“I know,” he said. Shockingly, he sounded halfway sympathetic.
“And she’s beautiful,” I went on.
He nodded.
I pointed the football through the trees, toward her house. “And she’s right there!”
“I know, son, and it’s going to earn you a tour through the ass end of the South’s finest secondary schools for monkey-ups.”
I bounced the football on the side of my head in frustration. “What do you want me to do?”
He pursed his lips and eyed me in the dusk. “Show me you have one iota of self-restraint.”
“I will,” I said quickly.
“Stay away from her.”
“Okay.”
“Keep your hands off her.”
“I’ll try.”
He scowled at me.
“I will,” I said.
He wiggled his fingers at me. “And it might help public relations with Lori’s pop if you put on a shirt and quit walking around here like sex on a stick.”
I rolled my eyes. He did make me feel self-conscious about my bare chest, though. I wanted to fold my arms. Instead, I threw the football as hard as I could at the warehouse door.
BANG.
“Nice arm,” Dad called after me as I chased the football. “Ever thought about throwing against the rock wall of the house? You’re making a dent in my door.”
That was the point. I liked making a dent. I liked watching it grow bigger with every throw. I didn’t say this, though. As I walked toward him, spinning the football on one finger, I did admit, “The metal door makes a more satisfying noise. Like fireworks. I can feel it in my chest.”
He reached out and stroked my cheek with his fist. “What’s this scrub you’re working on?”
I batted his hand away. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I yanked his beard.
He feinted toward me.
I bounced the football off his chest and caught it again. “I could so take you, old man.”
He chuckled and headed past me, up to the house. “You do what I said,” he called over his shoulder.
“I will.”
“I would hate to see you go.”
I watched him walk all the way up the yard, hands on his knees when he got to the steepest part, until he disappeared into the house.
Then I looked toward Lori’s house again. It was big, but all I could see between the thick tree trunks was wooden corners and white lights. It looked exactly like it always had from over here, but I felt so much different about it now.
In my earliest memory it was a scary place, because Lori and McGillicuddy’s mother had died. Later it was a mysterious and wonderful place, like the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I didn’t go to their house often, but when I did, McGillicuddy’s room was full of model airplanes still intact because he had no older brothers to break them on purpose, and Lori was liable to pop around the corner, treating me to a little thrill.
Lately I’d hardly dared go over there because I was sure Lori would know I liked her. When I did have an excuse to visit McGillicuddy, I walked through the halls holding my breath. The little thrill had grown into something much stronger, something that made me want to steal Lori away from McGillicuddy and get her alone. And now…
Now I just hoped she hadn’t gotten in too much trouble.
Keep my hands off her. Right. I waved fireflies away from my face and threw the football at the warehouse as hard as I could.
BANG.
As the doorbell rang, I was dumping potato chips into a bowl. This was something one did when having one’s friends over for lunch. This was, in fact, the only thing I could think of that one did when hostessing a lunch.
At the sound of the bell, I glanced toward the door and tried to slow my pulse. It was not Adam, miraculously freed from the wrath of his parents (and my dad). It was Tammy and Rachel, who’d agreed to come over again today to help me figure out what to do. They were conniving, like all girls but me. I figured they could troubleshoot.
“Heeeey,” I wailed.
Tammy and Rachel made unfamiliar girly noises of sympathy and wrapped me in a group hug. “Oh, no!” Rachel exclaimed. “Have you been crying?”
“I’m all cried out.” My voice was muffled against Tammy’s T-shirt—which was safe from stains, because I never wore makeup to work. I wished I could have enjoyed the group hug and taken them up on the implicit invitation to cry my eyes out all over again. This was why they’d driven out here on my lunch break. This was what girls did.
But I really had depleted my store of tears, and probably lost five pounds of water weight in the process, while dusting the marina showroom with Sean this morning. Plus, weird as it had been to show my emotional side to Sean, it would have been even stranger to cry in front of my brother, who would be back any second. Now that he and Tammy were together, I supposed he would listen in on all my girly confabs. Not that I’d ever had any of those before.
