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“Yes. I’m not wrong about your curfew, Lori. I’m not wrong about keeping you safe.” He reached forward to pat my arm. “But I may have flown off the handle about restricting your movements. Frances keeps telling me that it only backfires. I think that’s what we’ve seen in the past few weeks. You may date Adam again, and I’ve put in a good word with his parents. I doubt they’ll send him away to school.”
‘Thank you!” I screamed, throwing myself on top of my dad. “Thank you so much,” I gushed. “I’m so glad. Adam is great. You just have to see past… a lot. Thank you, Dad.” I eased off him because he seemed to be having trouble breathing, like I was crushing him or perhaps kneeing him in the ribs. “Thank you.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “Have fun at the party tonight.”
“I will. Thank you so much!”
I banged into the house and ran upstairs to get ready for the party, which would start in less than an hour. In my bathroom I laid out some things I needed for the party and was liable to forget if I got too excited: mascara, eyelash comb, earrings, and my mother’s diamond-and-pearl ring, which I’d only been wearing since my birthday. It still felt funny on my finger.
It wasn’t until I stepped into the shower that I thought through what my dad had said, and started to have doubts. My dad thought it was commendable that I’d made out with Sean in order to save Adam from military school? That would only happen if the world were run by reality-show producers. I wanted to have another conversation with my dad about this. However, I wasn’t sure how I could phrase the question. Hey, Dad, what exactly were you commending me for just now when I acted like I knew what the hell you were talking about? And I was afraid whatever I’d done for Adam would be reversed just because I asked.
Oh well. I was sure the mystery would be solved soon enough. Right now I would slip on the miniskirt Adam seemed so fond of and run to his house to celebrate with him.
At school my friends were always telling me how lucky I was to live next door to the Vader boys and go to their famous parties in the summer. I’d told my friends the parties were no big deal to me. I didn’t elaborate on why: I felt awkward going to them. I knew I was wearing the wrong thing but I had no idea how to fix it. I wanted Sean to like me and he was in a dark corner, manhandling some other girl.
Since I’d been with Adam, of course my opinion of the parties had changed. A party had gotten Sean and Rachel together, which had opened the door for Adam and me.
A party had hosted my first make-out session with Adam. The last party had been awful—Adam and I got in a huge fight, he punched Sean, and their dad discovered the tiny beer stash and took away party privileges for two weeks.
This party would be perfect. As I walked through the trees toward Adam’s house, big and rambling in the orange light of sunset, I could feel the electricity in the air, even though no other guests had arrived yet. Except for the Vaders’ cars and trucks, there were no vehicles in the driveway. Even Adam’s pink truck was gone.
Maybe Mrs. Vader had sent Adam to town to get more food for the party. But on the off chance that someone had borrowed his truck, I entered their house without knocking. I was Adam’s Girlfriend and that was my right.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Vader placed appetizers carefully on plates on the bar, and Sean quickly ate them. Without letting Mrs. Vader put down what she had in her hand, and therefore risking a grease spot on my Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Top, I grabbed her and hugged her. “Thank you so much! Is Adam upstairs? Can I see him? Is he gone?
Should I wait here for him? Everything is on the up-and-up. I can sit here and wait for him and not even hide it from you! Such luxury!” Mrs. Vader chuckled as she extracted herself from me. “Adam just left.”
“Where’d he go?”
“He didn’t say, but…” She pointed a chicken wing at me. “Adam thinks that you two are in an argument.” My body zinged into alert mode. My mind didn’t know what Mrs. Vader meant, but my body already did. Even Sean glanced over at her with a cautious look.
“He does?” I asked faintly.
“A bad one,” she confirmed.
“How could we be in a bad argument without me even knowing about it?”
Sean laughed nervously.
“All I know is, your dad called me to say I should reconsider sending Adam away to school,” Mrs. Vader said. “Then Adam came back from talking to your dad. I told him that we weren’t sending him away, and I thought he should have been happy, but he was very angry with you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t sending him away to school?” Sean asked.
