“Damn straight.” I really was feeling like the world was my oyster that afternoon. In the back of my mind I always knew it wasn’t, but a beautiful blonde lay on my chest, and it was easy to pretend she wouldn’t be snatched away from me again before the afternoon was over.
“You would not have to do trig.” She stroked higher, wrapped her finger around one of my chest hairs, and tugged gently.
“I would not have to do trig,” I agreed. “Could you please be more careful with my chest hairs? I don’t have many.”
“So sorry.” Her hand slid lower again, which I liked a lot better anyway. “In the eighteen hundreds, I would have run away with you.”
I sat up on my elbows to look at her in surprise. “You would?”
She sat up too. “Yes.” She nodded with certainty. “And you would die in a saloon fight and leave me with ten children and one on the way and a crop in the field.”
“I would do no such thing.”
“Yeah, you would never have made it that far. You would have died of infection one of the times you broke your arm.” Her hand moved to my upper arm and massaged the scar where that bone had come out. Her hand moved down and lingered on the scar on my forearm. Her fingers even tickled across the position of the break that had been only a greenstick fracture, with no bone sticking out. She knew my body almost as well as I did.
“Maybe we should stay in this century and work it out,” I murmured.
“No, I want to go back to two-hundred years ago, to the dysentery and the head lice. It’s so sexy!” She got on her hands and knees and crawled forward until her bikini top was in my line of sight. I’d thought when we first got to the island that she was seducing me by accident. I didn’t think so anymore.
“Stop it,” I protested. As if.
“Say something else sexy,” she purred.
“Louisiana Purchase.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “And you got a D in history last semester? That mean teacher just didn’t understand you.”
But Lori did, and she knew exactly what to say to make me feel like the smartest guy in the world. Or maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she just did it. Fascinated, I reached out and touched a wisp of her white-blonde hair that had blown across her bottom lip.
Her laughter stopped, and her smile faded. She said huskily, “You’re only three weeks older than I am, but when you do something like that, you seem years older.”
I do? I wanted to ask. This was news to me. Great news. I held her gaze like I had been aware of this already, and I rubbed my thumb gently across her lip like I’d done it on purpose all along.
“You seem so much more experienced than I am,” she said, “to make such a simple move so sexy.” She closed her eyes and leaned forward.
I stroked her face lightly as she put herself into my hand like a cat that wanted to be petted (unlike my mother’s cat, which did not want to be touched at all), but I wasn’t watching her face anymore. I was watching her bikini top and trying not to explode.
She whispered, “Have you done this with Rachel before?”
I stopped my hand on her face, cupping her sharp chin. She went very still, green eyes on me, and the bugs buzzed louder in the trees behind us.
Of course I’d done this with Rachel. Quite a few other girls, too. Just because I’d been waiting years for Lori to notice me didn’t mean I’d been waiting around the house.
I didn’t want to lie to her about this. But that wasn’t really what she was asking me. She was asking me if it meant more when I touched her, and if I felt more. I did.
She moved her head in my hand, forcing me to stroke her, but her eyes never left mine. She’d made herself vulnerable, and she expected me to do the same, the perfect end to a happy stolen afternoon.
I couldn’t. Sorry, but the weekend before, when she was out with Parker, I’d felt vulnerable enough to last me the rest of the summer.
I said slowly, “We should go back. Wouldn’t want to outstay your curfew.”
“Who would do that?” she asked. “That would be stupid.” She said this with no expression. I couldn’t tell whether she was mad or not. She started to stand up.
I pulled her back down, rolled on top of her, and kissed her mouth one last time. It could have turned into another long tumble in the sand, and it almost did. But even I knew we really couldn’t stay here forever.
We waded together into the water, dove under, and came up doing the American crawl at exactly the same time. The sun wouldn’t set for another few hours, but it had weakened since the midday heat. Now the water was warmer than the air. Crawling through it was like swimming through myself. The whole lake was mine, and Lori was too. Bad as things still looked for convincing her dad I wasn’t a criminal, at that moment I figured everything would work out okay. There was no way it couldn’t on a beautiful day like this.
