“Hey!” Sean protested.
“Okay,” Cameron said. “I mean, of course I’m going to stay away from Lori. I didn’t seek her out in the first place. She came up to me and said…”
I took a step toward him.
He eyed me. “… And I was just trying to help her, and you…”
I took another step toward him. I didn’t care whether he took me over the cliff with him or not. If he didn’t swear to stay away from Lori, he was going over.
“Okay!” he exclaimed. “Yes, I was wrong. Okay?” When I didn’t budge, he turned to McGillicuddy to save him. “Okay?”
“Okay.” McGillicuddy grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him away from the edge. “Let’s go.”
For all their big talk and big threats, the three of them sure did hurry away from the edge now that we had this settled. They reached the trail and disappeared into the trees without looking back to see if I was following them.
I stepped all the way to the edge. The boats were tiny, and the water was dark blue here, the deepest part of the lake. In one of the boats closest to the cliff, I picked out Lori by her long blonde hair and perfect body and pink bikini. She stared up at me with her hands over her mouth. Somebody in another boat must have recognized me, or more likely thought I was Sean, because a faint chant made its way up to me: “Va-der! Va-der! Va-der!
I backed up three paces, took a running start, and jumped.
The wind was what I noticed. Underneath it I thought I could hear Lori screaming, but the wind was too loud in my ears for me to be sure. It was cold on my skin despite the light of the setting sun. The boats and the lake rushed up at me. I felt high.
Then I hit the water hard—a lot harder than I expected, harder than it had felt smacking into me the millions of times I’d jumped off the middle cliff. The impact took my breath away, but only for a second. I sank so deep in the water that I hit a patch of bone-soaking cold. That woke me up again. If I sank any farther, I wouldn’t make it to the surface before I had to take a breath. I clawed my way toward the sunbeams shining through the surface.
I burst into the air and sucked in big lungfuls of it. Now that I knew I was alive, the high was wearing off already. My skin stung where I’d hit the water. And when I saw Lori in the boat with her hands still covering her mouth, I remembered how angry I was. I swam over to her and hauled myself up on the wakeboarding platform in back.
She rushed toward me. “Are you okay?”
I frowned at her. “No, I am definitely not okay.” I wrung out my T-shirt on her pink-tipped toes.
Her expression turned from concern to irritation as she realized I was upset about her escape across the lake with Cameron. “I mean, did you break your wrist or something? Again? You look really pale.”
“I think that must be left over from the shock and horror!” I started this sentence calmly, but by the time I finished, I was yelling at her, unloading everything I felt. Luckily my brothers and McGillicuddy had descended the rock and were heading in our direction in the other boat, so I wouldn’t have to stay here with her much longer.
She flinched at my voice. Slowly she recovered, putting her hands on her hips and frowning down at me. “I thought we had a nice afternoon, Adam. I thought we fixed everything.”
The other boat arrived and floated slowly past, allowing McGillicuddy to jump on next to me. I traded places with him. Then, just as Sean started the engine again to take us home, I looked her square in her green eyes and let her know exactly what I thought of her and her plan right now. I said, “So did I,” and turned toward the sunset.
“Stay home tonight.”
These were the first words Adam had spoken to me since he jumped off Chimney Rock last weekend. After the boys and I finished our wakeboarding practice Friday afternoon, I was tying the boat to the dock cleat when he jumped onto the wharf and bent to mutter this in my ear. He never stopped, just kept walking, carrying his life vest and wakeboard into the warehouse.
Of course, this was for the best. I glanced up at the screened porch of my house, where my dad was always watching—or if he wasn’t, I thought he was, which amounted to the same thing. Adam had taken a big risk by bending down to talk to me at all.
On the other hand, you would think a boy with as much savvy and—let’s face it—as many impulse control issues as Adam could have risked another tryst with me at some point during this whole week. He hadn’t because he was still mad about Cameron.
