He stopped, finally, and gave me a shocked look. Ha—he could dish out the jealous accusations, but he couldn’t take them.
But I didn’t want to one-up Adam. I wanted to be with him and make out with him again, preferably sooner rather than later. “Hey.” I reached over to grab his hand.
Before I could touch him, he dodged away and jogged ahead again. We’d reached the edge of the forest. He barreled right through the blackberry brambles and onto the road.
“Adam,” I called, determined he wouldn’t get away before we could talk this out. I ran after him, hardly noticing the briars scratching my legs. I emerged onto the road in bright sunlight and the full glare of my dad and Frances, who were holding hands.
My first thought when I saw them was, Why are they walking together? Frances was supposed to be my dad’s employee. I was used to seeing them talking, but never touching. Then I remembered Frances had not been my nanny for years, and she and my dad were dating as of yesterday. My second thought was, Why are they walking in this heat? Nobody in their right mind would be out exercising in this heat. And—by now you are figuring out I am a little slow on the uptake—only my third thought was, Busted.
The instant I saw Lori’s dad and Frances across the hot asphalt road, I spun around, hoping Lori was still hidden by the trees.
She stood right behind me, in full view. And if my expression matched hers, we couldn’t have looked more guilty.
I turned back around. Her dad’s face was even worse. Glaring at me, he worked his jaw like he was going to say something, but he wanted to make sure he’d thought of the worst possible insult first. He turned redder and seemed to swell, like all his holes were plugged up and the pressure had nowhere to escape.
He opened his mouth.
“It was my fault,” I said quickly.
“I know!” he roared.
At the same time, Lori stepped in front of me and muttered, “Wrong thing to say, Adam.”
“Right.” I put my hand on Lori’s shoulder and pushed her an arm’s length away so it wouldn’t look like I was hiding behind her. “It’s nobody’s fault, because we didn’t do anything wrong.”
Her dad brought his hands together and popped a knuckle.
“Trevor,” Frances said soothingly, rubbing her hand on his back. But she was looking hard at me over her glasses, telling me upstanding citizens did not act this way. When we were kids, that look from Frances could make Lori and her brother behave, and sometimes even my brothers, but I never seemed to get the message.
“I saw you coming out of the woods,” Lori’s dad shouted at me. “Together!”
“We weren’t rolling in the leaves or anything. Look, no evidence.” I put my other hand on Lori’s other shoulder and turned her around backward, hoping against hope she didn’t have scratches from the tree on her bare back, or bark on her butt.
“Get your hands off my daughter.”
Either I jerked away from her at the force of his words, or she started out from under my hands. I wasn’t sure which. She and Frances and I stared at Lori’s dad in horror. He was excitable, yes, and he had yelled at me before, yes, but always about safety issues. He thought I was going to set his house on fire with bottle rockets or run my four-wheeler into his Beamer again. When he hollered at me about that stuff, his voice pitched into a whine like a woman.
This was not that voice. This was a full-bodied boom that meant business. He looked and sounded like a big dog defending his territory.
“Here’s what you did wrong, Adam,” he barked. “I told your parents to make it clear to you that you were not to see Lori again. You did it anyway. That’s what you did wrong.”
“But—,” I started.
“Shhh,” Lori said beside me.
“That’s—,” I started again.
“Shut up,” Lori muttered.
“—ridiculous,” I finished.
“Adam, stop talking,” Lori said.
“Adam, stop talking,” Frances repeated.
I knew I was only getting myself in more trouble. Lori’s dad unballed and balled his fists, daring me to talk back. I was beyond caring. I was right and he was wrong. I said, “Of course I’m going to see her. I live next door.”
“Not for long,” he shouted. “Lori, go with Frances. Go home.”
I balled my own fists then. Now it sounded like Lori was a dog.
Lori gave me a wide-eyed warning look, then obediently jogged a few steps forward and walked with Frances toward her house.
Her dad turned to me. “You. Follow me.”