Plus, now that I’d rid myself of the initial hysteria at getting Adam in even more trouble, I couldn’t concentrate on crying. I was thinking too hard about my plan for getting us out of this mess.
The girls and I detangled ourselves from one another and stepped into the kitchen, shutting the door on the midday heat. “It’s so romantic,” Rachel said. “Like Romeo and Juliet!”
“Romantic, no,” I said. “Like Romeo and Juliet, yes, except that it’s real. With suckage.”
“Give us the scoop.” Tammy slid into a chair in front of the bread and sandwich meat I’d piled on the kitchen table. “Did your dad convince Adam’s parents to punish him?” She glanced around the kitchen as she said this. I knew she wasn’t as interested in the scoop on Adam as the scoop on my brother’s whereabouts.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “McGillicuddy’s supposed to be down at the gas pumps, finding out from Adam right now. I worked with Sean and Cameron this morning, but neither of them knew anything. They weren’t around when Adam got in trouble. They asked him later what happened, and he told them to screw off.”
“Poor thing.” Rachel, who was still standing next to me, slipped her arm around my waist.
I shot a sideways look at her. “Poor thing” was right. I felt awful for Adam. But I didn’t necessarily want Rachel feeling awful for him—not when she’d been dating him two weeks ago. I was not schooled enough in the arts of girls to know whether she was bullshitting me or not. I was about to call her on it when McGillicuddy walked in.
“Hi, Rachel,” he said. “Hi, Tammy,” he said in a different tone. He stepped over to the kitchen table and kissed her. At first I thought this was going to be a McGillicuddy-style peck. Historically he was not good with girls. But this turned into something more. They kissed quite deeply in the middle of the kitchen.
Rachel and I looked at each other. She removed her arm from around my waist. I walked to the table, picked up a fork, and dinged it on a glass. “Hello, no PDA in the business meeting. We are here to rescue my love life, not to advance yours.”
They broke apart, glaring at me. McGillicuddy was as pink as the sliced ham on the table.
We all sat down, and I passed around ingredients for them to make their own sandwiches. All three of them shot me strange looks every time I passed something new. Perhaps other girls actually made lunch when they invited people over? Then I followed their gazes to the jars on the table. I hadn’t been handing around condiments you’d usually put on a sandwich. I’d just cleared out the door of the refrigerator and plunked the contents on the table, thinking this stuff must be good for something, though I’d never seen anyone use it.
I picked up a Mason jar with green oozing down the sides and showed it to my brother. “Look, this is from five years ago when Frances was our nanny, not our dad’s squeeze. Remember the organic muscadine chutney? Ah, memories.” I hugged it to my cheek. Shocked by the cold (and the sticky), I plunked it onto the table again. “Sometimes it’s good to let go.”
With her finger wrappe
d safely in a napkin, Rachel eased the jar a few inches farther from her plate. “Could I have a knife?”
“I’m not sure even a knife will help you hack into that Mason jar,” I said. “It’s pretty ol—”
“For the mayo,” Rachel said.
Realizing I had supplied no utensils for the grand repast, I jumped up, crossed the kitchen, and opened what I thought was the knife drawer. Clearly I had not prepared food in a while. This was a drawer full of kitchen tools we had no use for when Frances was not around, such as the avocado slicer, the garlic press, and the melon baller. I’d had a lot of fun cooking with Frances back in the day. She thought she was teaching me to cook, which made her happy. I mashed food like it was Play-Doh and learned nothing, which made me equally happy.
I grabbed a few implements in case someone needed them, sat back down, and handed Rachel a butter knife. Then I asked my brother, “What’d you find out about Adam?”
“Well,” he said between bites, “there’s some talk of military school.”
“What!” I shouted. “Adam would be the worst person in the world to go to military school.”