We reached the dock. She treaded water and nodded toward the ladder. “You go first. Check for bryozoa. My hero.”
I climbed up. There wasn’t a slimy colony of bryozoa lurking on the rungs, and I’m not sure I would have told her if there were, because I liked to hear her squeal. I reached down and held out my hand to her—not that she ever needed help, but I felt good doing it.
“Better not even stand on the dock together,” she said. “The longer we stay, the more likely they’re watching. You go ahead. They probably want to get going before dark. I’ll stay down here and act like I’ve been sunning myself the whole time. If they ask whether we were together, I’ll say, ‘Oh, has Adam been missing too? He must have gone for a long walk. I have no idea why he would do that. Mysterious!’”
“Yeah, maybe nobody will ask you,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t go offering that awful routine unless they ask, okay? Jesus.” I walked up the dock, snagged my towel, and put on my shirt.
“I’m going to try out for the school play just to spite you,” she called. “You’ll see. I’ll show you all!”
I looked back at her treading water, just a blonde head in a vast blue lake under a blue sky.
Then I jogged up the sidewalk through the trees. Because I was sneaky enough to give the alibi some plausibility, I walked around the neighborhood for a few minutes, then walked through the garage in front of the house and entered the hall. I met Rachel coming out of the bathroom.
“Hey!” she greeted me. “Did you have a nice time doing calisthenics?”
“It was okay. Did Sean ask you out?”
“I think he may ask out my grandmother before he asks me.” She giggled, but her laughter died off with her smile. “If she didn’t have fifty years on him, I would seriously say he was flirting with her. I think my granddad was jealous. When Sean acts like somebody he’s just met is his BFF, is it all a put-on to make his ex mad and to get more peach cobbler? Or does he feel something? Does he like my grandmother as a friend, or is he making fun of her in his mind?”
“I honestly don’t know.” I had wondered this myself. I glanced down the hall toward the den. “Where is everybody, anyway? I hope Sean isn’t in the house, the way you’re talking about him. If he were, I would need to give you some lessons in sneaky.”
She giggled again. Still watching the doorway to the den, I wished Lori would come around the corner and see me with Rachel when she was giggling like that. But I should have stopped thinking that way. As Lori had explained, there really was nothing to her date with Parker and no reason for me to be jealous.
“No,” Rachel said, “Sean and Tammy and McGillicuddy are out on the deck. Lori was out there a minute ago. She had a text message on her phone from her dad that said he and Frances were cruising to Chimney Rock. She said it sounded like her dad couldn’t sit still, worrying about whether she was seeing you over here.”
“It does sound like that,” I agreed. Good thing Lori and I had come back to the house when we did, before her dad and Frances took a detour from Chimney Rock, rode by here out of curiosity, and found a certain island hideaway.
&nbs
p; Rachel nodded. “Lori thought it was the perfect chance to scare her dad. Things didn’t work out with Parker, so she decided to try the plan with Cameron. They just left for Chimney Rock in one of the boats. What’s the matter? Hey, wait—”
I was already running down the hall. Rachel’s grandmother was in the kitchen, and I should have stopped and thanked her for the afternoon, but I was sure Sean had more than made up for me already, and there was no time. I dashed through the den and burst out the door onto the deck.
“Cameron made out with Lori when she was eleven!” I yelled.
Sean and Tammy looked around at me with wide eyes. McGillicuddy looked at me too, but he watched me with that war-criminal stare, waiting for the one last sliver of evidence he needed to beat the monkey out of his best friend.
“In the warehouse,” I panted. “When he was fourteen. So if you think he is innocently helping her out with her plan—”
Now McGillicuddy was the one making a mad dash. I ran after him, passed him on the dock, and jumped into the driver’s seat of the only boat left. I cranked it without looking behind me to see if McGillicuddy had untied it or if Sean had made it in. But as I maneuvered into the open water, I heard Sean laughing as McGillicuddy yelled, presumably to Tammy up on the deck, “I’ll call you!”