“Woof,” I said.
Lori and Frances both stopped under the trees and looked back at me. We all half expected Lori’s dad to really blow his top this time.
He didn’t. His balled fists expanded into claws that wanted to strangle me. Then he turned without a word and headed for my house.
Lori widened her eyes at me and nodded after her dad, urging me to go on. Frances pointed at him and gave me the stern nanny look.
I followed. But I let him get a good thirty feet ahead of me so he’d worry. That far away, he couldn’t hear my footsteps across the pine needles. He kept looking over his shoulder to make sure I hadn’t escaped. We continued past my house, all the way down to the marina. He waited for me outside the office door with his arms folded. When I caught up with him, he swung open the office door, ready to feed me to my parents.
But the office was empty. He pointed me inside. I slouched past him and collapsed into my mother’s desk chair. I’d been so keyed up for a shouting match, I was almost disappointed it was delayed. For a few minutes, anyway.
“Stay.” He glared at me a moment more, then closed me inside the office while he went to look for my parents.
I stared at the painted metal door. Sean had drawn a smiley face on it in WD-40 when I was eight and he was ten. He blamed it on me, and Mom believed him. The huge greasy smile in the faded paint never would wash out—believe me, I’d tried. I’d been forced to try. Now it taunted me. Going in the woods with Lori had been my idea. Going parking with her last night had been my idea, too. I knew that, and yet all my troubles pointed back to Sean.
On impulse, I rolled the chair closer to the desk, snagged the phone, and punched in Rachel’s number. If it hadn’t been for Lori, I could have been into Rachel. As it was, I’d only gone out with her last month for the same reason I went out with any girl: to have some fun, but also hoping that Lori was watching and that she would finally get jealous. I liked Rachel, though. I felt bad about using her until she cheated on me with Sean. Afterward, I figured she deserved whatever she got, because of her infidelity and extremely poor taste.
She must have recognized the marina office number on her cell phone and thought it might be Sean, because her voice sounded tight, like she could hardly contain herself. “Hello?”
“It’s only me.” I hadn’t meant to disappoint her.
“Hey, Adam!” she squealed. She didn’t want me to feel bad for making her feel bad. Which was cute and all. Rachel was a really nice person. But if I’d gone into the woods with Rachel and then called Lori, Lori would have answered with a cackle and a “So, did you get some?” I missed her already.
“Hey,” I said. I was lucky Rachel had answered her phone. Now that I had her, I needed to get what I wanted from her as quickly as I could. Lori would call her soon for a girl talk about what an idiot I was for not going along with her plan. I had to get Rachel on my side now, before my dad came in and grabbed me. “What’s up with you and Sean?”
“What do you mean?” she snapped. “Did he say something about me?”
Just as I’d suspected. “He didn’t say a word,” I admitted.
She let out a little huff of frustration. “Then why do you think there’s something up between us?”
“Not between you,” I said. “It’s all one-sided. You got mad at him and broke up with him last week. He came groveling back to you but you blew him off. You expected him to crawl back again. He
hasn’t. He talked to you at the festival yesterday but he didn’t ask you out. Am I right?”
“Well.” Her voice pitched even higher as she got upset. “I broke up with him because it seemed like he only wanted to date me to make you mad. After we broke up, I thought he would take a few days and realize how wrong he’d been, and then he’d beg to have me back and he’d appreciate me more. I never thought I would break up with him and he would shrug and say, ‘Okay’!”
“I can tell,” I said. “You pranced around in your bikini at the lake this afternoon and he still didn’t ask you out. He is not acting like the boys you’ve dated before at all.”
“You can lose the superior tone, Adam Vader,” she said sternly. “The last boy I dated before Sean was you.” She paused. “Of course, you only asked me out to make Lori jealous.”
I laughed. Not a desperate-about-my-girlfriend laugh, but a cavalier laugh like Sean’s. I felt ill. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“You want to make Lori jealous again?” Rachel guessed. “The two of you have enough problems.”