“I think that’s the idea,” my brother said. “You go into military school because you’re undisciplined and unmilitary. They make you toe the line.”
I felt like my insides had been scooped out with the melon baller in front of me. Adam did not toe the line. That was why he was in so much trouble. But that was also one of the things I loved about him. A disciplined and military Adam would not be a new and improved Adam. It would not be Adam at all.
“But they’re not sending him yet,” McGillicuddy went on. “They’ve talked about it before, and this latest problem”—he glanced at me, like I was the problem—“has brought up the discussion again. They won’t send him if he stays away from you.”
“They’re saying, ‘Stay away from your girlfriend or we’ll send you to military school’?” I asked. “That makes no sense.”
“It’s more like they’re saying, ‘We gave you simple instructions and you couldn’t follow them.’”
I threw a potato chip at my brother. Rachel and Tammy ducked, as if people did not throw food at their tables. “You don’t have to act so smug about it,” I said. “You helped him polish the marks out of the boat faster. You sent him in my direction.”
“Isn’t the issue really that your parents are watching you all the time?” Tammy asked. “You could both quit the marina and get jobs at the same place somewhere else.”
I frowned at her. I hadn’t thought of this. If I got a job on land, I might dry up. I couldn’t imagine a summer away from the lake. But to save Adam from military school, it would be more than worth it. I asked, “Like where?”
“You both have your lifeguard certification,” Tammy said. “You could work at the city pool or the country club.”
“Yeah!” I exclaimed. Work and water!
Rachel shook her head. “Adam wouldn’t be able to stay still in that lifeguard chair for more than five minutes.”
“Yeah,” I said. She knew this because she’d dated Adam. However, I did not want to be reminded of this at the present time. Waving away Tammy’s amateurish idea, I said, “I already wanted to talk to y’all about this, but military school makes it even more important. Adam won’t follow this order from his parents. There’s my irresistible beauty and allure—”
Tammy laughed.
“—shut up, and then there’s the very idea of his parents telling him he can’t do something. It’s a perfect storm for Adam to self-destruct. I need to get us out of this mess before that happens. And I have a plan.” I explained my ingenious mission with Kevin Ye, ignoring Rachel when she choked on her lemonade at several points. I finished, “Isn’t that a good plan?”
“No,” McGillicuddy spoke up, “but it’s consistent.”
I went on. “The problem with this plan—”
“The problem?” Tammy asked. “Like there’s only one?”
“—is that I ran it by Adam, and he does not like it.”
“You have got to be kidding,” McGillicuddy said flatly.
“It’s the Kevin Ye aspect. Adam doesn’t want me dating a felon.” Or his brother, or his other brother. “It could still work if I thought of someone who passed muster with Adam and horrified my dad at the same time.”
“What about Parker Buchanan?” Rachel asked. “Your dad must know him by reputation. Everybody in town’s heard that he made out with three different girls in the food court at the Birmingham mall and all their boyfriends tried to jump him in the parking lot.”
“That’s perfect!” I pounded my fist on the table. Rachel’s lemonade sloshed over the side of her glass. “Sorry.” I stood up to snag a towel.
“I was joking,” Rachel said.
My brother warned her, “Do not make jokes to Lori that you don’t want to be misunderstood and taken seriously.”
“Why is Parker perfect?” Tammy asked. “He’s a playboy who lives on the edge. Why would that be so scary to your dad? He sounds like a combination of Adam and Sean.”
“Yes, but he’s from Birmingham,” I pointed out as I wiped up the lemonade at Rachel’s place—or tried to, and ended up scooting the puddle into her lap. “Sorry. Maybe you should do this.” I handed her the towel and sat back down in my place. “You know how people around here feel about Birmingham. You don’t even have to explain that anything from Birmingham is more intense. If you wreck your car and people want to know how badly you were hurt, all you have to say is, ‘The ambulance took me straight to Birmingham,’ and everybody knows you went to the university hospital because you were at death’s door. If you’re going on a date and you say, ‘We went to Birmingham,’ people know your boyfriend took you to the fanciest restaurant in the state because he’s trying to get in your pants.”
