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“Of course,” Rachel and Tammy said.
“So I do not want you to look around, see us missing, and sound the alarm that we have been eaten by bryozoa.”
“Bryozoa eats plankton and microscopic stuff in the water,” Rachel pointed out.
“Clearly you did not watch the same space-alien movies I watched growing up.” Lori pointed at Tammy. “And as for you, missy?”
“Yes?” Tammy asked drily. It sounded like she was almost as used to Lori’s plans as I was.
“I can’t trust my brother to keep his mouth shut about this,” Lori said. “We have to make sure he doesn’t see me.”
“I have an idea,” Tammy said in the halting speech and overenthusiastic delivery of someone reading from a cue card. “Why don’t I entice your brother into a dark corner and make out with him to distract him?”
“That is a great idea,” Lori said in the same tone.
Tammy stood and dashed up the dock toward the house. At least some people didn’t have to be dragged into helping Lori with her plans.
“That leaves me with Sean,” Rachel said doubtfully, but I could tell she was trying not to smile.
“And Cameron!” Lori reminded her. “Knock yourself out. Or… I guess you want to get rid of them. I know exactly how to make them forget you exist, if they haven’t already with the Braves game on. Give them a bowl of Fritos and some dip. Always works for me.”
“Wow, it’s that easy? Thanks, Lori.” Rachel got up and walked toward the house more slowly than Tammy had, watching the windows, undoubtedly hoping Sean would appear, looking for her. No such luck. I knew she held out hope Sean would throw her a bone, and I knew he wouldn’t. I knew exactly how she felt.
“Race ya,” Lori said. Before I could respond, she was gone. She splashed into the water and crawled at a good clip toward the tiny island three hundred yards from the dock.
I dove in after her, caught up with her in a few strokes, passed her, turned over, and did the backstroke right in front of her, kicking up big splashes in her face just to piss her off. I righted myself, treading water, looking for her.
She wasn’t there.
“Sucker!” came from a long way off. I saw her wet blonde head halfway to the island already. She must have passed me by swimming underwater. Now she sank under the surface again.
I swam as fast as I could after her. As I moved nearer to the island, I saw what a genius Lori was and how brilliant a choice the island was for a place to slip away from McGillicuddy. It was possibly even more masterful than my secret make-out hideout. Rachel’s grandparents’ house was at the end of their neighborhood. Beyond it, the shore stretched around endless bends of red mud cliffs and pine trees, with not a soul in sight. The island sat in front of those cliffs, at the edge of the busy river channel, but a DANGER sign indicating shallow water was stuck between the island and the bank, so boats wouldn’t dare float through here. It was private. It was perfect.
I touched bottom and walked through the sand, stirring up bits of mica that glittered like stars in the water. Looking back toward Rachel’s grandparents’ house and their pier, I watched both disappear behind the trees on the island. Now Lori and I couldn’t be seen unless somebody came looking for us.
Lori sat on the sandy, glittery beach of the island, directly in front of the DANGER sign, waiting for me. I waded toward her.
“Why have you been ignoring me all week?” she called. Her voice sounded annoyed. However, she sat leaning on one hand with her long legs folded gracefully, the warm lake lapping at them. With a small wardrobe malfunction of her pink bikini, she could have been a model in one of the issues of Playboy she used to steal from McGillicuddy to study what kind of girl Sean was into, so she could be more like her. In fact, I thought at first that she was teasing me by pretending to be that girl. But as I waded closer, I realized she really was annoyed, and she was seducing me by accident. Hell, I would have been turned on no matter how she sat.
“I haven’t been ignoring you,” I said. “I’ve been obeying my parents.”
“There’s a first time for everything, I guess.” She squinted at me and put up one hand to shield her eyes. A shadow covered half her face. The sun was peeking around my back and blinding her.
I held my ground, squishing my toes in the glittering sand, and made small movements back and forth, just to bug her. The sun was hidden by my body. Then it hit her full force in the eyes. Then it went into hiding again.