“Well, Sean, I wasn’t sure you’d care.” Mrs. Vader’s gaze switched from Sean to me and back to Sean again. She must have heard what I’d tried to tell her about Adam and Sean over all that tapping on her keyboard.
Sean gaped at her. I didn’t care. They could work out their important family issues later. I had teen intrigue to manage. What I wanted to know was, “Why did Adam talk to my dad?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what was said, but they had a man-to-man talk about Adam’s behavior, which is what changed your dad’s mind about him.” Now what my dad had said to me made sense. He hadn’t commended me for making out with Sean in order to get Adam out of trouble. He assumed I’d sent Adam over for this man-to-man talk. He thought I’d dealt with my problems and Adam’s in a responsible, adult manner, when nothing could have been further from the truth.
Something else made sense too. I knew why Adam was mad at me. I put my hand over my mouth. “Sean,” I said through my fingers. “Sean, Adam saw us.” Mrs. Vader threw the chicken wing down on a pan and put her hands on her hips, glaring at me. “He saw you doing what?”
“Does it really matter, as long as it’s before her curfew?” Sean said this in a snide tone, but I could hear the vibration underneath.
Mrs. Vader shook her head as she picked up a sponge and wiped the counter. “Lori, you need to watch out around these boys.” I was still miffed at her for implying I didn’t have a mind of my own. “Maybe they need to watch out around me.” I had thought this for a while, but I never said it out loud.
When I saw the look on Mrs. Vader’s face, I wished I could take it back. “Maybe they do!” Her voice was shrill.
The doorbell rang, saving me from the possibility of the Vader matriarch throwing fried food at me. Sean clapped his hands together and said in the tone of a 1950s housewife, “There are our guests! Am-scray, om-May.” He left to get the door.
With a last withering look at me, Mrs. Vader disappeared up the stairs. She passed Cameron bounding down. “Party time!” he called to no one in particular. Then he saw me. “What in the world is up with you now?”
I swallowed. “I do hope you are referring to my glamorous updo and not some bombshell you are about to drop on me about Adam.” Cameron shrugged. “Just that he went to pick up Rachel.”
I nodded manically. “But not for a date, right? Just as friends, right?” I chose a pizza roll from the spread and popped it into my mouth with a shaking hand.
Mmmmmm, cheese.
“I thought it was a date,” Cameron informed me. “He was dressed like Sean. He shaved off his beard.” I put one hand over my heart, which was pounding in protest. “Don’t you think he was just trying to make me jealous?”
“I asked him about that. He said no, he really asked out Rachel. He said you’re obviously done with him.” Cameron angled his head in the direction Sean had gone.
“Now he’s done with you. He said it was a relief because you’re more trouble than you’re worth. Which…”
“Made sense?” I shrieked.
Cameron spread his hands: If you say so. He walked into the living room and high-fived some of his friends.
Sean came back into the kitchen, leading five or six people who snagged hors d’oeuvres, jumped over the couch into the living room, and turned the stereo to full volume. I stepped up to Sean and grabbed him by the neatly ironed front of his shirt. “Adam saw us!” I shouted over the music. “He went to get Rachel! Cameron says he shaved for her and it’s a real date. Please tell me you think Adam’s only trying to make me jealous!” Sean lost his natural smirk and looked concerned for once. “Sounds like they’re really together.”
“I don’t think so.” I couldn’t think so. The possibility was too awful. I released Sean’s shirt and smoothed it. “Adam just saw us kissing and got angry. He was always opposed to the plan. He specifically told me not to go forward with the plan. But he’ll be over it tomorrow.” I thought about how long Adam held grudges against me lately. “Or next week.”
Sean shook his head. “They’re really together. And I was going to talk to her!” His usual debonair grin was gone. He looked so morose that I lost all confidence I could explain my way out of my predicament with Adam.
I patted Sean on the back and said with more assurance than I felt, “We’ll sit in the front window and watch for them. The instant they arrive at the party, we’ll see them and we’ll talk to them just like you planned. They’ll listen to reason.”
