to,” he called. “Did she fire you?”

  “Mama Vader has
some feminine wiles!” I exclaimed.

  Adam laughed. “She’s got maybe one more feminine wile than you, and you’ve got about three-fourths of a wile.” He tilted his head and wiggled the fingers of his outstretched hand. “Come with us. We want you to close the show. Right, Sean?”

  “Right!” Sean said with fake enthusiasm. From the back of the boat, Cameron waved my wakeboard at me to show me, again, that they’d thought ahead.

  “I’m not supposed to get my stitches wet,” I reasoned.

  “Don’t fall,” Adam reasoned right back.

  I wanted to go. I couldn’t quite detach the heavy one percent. “You called me a bitch. I’m not running back to you when you leave me a dozen roses.”

  “Four more.” He waved his smaller bouquet at me. “Sixteen total. Birthday or what?”

  Rachel shoved me forward—which, since I was sitting down, didn’t push me into the boat. It only folded me over like a movie theater seat.

  “You can think about it,” Adam said. “The four of us can take our turns, and we’ll come back to see if you’ve changed your mind. But I want you to come with us now.” In a singsong voice he coaxed, “I’ll let you drive.”

  McGillicuddy and Cameron stared at Adam, eyes wide with fear. Sean coughed, “Bullshit.”

  “I’ll let you drive when I’m wakeboarding, anyway,” Adam said.

  “It’s love,” McGillicuddy said, motioning with his head for me to get in the boat. “Let Tammy hold your roses so they don’t go bald in the wind.”

  McGillicuddy’s blessing was the final push I needed. I held out my arms for the extra roses from Adam and inhaled one last long sniff before handing off the whole huge bouquet to Tammy. Then I took Adam’s hand and let him help me in. McGillicuddy shoved the bow away from the seawall and walked into the back of the boat, muttering, “Freaking femme fatale.”

  As we puttered out of the idle zone, I gave Rachel and Tammy a pageant wave. They waved back and clapped for me. The boat reached the open water and sped up. The motor and Nickelback drowned out the clapping. Adam grabbed my waving hand, and we did the secret handshake.

  As we sank to the bow seat, I touched his skull-and-crossbones pendant on a new leather string. “They still have these in the bubble gum machine?”

  “Sean went under the dock and found it for me.”

  I nodded. “He was the best choice to rescue it for you. He has no fear of bryozoa.” Squinting into the sun behind Adam, I looked up into his sky-blue eyes. “One day on the boat when we were kids, did you tell me you wanted me to be your girlfriend when we were old enough?”

  He slid his hand down a lock of my hair and twisted it around his fingers. “I don’t remember saying that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I wasn’t lying that day in the truck. I really have loved you forever. Why else would I wear a skull-and-crossbones necklace you bought me from a bubble gum machine? It turned my skin green.”

  “It didn’t.” To make sure, I moved the pendant aside and peered at his chest, which looked the normal scrumptious tan to me. “It didn’t,” I repeated with more confidence.

  “It did when you first gave it to me. Any metal coating that might have been clinging to it wore off on my chest years ago.”

  Come to think of it, the pendant was a funny color not found in nature. I’d probably given him lead poisoning, which was why he acted like that. I ran my fingertips down the bones, and poked the skull in the eyes. “You know, you could have told me you loved me a long time ago, before things got so crazy.”

  “No, I couldn’t. I like to take chances. I’d blow a chance on anything but you. You didn’t love me.”

  Didn’t I? It was hard to believe I’d called him little dolphin just two weeks before. “I didn’t think about you that way. Clearly I was capable of it. Because I love you now.”

  He grinned and took my hand. “We should add another step to the secret handshake.”

  “Then we couldn’t do it in public.” I turned his hand over and ran my fingertip lightly over his palm until he shivered. “When Sean came up to your mom because a fish had mouthed his toe, and my mom said I should just wait until I was sixteen… That wasn’t Sean. That was you. Right?”

  He put his head close to mine, watching my finger trace valentines in his open hand. “I didn’t want you to like me because you thought you were supposed to. I wanted you to like me for me.” His breathing sounded funny. He was about to cry—which was going to cause him a world of trouble with the boys. He could live the first time down owing to the shock of seeing me crash into a very large, very stationary object. But if he cried again, he was toast.

  I knew one way to stop him. I hollered above the motor, “Oh my God, Adam, are you about to cry?”

  “Oh my God!” Sean echoed in a high-pitched girl-voice. Cameron squealed, “Adam, don’t cry!” My brother called, “No crying on the boat.”

  Adam laughed with tears in his eyes and kissed me softly on the forehead, the side away from the stitches. And suddenly, to my complete horror, I was the one crying, sobbing into his chest. I was happy, but that wasn’t why I was crying. I was relieved. Relieved of a weight I couldn’t even name.

  He held me more tightly and kissed my forehead several more times, then made his way down my cheek, dangerously close to my ear. I giggled at the same time I cried. If he didn’t stop, he was going to give me hiccups—which would be so incredibly sexy, on top of messing up my timing for wakeboarding jumps.

  He kissed my lips. “What do you want to do tonight?” he whispered.

  What a question!

  “Put our names back on the bridge,” I said. “Only, you hold the sailboat this time, and I’ll take care of the handwriting.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, enjoying the warmth of Adam’s arms around me against the wind. We sat back and watched the other boats and the crowded banks of the lake spin by. When the show started, we spotted for the other boys while they took their turns. Then it was Adam’s turn, and mine.