She closed one eye. “I don’t buy it. You’ve been avoiding me. You’re still punishing me for going out with Parker. And that doesn’t make any sense to me, because I sent McGillicuddy over to tell you the Parker thing did not work with my dad at all. McGillicuddy came back and said you just shrugged!” I shrugged again. “How could you and I have talked about it without somebody seeing us?”
“You managed our trip into the woods okay.”
“And we got busted.” Since her eyes were watering, I figured she’d had enough of my game with the sun. I sank down in the water in front of her and leaned back on my hands in the sand.
“I guess I’ve been expecting more out of Mr. Daredevil, Mr. Devil-May-Care.” She sat up straight and looked me dead in the eye. “I’m so glad you finally called Rachel and arranged this excuse for us to see each other today.”
She knew there was more to this, and she expected me to sing. Who did she think she was dealing with here, Cameron? I hoped I played this cool, but I did look away. I wanted to keep her on her toes, wondering if there was something going on between Rachel and me, so she’d be a little bit jealous. But she was my friend, and I felt guilty.
After eyeing me silently for a few more seconds, she finished, “Otherwise, I might not have been able to tell you what I did for you until it was too late for you to take advantage.”
“Take advantage?” I looked pointedly at her cleavage. “What you did for me? It must involve underwear.” As fast as one of my brothers, she shoved me. I lost my balance and fell backward into deeper water. She jumped on top of me and dunked me. Yes, I got dunked by a girl, but only because we had trained her well, and she had surprise on her side.
As soon as I realized what had happened, I grabbed her arms above me in the water and lifted her whole body onto my shoulders. She bit off a squeal—remembering at the last moment someone back at the house might hear her. I heaved her as far as I could from the island. By the time she swam all the way back again, water spilling from her long hair, I was sitting exactly where she’d been sitting on the beach before. I was king of this mountain.
She walked up the beach until she stood directly over me. The water from her hair streamed into my eyes. “You are going to be so sorry when you find out what I did for you.”
“I doubt it.” I laughed. “It felt pretty good to throw you.”
“Parker knew all along that my dad saw through him, but he failed to inform me of this. So I got some payback.” I wiped the water out of my eyes and moved a few feet to one side, out of range of her dripping body. “I definitely do not want to hear about your payback with Parker.”
“Yes, you do.” She followed me, stood over me again, and wrung out her hair on my head. “You know, his grandparents’ yacht club puts on the Fourth of July fireworks display.”
Now I had an inkling of what she was getting at. I couldn’t help smiling as I put both hands over my head to shield myself from the water. “And?”
“And you’re going to help.”
The splashing had stopped. I looked cautiously up at her. “I am?”
She was standing where I’d stood before. With the sun brushing the tops of the trees onshore directly behind her, I could see her only in silhouette, but I could tell by the movement of her hair that she nodded.
An explosion went off in my heart, followed by a few smaller percussions like a Roman candle. Lori was driving me batty with her plans, but it wasn’t every girl who would go out of her way to get you what you wanted most in the world, besides her. Especially when it involved explosives. I breathed, “I love fireworks.”
“I know!” She jumped up and down with excitement, and the silhouette of her hair bounced in long wet clumps. “But I understand you didn’t want to hear this, and then you threw me into the deep water for no good reason, which hurt my feelings, so I’ll call Parker and tell him no thanks.” I reached for the center of her silhouette to grab her wrist. Instead I grabbed cloth, which gave as I tugged on it. The waistband of her bikini.
“Hey.” She sounded a lot less outraged than she should have. I was the one embarrassed.
“I can’t see you.” I rose on my knees until my head was out of the sunlight and I could see her grinning down at me. Then I grabbed her wrist and pulled her down on top of me.
