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“You don’t know that.” I ran my fingers through her hair. Now it was dark blonde, but as the summer went on, it would turn lighter until the front was almost white, just like every year. “We’ll explain what happened. It was an honest mistake. Don’t cry. Not yet.” She was making me antsier than I let on, though. I pulled away from her, put the truck back in drive, and sped down the road.
“What did happen?” she asked. “Clearly we don’t find each other as exciting as we thought.” I laughed. “I remember you were biting my earlobe—”
“I remember biting your earlobe,” she said dreamily.
“—but sleep finally caught up with me.”
“Me too.” She scooted closer to me on the seat and put her head on my shoulder.
I drove with my left hand and slipped my right arm around her waist. For thirty more seconds, she was my girlfriend.
Finally I parked in her driveway. “I’ll walk you to the d—”
She slammed the passenger door and dashed through the trees to her house. One of her pink flip-flops flew into an azalea and she never slowed down. I don’t know why she was in such a hurry. Seemed to me that 6:01 a.m. was just as grounded as 6:02.
Her father was already yelling at her when he opened the door. His voice faded and the bright rectangle of light shrank as he swung the door closed behind her.
I murmured, “Happy sweet sixteen, Lori.”
I backed down her driveway, drove a few feet, and pulled into my own driveway. My mom must have heard my truck. She was waiting in our own open doorway in her bathrobe with her arms crossed.
Up until the moment I saw her, I’d planned to tiptoe into the house and hope nobody had missed me. It had worked for my brothers before. If I did encounter my parents, I would tell them the truth: Lori and I had fallen asleep, we never meant to be out until morning, and I was sorry.
But there was something about seeing my mother there, arms folded, ready for a fight, that pissed me off. Instead of standing on the porch and apologizing to her, I squeezed past her into the house like nothing was wrong. And I said, “You’re up early.”
She grabbed the back of my neck and pointed me toward the kitchen. “Sssssssit. Down.”
I huffed out a sigh and walked into the kitchen. It was a little early for everyone to be up and getting ready to go to work at the marina down the hill. My dad sat at the table, drinking coffee. He didn’t share Mom’s frazzled appearance, though. I doubt he’d lost much sleep over my status as a missing person. My oldest brother, Cameron, must have been asleep too—he never got up until the very last second—but my other brother, Sean, lounged at the head of the table, smirking at me. I gathered he was still mad at me for nearly breaking his nose when he jumped on me a few nights ago. The swelling had gone down and it seemed to be healing nicely, so I didn’t know what his problem was.
“Sit down,” Mom repeated.
I pulled out a chair and sat. I wanted some of that coffee first, but something told me I should not ask for this right now.
Mom sat directly across from me, where she could vaporize my brain with her stare. “Where were you?”
The fact that I was only two minutes away from home and could see the house the entire time I was gone might have helped me. But I had planned a whole summer of taking Lori back to that spot. I didn’t want to give it away. Sean and Cameron would be lying in wait for us next time, armed with camera phones and cans of whipped cream. I said, “We fell asleep.”
Sean snorted into his coffee.
Mom silenced him with her stare. Then she turned it back on me. “Trevor McGillicuddy called me and woke me up in the middle of the night. Imagine how embarrassed I was that my son had his daughter out at all hours, after he has been so good to us. He did some fancy legal footwork to get Cameron out of that speeding ticket.”
“And his second speeding ticket,” I said.
“And his second speeding ticket,” she acknowledged.
“And he got Sean out of his speeding ticket.” I took the opportunity to remind her how horrible her other sons were. Since I’d been driving for only three weeks, I was still golden, at least in that area.
Sean mimicked me in a bratty tone. “And he got Sean out of his speeding ticket.”
“That is not the point!” Mom yelled. “You expect me to call Lori’s father and tell him you had Lori out until six a.m. because you fell asleep?”