Three hours later, Sean and I still shared the window seat that looked out over the Vaders’ front yard. This gave us a view of anyone coming or going from the driveway and the front door. But we were afraid of giving Adam and Rachel the impression we were together, so we sat side by side on the cushions, awkwardly, and without touching, looking through the glass like eager puppies waiting for their masters to come home.
Surely they were only riding around town before the party because they knew we were waiting for them. I’d tried to call Adam and Sean had tried to call Rachel, but they weren’t answering. Surely they were only punishing us. They would show up here sooner or later and we could fix everything.
“Why were you always so mean to Adam when we were kids?” I demanded. I wanted to comfort Sean in theory, but I was getting frustrated with the wait for Adam. It felt good to take out some aggression. “If you hadn’t been mean to Adam, he wouldn’t be so quick to lose it. For that matter, why were you always so mean to me? You never let us play with you. Or if you did, you made it seem like you were doing us this huge favor.”
“Junior,” he said gently, “you were really little. And really cute.” He tweaked my nose. “And I didn’t want to babysit. I wanted to play with Cameron and McGillicuddy.
This is hard for me to remember, but at one time I felt, like, honored to be allowed to play with them because they were older than me.” He leaned closer so I could hear him better over the booming bass line. “If hanging with the big dogs made you so miserable, why didn’t you and Adam go hang by yourselves?”
“We did, once.” I searched my memories of that summer day, the sunlight glinting off the points of waves on the lake, filtering through moving spaces between the leaves of a tall tree, threading itself into Adam’s curls as we nailed a sign to his tree house that said KEEP OUT JERKS. “Normally it didn’t occur to us that we could do that.”
“Until now,” Sean said, “when it’s too late.”
“Ha ha. Not funny.”
“I don’t think it’s funny either,” Sean said. “I think Rachel and Adam are really together.” He glanced behind me. “Speak of the devil.” In my excitement to see Adam, I whirled around and fell off the window seat. A shadow loomed overhead, blocking out the tiny bit of strobe light that made its way through the bodies dancing in the center of the room. My brother stood over us with his hands on his hips.
I reached up and slapped Sean’s leg. “I thought you meant Adam!”
Sean focused on McGillicuddy instead of me. “It’s okay.” Sean put up his hands. “I didn’t kiss her in the warehouse when she was eleven.” McGillicuddy shook his head. “Adam and Rachel just left.”
I leaped up from the floor before Sean had even made it off the seat. “We never saw them drive up! Did you tell them Sean and I aren’t together?” All our assorted brothers and close friends had been instructed to tell Adam and Rachel they were wanted for a conference at the window seat.
“Apparently they never came inside,” McGillicuddy shouted over the music. “I heard this from some people coming in from the dock. They said Adam and Rachel shot bottle rockets into the lake and left again.”
“That’s my date!” I turned to Sean and pounded on his chest with my fists. “Your girlfriend stole my date night!”
“Oh, God,” Sean breathed.
I relaxed my fists and pressed my hands on his chest, holding him steady. Then I asked McGillicuddy, “Did they ‘leave’?” I made finger quotes, which would indicate that they had put on a big show of acting like they were driving elsewhere to make out. At least, this is what the finger-quotes indicated to me. “Or did they leave?” He frowned at me. “They left.”
Tammy danced over with a big grin on her face, the kind of grin one wears when one is at a party with one’s boyfriend and one’s life is not going to hell in a handbasket.
She grabbed McGillicuddy and pulled him onto the dance floor before I could ask him whether he’d understood the whole finger-quote concept.
“Rachel and Adam are together,” Sean wailed. “I mean, really together. They’ve left without standing outside this window and mooning us”—he gestured to our view of the driveway—“or even waiting until we looked up at them. I’m telling you, Lori, Adam was dating Rachel in the first place. I stole Rachel from Adam. After less than two weeks, she broke up with me because of the way I treated Adam. They’re not kidding. They’re back together now.”