“Tell me about it.” The sick feeling grew. I winced at another of those pangs in my stomach, just like this morning when I found out I was banned from Lori. Then I said, “Lori still likes Sean.”
“She does not!” Rachel squealed. I heard her swallow. She said more calmly, “She does not, Adam. She likes you. You should have heard her talking about you on the boat this afternoon.”
You should have heard her talking about Sean in the woods, I thought. “Here’s the thing. She’s forming this plan—”
“Uh-oh,” Rachel said.
“—to date other guys until I don’t look so awful to her dad.”
“But she’s not dating Sean,” Rachel said.
“Not yet,” I admitted. “But she will. If this goes on long enough, I promise you she will.”
“I don’t believe it,” Rachel said. “And even if I did—”
I had her.
“—what could I do about it?”
“Nothing yet,” I said. “But when the time comes, I want you to be prepared. I may ask you to do something that would help me keep Lori interested or to send Sean your way.” I felt guilty as I said this. Sean and I had promised to stay out of each other’s way when it came to Lori and Rachel.
I talked myself out of it. I could count on one hand the number of promises to me that Sean had kept.
In fact, upon further reflection, I couldn’t think of a single one.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Lori and I haven’t been friends very long. I wouldn’t feel right, going behind her back like that.”
“She’ll forgive you,” I said. “She’s very forgiving. And you’d be doing her good. You want to keep her away from Sean, don’t you? He’s bad news.”
Rachel giggled at this. She’d always giggled at pretty much everything I said—another thing I liked about her. She was easy to please. This went a long way toward explaining her infatuation with Sean. I chuckled along with her, even though I was dead serious.
She quieted down and asked, “You think I’m an idiot for liking him, don’t you?”
“No. I think you have the same taste as every other girl at our high school. I don’t understand that big belt over the long shirt, either.”
“It’s called a tunic.”
“It’s called ugly. And one more thing.”
She sighed. “What.”
“Don’t tell Lori you’ve been to my secret make-out hideout. If she asks you about it, tell her that you and I never went there.”
“Why would she care?” Rachel asked. “You and I went there when we were dating, before you and Lori got together.”
“Yeah, but she thinks she was the first, and I didn’t tell her otherwise.”
Rachel was quiet for a few moments. In the background I could hear her little sisters yelling at each other about something. If she was trying to figure out how boys’ minds worked, she was way out of her element. She was no Lori.
Finally she said, “I don’t want to lie to her. Like I told you, she and I haven’t been friends very lo—”
I interrupted her before she went any farther down that high-and-mighty path. Time to play the sympathy card, which never worked on Lori but was a sure thing with every other girl I knew. “Lori and I are going through a tough time right now. You would be helping, not hurting. Please help me, Rachel.”
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said weakly. “I thought you did want to make her jealous. If you want me to conceal from her that I’ve been to your hideout, it sounds like you don’t want to make her jealous.”
“I don’t want to make her jealous yet,” I explained. “She hasn’t gone out with Sean yet. Right now I want her to feel special, like she’s the only girl I ever introduced to my secret make-out hideout. It’s only after she goes out with Sean that I’m going to pull the rug out from under her.”
“Adam Vader,” Rachel said. “I had no idea you were so sneaky.”
“Right. That makes me even sneakier. Deal?”
We hung up, and I felt guilty all over again. I was worried about Lori going out with Sean, but I was actually more worried Lori would discover she wasn’t the first to experience the secret make-out hideout. I wished she had been the first and I’d never taken Rachel there. I didn’t want to see Lori’s face when she found out otherwise.
I could have admitted this to Rachel. Maybe I should have. But I didn’t trust her after she’d cheated on me with Sean.
Of course, she was right that I’d only gone out with her to make Lori jealous. She had no reason to trust me, either. We made perfect partners in crime.