“Well, we did.” That’s all I said, though I wanted to tell her we’d gambled away the night and my granddad’s life savings at the Indian casino in Wetumpka. She was acting like we’d done something that awful.
Judging from the look on her face, you’d think I’d gone ahead and said this. Sean didn’t help by prompting me, “Why’d you fall asleep? What were you doing before that?”
Mom watched me expectantly, as if she wanted to know the answer to that question too, and as if my older brother had just as much right as my parents to interrogate me.
“Nothing,” I said.
Sean laughed.
“Nothing?” Mom yelled.
No, not nothing. The highlight of the night, at least for me, had been when Lori wrestled me down on the seat of the truck, straddled me, held my wrists above my head, and kissed my neck. She’d pretended she’d overpowered me. I could have easily pushed her off me, but I didn’t. It was very sexy. I could still feel her lips on my neck.
God, that had felt good.
“Adam!”
I jumped when Mom hollered at me again. My hand was pressed to my neck where Lori’s lips had been. I put my hand down. “Maybe not nothing, but not what you smutty-minded people are thinking.”
“You just stayed out all night with the girl you’ve had a crush on since you were four,” Mom said, “and nothing happened? What do you take me for, Adam?” I wondered how my mom knew I’d had a crush on Lori for so long. That was creepy. But what I yelled back was, “What do you take me for? What do you think I did to her? You think I’m stupid?”
“No!” Sean gasped.
Normally Mom would have rushed to my defense over that sarcasm from Sean. Of all the things Sean and Cameron picked on me about, my ADHD and my tendency to flunk school because of it was the one topic that was off-limits, at least while Mom was around.
This time she said, “I’m beginning to wonder. Lori’s father wants to ban you and Lori from seeing each other for the rest of your lives.” I said, “He can try.”
“Adam, your father and I want to help you, but we can’t if you don’t help yourself. You’re not doing yourself any favors with that attitude.”
“What attitude? I don’t think I’m being helped right now.”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” Mom snapped. “I was worried sick last night. Your father was worried sick.” Dad shrugged.
“Trevor was worried sick about his only daughter staying out all night on her sixteenth birthday,” Mom shrieked, “and you don’t even take it seriously.”
“It’s hard to take seriously when I’m in trouble for something I didn’t even do,” I shouted back.
“Son,” my dad said.
“What!”
He stared at me for a few long seconds, letting me know I’d crossed the line, before he answered. “Shut up and listen to your mother.”
“Lori’s father will calm down,” Mom said. “He always does. When that happens, your father and I will talk to him about letting you see Lori again. But in the meantime, you must exercise some restraint. Stay away from her, just as he wants, or we won’t be able to put in a good word for you.”
“Okay. I’m about to work with her for eight hours at the marina, but I’ll take a blindfold.”
“You will work on opposite ends of the marina until further notice,” Mom said. “You may not go out with her. You may not date her. You may not be her boyfriend.
Clear enough?”
Damn. Lori was right. Only it was worse than her being grounded from going out. I was grounded from her.
I stared at Mom, the embodiment of evil sitting across from me in a red bathrobe. Sean had told me since we were kids that I was adopted. He and I looked a lot alike, unfortunately, so I’d assumed he told me that just to be mean. Now I knew he’d told me the truth. A real mom couldn’t be that cruel.
“You can’t do that,” I breathed. “No.”
“I can,” she said, “and I am. Lori’s father informed me at about three thirty this morning that if we found the two of you alive, you would not date each other again. I have to agree with him until you show us more maturity.”
I turned to my only chance left. “Dad,” I pleaded, “this is so [cuss word you never, ever say in front of your mother] ridiculous.” Mom gaped at me. So did Sean. The difference was that Sean was half smiling, and Mom looked like she might climb over the table in her bathrobe and stab me with the butter knife.
Even Dad shook his head and said, “Consider yourself lucky. Lori’s pop wants you to go to jail.”
“But for now,” Mom seethed, “go to your room.”