McGillicuddy cleared his throat. Next to him, Tammy took a huge bite of her sandwich. He must be taking her on a date to Birmingham sometime soon.
To cover his own embarrassment—or just to make sure he understood my plan, but I doubted this—my brother reached behind him and snagged the pad and pen on the counter beside the phone. He drew a little diagram. “So an ADHD boyfriend is bad, and a playboy ADHD boyfriend would be worse, but a playboy ADHD boyfriend from Birmingham is the top of this hierarchy.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said. “I would not rely on Parker’s reputation alone. I would go out with him on a couple of dates, enough to let Dad know we’re getting serious, and then stage a Teen Crisis.”
Everybody cracked up but me. Tammy asked, “What kind of Teen Crisis?”
“I have no idea,” I said defensively. “You’ve been watching MTV longer than I have.”
“Are you just going to flirt with Parker and win him over,” Rachel asked, “or are you going to explain to him what you’re doing?”
“I’ll explain to him what I’m doing,” I said. “Otherwise I would feel awful. What if he fell for me for real?”
Rachel and Tammy looked at each other.
“It is not beyond the realm of possibility,” I grouched.
“What makes you think he’ll do it?” Tammy asked.
“I’ll offer him something in return. I’ll take him around town, introduce him to people, show him where we hang out. I will leave out the part where I am extremely unpopular and kind of socially challenged. Do you think he might believe I’m popular?”
“Depends on how long you’re together,” Rachel said. “He’ll wise up eventually.”
My brother tapped the pen on the pad. “Won’t you feel guilty for lying to Dad?”
I did feel a twinge of guilt at that, but anger took over. “I won’t be lying to him. I will be going out with Parker. I might not be going out with him with romantic intensions, but I will not say I am. Dad will only infer this, and everybody knows you should not infer anything. You should get it in writing.”
All this lawyer lingo reminded me that my brother was leaving behind incrimina
ting evidence. I reached across the table, snatched the pad in front of him, and tore out the sheet where he’d made little notes about the plan. I tore out the sheet under that, too, in case the imprint of the pen was clear enough to show up if a paranoid father rubbed a pencil across it. I tore both sheets into a pile of tiny pieces while the three of them watched me as if I had completely lost my mind.
“The thing is,” I said, trying to sound sane, “I need to explain all this to Adam in private. I can’t get McGillicuddy to explain it to him. Something will be lost in the translation.”
“Well, excuse me that I can’t look at him all googly-eyed,” my brother said.
“And he’s liable to punch you,” I said.
“Very true,” Rachel agreed. I felt another twinge of annoyance that she knew Adam so well, or thought she did. That’s one of the reasons I’d asked her to help me plan, but the more helpful she was, the less sure I was that I wanted her help.
My brother’s eyes slid to Tammy for a fraction of a second, then back to me. He said, “Punch me? He can try.”
“Right.” I needed to keep my brother on my side. Best to support his machismo in front of Tammy. But he knew, and I knew, that asking Parker to help me and scaring my dad with Parker would not be nearly as difficult as persuading Adam to play along.
Friday night my family had Lori’s family over for dinner. My mom tried to pass it off as routine. She said we’d been so busy that we hadn’t invited them yet this summer, and now was as good a time as any. However, I was pretty sure she wanted to repair whatever I’d messed up with Lori’s dad. Sooner or later somebody would get another speeding ticket, and then what would my parents do? Pay for a lawyer?
I thought I would be glad for the chance to get close to Lori. It ended up being three courses of frustration. I’d felt exactly this way wakeboarding with her an hour before. I always looked forward to being near her, but when the time came, we were both scared to exchange more than a “hi” for fear authority was watching us.