Plus… what did he want me to stay home for? Was he sending me a message via carrier pigeon? Or did he want me to stay home just so he’d know where I was while he went out and had fun? It was like him lately not to tell me and to expect me to play along.
And I’d had enough. I decided I should go out that night, just to spite him.
Problem was, I had no one to go with. Tammy would be out with McGillicuddy. I sure wished Rachel was available. I’d been itching to milk her for more about what had happened when she dated Adam in May. In the past he’d talked like their relationship hadn’t meant much, but last weekend at the island, he’d hinted at something more serious.
There would be no milking tonight. Rachel needed to spend Fourth of July holiday time with her family—which she said was an okay trade-off, since she got to take care of this on July the second. After a two-week hiatus for the beer infraction, the Vaders had reinstated the boys’ weekly party, just in time for a blowout tomorrow night on July the third. Rachel would be able to come to that. And she could come with all of us to watch Adam’s fireworks over the lake on the Fourth.
So nine o’clock Friday night found me sitting at my desk in my room, carefully piecing together the tail of a B-52 Stratofortress. I’d bought the model earlier in the week because McGillicuddy and Parker’s convo piqued my interest again. I missed building models. It was strangely calming to construct something according to someone else’s predetermined plan. A month ago I’d thought I needed to stop doing anything tomboyish so I could blend in with girls better and catch boys more efficiently. Now that I’d caught one and my dad had thrown him back, I didn’t see the point in trying.
As I carefully lowered my X-Acto knife to place one of the machine guns, the gun fired a cloud of bullets! At least, that’s what it sounded like. I bent to retrieve the knife, which had narrowly missed my foot, and wondered whether I’d inhaled too much glue. Then the noise came again—tiny rocks thrown against my window.
I turned out the lights, waited a few seconds with my eyes closed to adjust them to the dark, and looked outside. Adam stood between the trees. It could have been Sean—they looked enough alike—but Sean would never hike around in the woods in the hot, humid summer night without good reason. It would mess up his hair.
Adam switched a flashlight on and off to signal me in Morse code, which I’d picked up through many years playing army. The boys always made me hold the grenades. Dot, dash, dash, dash…
J-U-M-P
Was he referring to his fall from Chimney Rock last Sunday? Did he want a medal? I opened my window, leaned out as far as I could without losing my balance, and stage-whispered, “What do you mean, jump?”
He walked closer. I still couldn’t see his face well enough to make out whether it was Adam, but his skull-and-crossbones pendant glinted in the moonlight. He stood directly under the window and held out his arms as if he would catch me.
I looked guiltily around my dark room. I’d never snuck out of my bedroom before. I didn’t particularly want to be disobedient. I loved my dad. I wanted to get along with him. Being a wayward teen seemed like a lot more trouble than it was worth.
I looked back at Adam. He tapped his foot.
Decision made. I stuffed some pillows into my bed and pulled the covers over them. If this was supposed to be me, I had gained a lot of weight and I was not carrying it well, because I was looking awfully rectangular. However, McGillicuddy was out with Tammy and Dad was downstairs with Frances. I seriously doubted anyone would come up to check
on me and discover that I had turned into polyfill.
I lowered the window until the opening was barely wide enough for me to squeeze my butt through. Then I eased out, feet first, realizing as my toes scraped the shingles that I should have worn shoes, and realizing as my thighs scraped the shingles that jeans would not have been a bad idea either. I crawled backward down the short section of the roof and hung my legs over the eaves. This was my last chance to go back. I looked up at the dark glass.
“Drop,” Adam whispered from below. “I’ve got you.”
I took one last deep breath. I had to psych myself up to take risks. I was not like Adam. I counted in my head, one, two, three… and could not quite bring myself to let go. I started over. One, two, I wanted to see Adam, didn’t I? Three.
“Oof!” Adam caught me all right, with the side of his head. I could tell by the feel of his skull on my foot as I kicked him. He grabbed me as best he could anyway, and we half landed, half fell in the pine needles.