Like I was five! Punished for this made-up adult behavior like I was in kindergarten. “No,” I said. “I have to get ready for work, and I’m hungry.”
“Go to your room!” Mom and Dad yelled at the same time.
Just as well. I was beginning to feel sick to my stomach. I scraped my chair back from the table as loudly as I could, stepped over Sean’s leg, which he’d positioned to trip me, and stomped through the den to the stairs.
As I rounded the corner, I almost collided with Cameron crouching on the bottom step. His eyes widened at me. I’d caught him listening.
He recovered and said, without missing a beat, “I thought you were going to pull it off until you said [cuss word you never, ever say in front of your mother].”
“Thanks for your support,” I grumbled. “You left me there to bleed out.”
He held up his hands. “I don’t have a dog in this fight.”
I elbowed him as I passed him on the stairs. “If you were in this shit, I would have helped you.”
“How?” he called after me. “By setting the curtains on fire to create a diversion?”
At least Sean couldn’t follow me. He and Cameron shared a room when Cameron was home from college. I’d had my own room since I was five and Sean wrote on my face with permanent marker while I was asleep. I reached the top of the stairs, stalked into my room, and slammed the door hard enough to bounce every football trophy on my shelves.
I leaped across the room to catch last year’s tenth grade player-of-the-year trophy, presented to me at a ceremony that Sean had laughed all the way through. I carefully set it back on the shelf. But I was thinking that Sean and Cameron had a point. I was a loser. If Cameron had stayed out until morning with his brand-new girlfriend-who-was-like-a-daughter-to-Mom, Mom would have thought that was fine. Her firstborn could do no wrong. And if Sean had done it, he could have talked his way out of it.
Whereas I’d dug my own grave. I couldn’t do anything right.
I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed the button for Lori’s house. Her dad might answer, but that was okay. We couldn’t get in any worse trouble.
One ring. We should have run away after all. Two rings. I’d saved a couple thousand dollars of my money from working at the marina over the years. I had known it would come in handy someday. I’d always suspected I’d end up on the run from the law sooner or later, since I was forever getting blamed for things I didn’t do. Three rings. The money would tide us over until we both got jobs at a marina in a different town. Of course, we would need references from our previous employer. I doubted Mom would cooperate.
“Hello,” Lori answered. She was hoarse.
“Lori.”
“Adam,” she whispered. “I can’t talk long or my dad will catch me. He is insane. He thinks we spent the night in some kinky love grotto. It’s so unfair. He has no idea what dorks we are.”
“My parents are the same.” In defeat, I flopped backward onto my bed. The bed Lori should have visited sooner or later. But considering the last half hour, that would never happen. “Now you can cry.”
3
After a shower, I took extra time to dry my hair. Despite the fact that Adam and I had gotten each other in so much trouble—or maybe because of it—I wanted to make sure I looked as pretty for him as I had last night with my Ominously Good Hair.
Of course, this was ridiculous. All my efforts would be for naught. If Mrs. Vader stuck me in the warehouse, my blonde crowning glory would be full of boat grease and spiders by nine a.m. Also, I didn’t want to be late for work. Not this morning.
I did, however, want my dad to embark on his Sunday morning routine of going back to bed before I got downstairs. I had never seen him as angry as he was when I came home an hour ago, and I did not want a recap.
No such luck. When I popped into the kitchen, my dad and my brother leaned against the counter with their arms folded. Dad still looked red, but at least he wasn’t yelling anymore. I stepped through the doorway just in time to hear him say, “You take care of your sister today.” McGillicuddy gave my dad a two-finger salute. “Ayeaye, cap’n.”
Dad turned to me. “And you.” Every morning that I’d gone to play with the boys when we were little, or I’d gone to work at the marina this summer and last, he’d told me, Watch out around those boys next door. This time he couldn’t muster the words. Focusing on me, he opened his mouth, breathed in, breathed out.