Suddenly I realized how tense I was, leaning forward and gripping the edge of the metal desk with both hands. I leaned back in the chair. This didn’t relax me any. I found myself staring up at the bulletin board over the desk. Tacked to it were business cards for boat sales reps, a diagram of an F/A-18 Hornet that Cameron had drawn when he was about ten (and I thought he was so impossibly old), the schedule for everybody who worked at the marina (Lori was under Sean, I noticed with annoyance), and a brochure for a military boarding school. I’d almost forgotten my parents were thinking about sending me away.
I’d told Lori’s dad he couldn’t keep me from seeing Lori because I lived next door. When he’d said, “Not for long,” that’s what he must have meant. That’s what he was talking to my parents about right now.
They wouldn’t do that to me. Would they?
No, they wouldn’t. Not yet. Not just because Lori’s dad told them to.
But the threat was there. Last year when I was flunking chemistry, my mom started investigating schools. She’d asked Lori’s dad about it because he had a fraternity brother who’d gone to one, and who might be able to get me into a good one for those of us with ADHD, instead of one full of actual juvenile delinquents. This was my mother’s fear—that if she sent me away to clean up my act, I’d actually become more corrupted and learn to pick locks better. It was all the same to me. Prison was prison.
I’d brought up my chemistry grade by the end of the semester, though. I hadn’t improved my test scores, but the longer the class went on, the more our grade was based on lab. I was excellent at lab. Unlike every nerdy girl in the class and half the guys, I was not afraid of the Bunsen burner.
I’d worked my ass off for that C, all for nothing.
This office had no windows.
I jumped up from the tiny chair, kicked open the door, and escaped from my cell.
Around the side of the warehouse, I fished my football out of the bushes. I jogged about ten yards up the boat ramp, aimed carefully, and fired a pass at one of the huge metal doors.
BANG.
Bull’s-eye. I ran after the ball and stopped it before it rolled into the yard and down the hill into the lake. I jogged back up the ramp with it and let another pass fly.
BANG.
If Lori’s dad had found my parents in the warehouse an
d they were looking for me now, the noise would notify them of my whereabouts. I didn’t care. The more passes I threw, the better I felt.
BANG.
“Adam!” my dad roared. The sun was setting now. From where I stood on the ramp, the corner of the warehouse appeared to cut the huge orange sun exactly in half. My dad walked toward me out of that orange glow, like the devil. He hiked up the ramp and stopped near me, stroking his beard.
I can’t repeat in mixed company any of what he said to me. However, I can convey the general import of the message by replacing the word I shouldn’t have said in front of my mother with the word “monkey.” I hate monkeys.
“Son,” he said, “you monkeyed up.”
“I know.” I put off the rest of this conversation by running after the football again. But when I returned to my starting spot, he was still there.
“Now, I’m not going to send you to military school just because Trevor McGillicuddy has his panties in a wad.”
“Thanks,” I said.
BANG.
He raised his voice. “But the reason I will send you is the reason your mama and I were discussing it in the first place. You have absolutely no monkeying self-control. None.”
“Thanks for nothing.” I ran down the ramp to retrieve my football.
“That’s a prime monkeying example,” he shouted after me. “You’re in trouble and you’re still talking back. People like you end up in jail, son. Nobody is going to help you out then. Trevor’s already so mad at you he could spit, and I’m not wasting my boat money paying for a lawyer to defend you for a crime you’re likely guilty of anyway.”
I walked back up the ramp, tossing the football from hand to hand. I tucked it under one arm and slapped my dad on the back. “Your confidence in me is heartwarming. Makes me want to return all the money I stole from the little old ladies and kick the heroin.”
He gave me the same look he’d sent my way that morning in the kitchen. I had gone too far.
I raised both hands and one football. I had no defense and nothing else to say.
“Why can’t you stay the monkey away from her?” he burst.
“Because.” This was impossible to explain. I didn’t understand it myself. I put my hands down in defeat. “It’s Lori.”