He lay facedown on the ground. I flopped him over on his back to make sure he was alive. If he had a concussion, we’d have to call the ambulance, which meant we’d get caught and he’d get sent to military school. On the bright side, maybe the military school would not take him if he had brain damage. “I’m so sorry.”
“Worth it,” he grunted. He rolled onto his feet like a ninja and grabbed my hand. “Hurry, before they release the hounds.”
We ran through the dark yard, chased by imaginary barking noises. We didn’t have far to go. He stopped in the woods halfway between my house and his and made an “after you” gesture at the ladder of his tree house.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “A family of foxes lived in it last year.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve cleaned it out a little since then.”
I climbed the ladder and peeked up into the tree house. His old sleeping bag covered the plywood floor. Pillows cushioned the plywood walls.
“Ohhh, this is so cool.” He’d gone out of his way to plan this. I climbed the rest of the way up and slid across the soft padding to make room for him. He sat beside me. The tree house was smaller than I remembered. It had seemed like a kingdom floating above the forest when we were kids. Now we could stretch out, but just barely.
He leaned behind me and flicked his lighter. A candle sputtered to life. The soft light kissed his intense face, sparkled in his beard, smoothed the worried lines between his brows.
“We’re going to catch the tree house on fire,” I warned him. “And the forest, your house, the marina, the whole neighborhood. My dad will be so pissed.”
“It’s in a container.” He showed me the candle in a jar. “And it’s on a metal pie plate. Check me out. I think ahead.”
“You do!” I really was impressed, because padded tree houses and candles in jars were not like Adam at all.
I sat back against the pillows and watched him. He put his hands behind his head and relaxed against the pillows too. We sat a little apart from each other, but our legs made an angle and our feet met in the middle. I stroked his broad, tanned foot with my pinky toe. He didn’t shy away, but he didn’t make a move on me either.
He took a deep breath and let out a slow sigh. “It’s been a long time since I’ve sat outside at night,” he said. “Well, it seems like a long time. I guess it was only three weeks ago, on your birthday, in my Secret Make-Out Hideout.”
“That fateful night,” I said ruefully.
“I forgot how loud it is out here,” he said.
We listened for a long time, and I stroked his foot with my toe.
“And how many layers,” I finally said. “A low hum on the bottom, then a medium, then a high hum. That’s the background. Then there’s the croaking, like a chanting, and every few seconds a chirp.” I moved my toe to the underside of his foot, where he was ticklish.
Now he jerked away, but he still didn’t take the hint and scoot in my direction.
I reached over and slid my hand underneath his shirt.
The hard muscles of his stomach jumped at my touch. I almost laughed—not because it was funny, but because I was so overwhelmed with surprise that I could make his body react like that.
“If you could draw this sound,” I said, “it would look like the surface of the lake when you dribble water into it. A circle around a drop.” I put my fingers together on his skin, then expanded them outward, trailing my fingertips. “Another circle.” I moved my fingers and expanded them out. “Another circle.” I moved my fingers. “And lines between them, as you move the water drops from one place to another on the surface.” I dragged my finger up his stomach to his chest.
He gasped.
I did laugh out loud this time. “Sorry.”
He put his hand on top of my hand, with only his T-shirt between them. “Don’t be sorry.” Then he slid his hand across his chest, onto my shirt, and ventured underneath. He did this very cautiously, probably waiting for me to hit him. I did not.
“I hear what you mean about the circles.” He drew expanding circles with his fingertips in different places on my tummy, just as I’d done to him. “And the lines. But to me, it wouldn’t look like the surface of the lake. It would look like fireworks.” He dragged one finger from the waistband of my shorts upward, dipping into my belly button and out again. A bottle rocket shooting off.
My whole body was going up in flames as I watched him in the candlelight. Any second he would lean forward to kiss me, and it would be a doozy.
Instead he asked, “Do you remember this?” Sitting up again, he reached behind a pillow and pulled out a weathered wooden sign that had hung over the ladder years ago. The letters we’d scratched with a pocketknife were still visible.