“Which is really sad,” she grunted as she fell, “because Parker was excited by the idea. He’s afraid of fireworks. The yacht club hires a professional company to put on the show, but Parker’s grandparents make him help every year. It’s almost enough to make him give up his annual summer trip down from Birmingham.” With one hand I made a ponytail out of her wet hair and directed her lips toward mine. I kissed her.
“Mmph.” She struggled to move her lips away from mine. “It would have been perfect if you’d done Parker the favor of taking that chore off his hands. Oh well.” While she was talking, talking, talking, I wrestled her down onto the beach and put some of my weight on top of her so she would shut up, and I kissed her again.
This time it worked. I heard her sigh through her nose. I felt her relax under me. Not many girls would engineer a chance for me to set off explosives, and not many girls would enjoy kissing me on this beach. I thought it was nice, but I’d kissed enough girls to predict what they’d be complaining about at this point. The sand was somewhat muddy. Bugs buzzed in the forest surrounding us and might come out to get us at any second. Boats groaned in the river on the other side of the island. They could come roaring around the side of the island without warning and wreck on the DANGER sign. Even Rachel, who put up with a lot, tended to be jumpy about these sorts of things.
Only Lori viewed them like I did, as part of every summer afternoon. She opened her mouth for mine and traced her short fingernails down my back. This made me shudder, like it always did. I wanted to be strong and unaffected every time we touched each other, but the truth was, Lori could do things to me. The only way to keep the upper hand was to do things back to her. I kissed her until she forgot about tracing her fingernails on my back. I worked my way up to her ear. Her arms went limp in the sand.
A motorboat came closer and closer. The sound stayed on the other side of the island. We lay still together, listening to it reach the peak of its volume, then fade as it went on its way downriver. But the spell was broken. I thought we had a few minutes until McGillicuddy would notice we were gone, but not so many that we could risk getting into it again and losing track of time, which we clearly had a problem with.
She looked up at me—not into my eyes, but at my chin—and seemed fascinated with rubbing her thumb on my stubble. “It makes a crispy noise,” she said.
“Admit you like it.”
“It hurts.” She rubbed her own red cheek. Luckily we’d come over here in the boats, and if her dad asked her about it, she could claim windburn. She pushed my chest, and I let her sit up. Then she looked out across the water toward where the dock and the house would be if we could see through the island, but she put one hand on my thigh. On the inside of my thigh, slowly moving up. This told me she was thinking the same thing I was thinking: We probably should be wrapping this up, but we weren’t done with each other.
We should skinny-dip. That’s what would happen if this were a movie. But I’d never actually known anyone who’d skinny-dipped, or admitted to it. I probably would have done it with my brothers at some point in our lives, except Lori was always around.
That was exactly my problem now. I would have given anything to see her na**d, but that would mean she’d see me na**d, too. I might have been the impulsive one in my family, but even I had my limits.
“Want to get na**d?” she asked.
“No,” I said instantly. After I’d thought for a second, I realized my first answer was the right answer for once. No, I did not.
“Me neither,” she said.
I sighed with relief, then tried to turn it into some kind of offended gasp. “Why’d you ask, then?”
“You seem hell-bent on putting the last nail in the coffin,” she said. “Nothing would get us in more trouble than being caught na**d.”
“We wouldn’t get caught.”
“How can you say that?” She threw her wet arms wide in exasperation. Drops of water followed her fingertips, glinting in the sun. “We get caught every time we’re together.”
I clamped my hand over her mouth and whispered, “That’s because you’re yelling.”
She pulled my hand away and cupped it in both of hers. She studied it, squeezed it, ran her fingers up and down my fingers. Then she looked at me and said, “I’ve missed you.”
I let my head sink until my lips touched her hands, but my eyes never left her green eyes. Love hurt. Honesty made it hurt worse, and I could hardly stand it.
I scooted away from her in the sand and gazed at a few white clouds, purple on their undersides in the late afternoon, in the brilliant blue sky. “This is only happening because of twenty-first-century society,” I said. “Two hundred years ago, your dad would be glad to hand you over to me.”
