Endless Summer

“Why didn’t you tell your dad we’re hooking up?” Adam asked. “I told my mom we’re hooking up.” He sounded almost hurt, like he thought I was embarrassed of him.

“Would you come off it? You shouldn’t have told your mom. She gave me the third degree this morning, like she knows something’s up between you and Sean. You tried to get her to ground him? How am I supposed to go out with him if she grounds him?”

Adam shrugged and said with a straight face, “If you really loved him, it wouldn’t matter what you did when you went out, as long as you were together.” He pressed his lips together.

“You are so full of it. Anyway, I told Dad you were giving me a lift to town to buy an eyelash comb tonight, and we might hang out for a while. I figured he’d stage an intervention if I told him the whole truth. And if I told him you and I were hooking up for real, he’d give me the fourth degree about it, and you, and sex, and… oh.” Adam nodded. “Whereas if you didn’t tell him, he’d give me the fifth degree.”

“I guess I didn’t think it through. It didn’t seem worth the trouble, since we’ll only be together a couple of weeks.” Truth was, I’d focused on how our diabolical plan would help me get Sean. With an emphasis on Sean. Not that Adam’s relationship with my dad didn’t matter, because they did have to live next door to each other for several more years, but come on. What were a few fake dates between friends?

We walked up the hill to Adam’s driveway. I opened the passenger door of the pink truck and climbed inside—and I do mean climbed, because when I stood on the ground, the seat was even with my head. Adam sat in the driver’s seat, weirdly. He’d driven McGillicuddy and me home from te

Sean’s new truck had already left the driveway. He had to drive all the way across town to pick up Rachel. No worries. We’d see them at the movies. Our biggest problem would be deciding whether to sit on the back row with the other couples who pla

Instead of parking in the dirt track lot, he drove around to the mud field. It was just a huge pit of mud that the owners of the dirt track lovingly sculpted into valleys and bumps, and watered daily. Build it and they would come. Boys loved to splash across the mud pit in their pickup trucks. ey didn’t do this with their girlfriends, though.

Girls wouldn’t put up with this.

And yet here we were, perched on the lip of the pit. Scooter Ledbetter pulled up behind us in his jacked-up F-150. We couldn’t even back out.

I ventured to ask, “Is this our date?”

“In all its glory.” With one arm, Adam made a sweeping motion across the mud field before us.

“Great. We’re trying to make Sean and Rachel jealous, besides which it’s my first date in real life, and you’re taking me mud riding.” I’d been with the boys and Mr.

Vader to the dirt track countless times to watch races. I’d always thought my first date would be with Sean. Adam wasn’t too far off. But I’d never imagined my first date would be with Sean’s stand-in at the dirt track. “You’re bringing sexy back.”

He stuck out his bottom lip. “Where did you want to go?”

“Didn’t Sean and Rachel go to the movies?”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet she made him take her to the new Disney cartoon. at’s his punishment for stealing her from me. at and MTV. Endless reality shows on MTV.” He cracked his knuckles.

“Adam, I don’t care if it’s Mickey and Mi

“We want to make them jealous,” he agreed, “but we can’t follow them around. We don’t want to admit we’re trying to make them jealous. And that’s exactly what we’ll be doing if we set foot in Mickey and Mi

I started to protest. But as I thought about it, I remembered every time I’d watched a DVD with the boys, Adam had left the room after thirty minutes, asking Cameron to call him back in for the juicy parts. And we were always telling Adam to be quiet. We couldn’t hear the movie over his CD player, or his drum set, or the roar of the blender as he made milkshakes in the kitchen. I asked, “You can’t sit through a whole movie, can you?” He frowned, which made cute little lines appear between his brows. He fished the lighter out of his pocket and flicked it, studying the flame.

Either he couldn’t sit through a whole movie, or it hurt him too much to be around Rachel while she was with Sean. is wouldn’t help us make them jealous. But it was only the second night after the freaking shock of seeing Sean and Rachel together for the first time. Adam’s heart must be breaking every time we talked about Sean and Rachel, yet he’d come with me this far. I could be more understanding and give him a few days for the wound to scab over.

“We don’t have to go to the movie,” I sighed, “but we need to go somewhere girls will see us. ere’s no one here but boys. It’ll never get back to Sean and Rachel that we were together. Boys don’t gossip.”

“Pah! You don’t know us as well as you think.”

This was a disturbing prospect.

He stuffed his lighter back in his pocket. “Here’s an idea. Call me crazy, but what if we actually enjoyed hooking up?”

“Whoa, Nelly,” I said. “You scare me, thinking out of the box.”

“What if we made hooking up productive?”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Producing envy, with or without big fat teardrops.”

“Forget about that, Lori. It’ll come without us trying so hard.” He took the box of fishhooks out of his pocket and rattled it. “You’re turning sixteen in less than two weeks.”

That was a low blow. “You don’t have to rub it in that I forgot your birthday,” I protested. “You remember mine because yours is first.”

“And didn’t your dad stop taking you for driving lessons after you ran his Beamer into the woodpile?”

“Only because he told me to back to the left, and I thought I did. I would have done fine if he’d pointed instead of telling me the direction. Again, you don’t have to rub it—”

“I’ll teach you to drive.”

I blinked. He was a daredevil. “Around town?”

“No, right here. It’s safer.”

I pondered the mud field. “I might wreck the pink truck.”

“Who could tell?”

“I might hit somebody else.”

“If they’re here, mud riding, they’d probably get off on it.”

As if in agreement, Scooter Ledbetter chose this moment to start honking his horn in time to his stereo blasting Nine Inch Nails.

“Oh, what the hell,” I said, spitting my petrified gum out the window. It had turned more of a metamorphic flavor anyway. I scooted into the driver’s seat as Adam crawled over me. Nose close to his shirt, I caught a whiff of his cologne.

And then, too soon, he was on his side of the truck and I was on mine. “Is it in first gear?” he asked. “Are your feet on the brake and the clutch? Look both ways and make sure no traffic is coming before proceeding carefully into the mud hole.”

I screamed like a girl as the edge of the pit fell away under us. en I bit my scream off short as we bounced over a little hill and then a big hill that sent us flying. Now I was giggling.

Adam gri