“Oh my God.” I laughed. “KEEP OUT JERKS. You remember that day?”
“Of course I remember,” he said. “Sean told us that we couldn’t play, and McGillicuddy and Cameron sided with him—”
“I hated when they ganged up on us,” I mused.
“—and usually we did what they said and hung around them like abused dogs. This time we said to hell with them and came here. We made this sign and nailed it to the tree.”
“And then we waited for them to notice we were gone and come looking for us,” I said. “They would see that we were the cool ones and they were the ones excluded, and they would rue the day, I tell you!” I thought for a moment. “And we ate Double Stuf Oreos out of the bag and talked, and finally we went home. They never did miss us and I doubt they rued the day, but it was a nice afternoon.” I thought again. “Do you have any Double Stuf Oreos?”
He gave me a reproving look. I wished I hadn’t said this, because now it seemed like I didn’t appreciate everything else he’d brought.
I started, “I’m just jok—”
He reached beneath a pillow and dragged out a package of Double Stuf Oreos.
Frances had never bought Double Stuf Oreos for McGillicuddy and me. One stuff was enough, she said. All we got was single-stuff whole-wheat faux Oreos from the organic grocery store. I would not swear to it, but I’d bet the stuff was made of tofu. Mrs. Vader, in contrast, did not go to such pains for her family, or perhaps she was just tired. This would have made her home a very attractive place for me to hang out even if there had been no boys. With boys and Oreos, it was heaven.
I lifted the chocolate lid and dug into the icing. “Mmmmmm,” I said. It was even better than I remembered. Mmmmmm, I put the rest of it in my mouth and shamefully, I might have forgotten Adam was sitting there, until I looked up and noticed he was watching me. “Wha?” I asked around cookie.
“You look like you are really enjoying that Oreo.”
Embarrassed, I swallowed. “I beg your pardon. I have been living on an athletic training diet of microwave pizza and Frances’s muscadine chutney from five years ago.”
“Is chutney supposed to age? Yikes.” He munched his own cookie and scooted the bag closer to me. “Have another.”
I dug into the bag and munche
d on a second cookie, happily looking around our dark, cozy nest in the flickering candlelight. “The tree house seems smaller,” I said. “You seem bigger.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“But the Double Stuf Oreos taste exactly the same.” My voice cracked from a crumb caught in my throat. I might need to bail out of the tree house and drink from the lake.
“I’m sure they have very good quality control.” Then the boy who Never Planned Ahead dug under yet another pillow to produce two bottles of water. He always brought two, I’d noticed. Either he was afraid of my cooties, or he knew I was afraid of his cooties, ever since the time years ago when Sean spit in my Coke.
“Thank you so much,” I croaked. As I sipped the cold water, I eyed him. Except for the beard, he looked relaxed and innocent, which was not like him at all. “So, what’s the occasion?”
“What do you mean?” he asked too quickly. “I wanted to see you. I’ve been dying to see you.”
“Right, but normally you would just spontaneously drag me into the woods. If you’ve engineered all this, something’s up.”
He blinked innocently at me for a few more seconds, then gave in. “Okay. It’s about the plan.”
“Your plan for us to run away to Montgomery? Let me guess. You’ve decided we can stay in the tree house and live on Double Stuf Oreos instead.” I slid my hand onto his thigh. “That’s actually not a bad idea.”
He looked at my hand. “No, it’s about your plan to change your dad’s mind about me.” He picked up my hand. “I have something important I want to ask you.” He kissed my hand. “You know, when you were out with Parker and Cameron, I got angry.”
“You brought me here and wined and dined me”—I nodded toward the Oreos—“just to tell me this? Your temper is not news.”
He put our hands under his chin and locked eyes with me. “Sean’s next, isn’t he?”
He seemed so earnest, I didn’t want to leave this question hanging in the air. I wanted to reassure him. But I didn’t want to lie to him, either. He would have seen through it, anyway. He already did. Sean was my last resort, if only I could figure out a way to use him.