Out in the main river channel, I accelerated the boat as fast as it would go and stared ahead at the blue water, willing the miles away so we could be at Chimney Rock already. I pictured Lori asking Cameron to kiss her in front of her dad. Cameron would be more than happy to oblige. And somewhere in the middle of that kiss—she didn’t mean to, you understand—she would remember why she’d always looked up to the older boys, and she would fall for my other brother.
Echoing my thoughts, McGillicuddy walked past me into the bow and stood there with the hard wind blowing his blond hair straight back, hands on his hips.
Sean sat down across the aisle and leaned toward me. If he made a snide comment, I would punch him.
He hollered at me over the motor, “Are you going to yak?”
I jerked my head around at him, ready for a fight. But his face didn’t give away that he was setting me up to be the butt of a joke, like I’d expected. He looked concerned. Of course he was not concerned. Sean was not capable of this. He had contorted his face into a facsimile of concern.
“No, why?” I yelled back, still bracing myself for the other half of the joke.
“You look really pale all of a sudden.” He reached across the boat and put his hand on my shoulder.
We stayed that way for approximately three seconds, him doing his concerned older brother imitation and me watching him like he’d grown another head, waiting for him to crack up.
Then he took his hand away, turned to the front, and stared into the wind like McGillicuddy and me.
It seemed like hours, but in only a few minutes we reached Chimney Rock. Here the cliffs were higher, made of granite instead of red clay. Stacks of boulders like chimneys jutted out from the bank. For their trouble, they’d been covered in graffiti over the years, just like the bridge across the lake. A path led from the shore up the side of one boulder, where you could jump three yards into the water. That was for kids. The path kept snaking up through the woods until it emerged on an outcropping where you could jump ten yards into the water. And if you were really daring, you followed the path to the top of the rock, a twenty-yard fall into the lake.
That’s why boats floated in front of the colorful cliffs now: to see who would jump. A lot of people walked out onto the highest outcropping. Very few of them went off. The folks in the boats below taunted them and chanted their names if they knew them, but most would-be jumpers stared at the water for a few minutes, then made their way back down to the middle rock and jumped amid boos from the boaters. Which was probably just as well, because people had been killed jumping off the highest cliff.
But I wasn’t interested in the jumpers today. Powering down the engine before I rammed someone, I scanned the crowd of boats.
“There they are.” McGillicuddy pointed to the far edge of the group of boats. I maneuvered forward until I picked out our target by its high wakeboarding bar. Cameron sat behind the wheel, watching the highest rock, because he was chicken and fascinated. And Lori sat sprawled in the bow, also seeming to watch the rock behind her shades, legs spread like a boy.
At the sound of our motor coming closer, she looked around and sat up, grinning. “Hey!” she called as if nothing were wrong. We idled even nearer, and still she didn’t clue in to the look on my face or on her brother’s. “We’ve been here for a few minutes, but we haven’t seen Dad. He sent that text message quite a while ago, so he and Frances must have come and gone. We were just about to head home ourselves. Oh well. It was a good idea, wasn’t it?”
“Spectacular.” I cut the engine and reached out for the side of the other boat so the two boats wouldn’t grind together, and so Cameron couldn’t get away.
McGillicuddy vaulted from one boat into the other and walked down the aisle until he stood in front of Cameron. “Hey, buddy.”
“Hey.” Cameron craned his neck to peer at the rock on the other side of McGillicuddy’s body. “Can’t see through ya.”
McGillicuddy folded his arms. “I hear you kissed Lori in the warehouse when she was eleven.”
“Adam!” Lori shrieked.
I didn’t even care that she found out I’d spilled her secret. I focused on Cameron, who was floundering in his seat, looking at Lori and then at me looking for anybody to blame.
Finally he had to face McGillicuddy again. “I was fourteen,” he said sheepishly.
“I was fourteen a little over a year ago,” I said. “You give it a bad name.”
“If you want to teach him a lesson,” Sean called from the other side of the boat, out of the fray, “I have an idea.” He nodded toward Chimney Rock.
McGillicuddy reached down toward Cameron in the seat, and I reached forward. Between the two of us, with the threat of Sean as backup, we nudged and bullied Cameron into our boat, leaving Lori alone.
“Guys,” Lori called. “Y’all. Don’t do anything to him for coming over here with me. It was at my behest.”
“He needs to learn when to say no,” I threw over my shoulder at her as I started the engine. With McGillicuddy and Sean guarding Cameron in the bow, I idled the boat forward, easing through the crowd, until we touched land. Sean jumped out and tied the boat at the base of the path.
Cameron just sat there, refusing to budge, until McGillicuddy and I stood behind him and nudged him again. He was beginning to get the idea that there was no way out of this.
If all of us hadn’t been so accustomed to each other through years of bullying, he might have tried to escape into the water or to plead his case. But he knew it was no use, and if he begged, he’d be doing it in front of a crowd, which probably included some people he knew. He eased out of his seat and skulked to the bow like he had an appointment to walk the plank. Which, in a way, he did.
The three of us moved up the path. Sean fell in behind us, smirking. “Cameron, remember when you threw me off that first rock?” he called. “Remember I told you I’d get you back?”
“I was in third grade, you idiot. Only you would remember that.”
This was untrue. By pegging the grade he’d been in himself, Cameron had given away that he remembered it, too. And I remembered every insult as freshly as Sean did, every blow, every time Cameron had shoved me off that rock. On impulse I reached forward and slapped Cameron on the back of the head.
“Hey!” he roared, turning on me.
McGillicuddy put one meaty hand on Cameron’s chest to hold him off me. “Keep walking, my friend,” he said with a threat in his voice.
We emerged from the trees onto the highest plateau, with more graffiti sprayed on the flat surface: GO BACK! DANGER! JUMP AT YOUR OWN RISK! Cameron eyed it as McGillicuddy and Sean and I continued to walk him slowly forward, nudging him, shoving him, ste
pping on his bare toes.
“People really have died jumping off this thing.” He controlled his voice carefully, trying to keep face as the oldest brother, yet really, really not wanting to jump off this cliff. “If I die, Mom will kill you.”
“You should have thought of that before you made out with my little sister.” McGillicuddy pushed Cameron hard enough that Cameron stumbled dangerously near the edge, and there was a half second when I thought he would lose his balance and tumble over.
He righted himself, breathing hard. The rest of us stood in a semicircle around him—close enough that he had no escape route between us, but far enough away that he couldn’t pull a kamikaze move by grabbing one of us to take over the cliff with him. I seriously doubted Cameron had the balls to do this, but stranger things had happened, and it was in the back of all of our minds as we faced each other uneasily.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Stay away from my sister,” McGillicuddy said. “Or we will bring you right back here, and we will not be so polite about it.”
I’d suppressed how I felt when I’d realized Cameron was with Lori. I’d acted cool on the boat, and I’d kept it inside for the walk up here. Suddenly I couldn’t keep it contained anymore, and it burst out of me in anger. “I wish you would go out with her again,” I challenged him.
“Adam,” McGillicuddy growled. “Wrong direction.”
“Touch her,” I yelled at Cameron. “Just look at her. If you do—when does Giselle get back from Europe? Two weeks from now? I will drive straight to your college and tell her that you called my girlfriend buried treasure, and that you were willing to whore yourself just to make her daddy mad. And then I will take Giselle out for coffee to console her, and one thing will lead to another…”
I could feel McGillicuddy’s eyes on me. Sean covered his mouth to keep from laughing. But Cameron watched me carefully, as serious as I was. “Giselle would not be caught dead going out with a sixteen-year-old.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
McGillicuddy had changed his mind about the effectiveness of my threat. He chimed in, “With the beard, Adam looks older. Hell, he’s taller than Sean.”