Endless Summer

I saw us through his eyes. Me, his girlfriend, in a bikini, wearing big movie-starlet sunglasses, behind the wheel of the boat. His oldest brother, shirtless, in Ray-Bans, whispering (well, shouting, but still) in my ear.

Though Adam was twenty yards from me, I could almost see those little creases form between his brows when he frowned. When he was worried. When he was jealous.

Sure enough, he slammed the nozzle into the gas pump, tossed one last furious look over his shoulder at me, and stomped up the wooden steps.

At this point it occurred to me that, despite my best efforts, Adam might prove difficult to date.

And I was right.

“Where’s Lori?” I asked as I threw a life vest at Cameron in the wakeboarding boat. I was part of a line. Sean in the warehouse (where it was cool and he wouldn’t melt) tossed the wakeboarding equipment we needed to McGillicuddy, and McGillicuddy tossed it to me. en I tossed it from the wharf down to Cameron. Or threw it, because I was pissed.

Cameron caught the life vest just before it smacked him in the face. “Why the hell are you asking me?”

“I figured you’d know, since you were hanging all over her just now.”

“I was not,” Cameron insisted. He glanced around the wharf like he was afraid his girlfriend from college, Giselle, would overhear. I wished she would. Unfortunately, she’d gone to Europe until the middle of the summer.

McGillicuddy must have shot Cameron a dark look from behind my back. ey were best friends, but that went only so far when it came to Lori. McGillicuddy thought Cameron was too old for her. Damn straight.

Cameron dropped the life vest and held up both hands. “I did not.”

Sean’s voice echoed inside the warehouse: “Aw, Adam is in wuv, and he misses Lowi.”

A life vest hit me in the back. I turned to pick it up and saw that McGillicuddy wasn’t paying attention. His eyes lingered on Cameron a moment longer to send his warning about Lori. Then he told me, “She’s teaching Tammy and Rachel to board this afternoon, remember?” He nodded toward his house.

Over at the McGillicuddys’ dock, three sunkissed girls in bikinis—Rachel tiny, Tammy tall, and Lori the happy medium—loaded their boat with gear. Exactly what we were doing but prettier, and nobody was getting hit in the head.

“Ow!” I put one hand to the back of my head where the handle of the ski rope had dinged me and glared at Sean in the darkness of the warehouse door.

Lori had told me she was boarding with Rachel and Tammy today instead of with us. But in the face of losing her, I’d forgotten. And all day I’d looked forward to spending an hour in our boat with her, the one place where we weren’t ba

And now this. Lori had flirted with Cameron in the chaser boat, and now she wasn’t even coming wakeboarding with us, as she had almost every summer afternoon as far back as I could remember. A hot breeze lifted her laughter across the water to me. Her boat looked small. She seemed very far away.

McGillicuddy pried my fingers from the bundle of ski rope and tossed it down to Cameron. “Relax,” he told me. “There’s a deep breathing exercise for that.”

“There’s a pill for that,” Sean’s voice echoed.

Normally I wouldn’t have let the comment pass. Sean loved to jab at me because I didn’t take my medicine for ADHD. If I didn’t respond, he’d jab at me harder. When I was little enough to complain to my mom about Sean constantly ragging on me, she always told me to ignore him and he’d stop. at might have worked with a normal brother. Sean was not normal.

is time I hardly felt the sting. I watched Lori push her boat away from her dock with one long leg, toes pointed, and hop in at the last moment before she lost her balance.

e other guys must have been as interested as I was in what was going on in the other boat. Sean had dated Rachel until she broke up with him a few days ago. ere were some people in the world besides me who saw through Sean’s pretty-boy act. McGillicuddy and Tammy had gone out for the first time last night—and, judging from the fact that he was not grounded from her, I assumed their date had gone better than mine had with Lori. We managed to speed up the equipment line and launch our own boat a few seconds later.

And when I neglected to crank up the rock music, not one of them said a word. We preferred to hear girls.

Ma

All three of them boarded better than they had all summer, which didn’t take much, since Lori had been putting us all to shame lately. At least, they looked good as far as I could tell. I was driving, not spotting, so the only glimpses I caught of them were in my rearview mirror as they hung upside down in mid-trick.

And the whole time, I had one eye on the girls’ boat. ey were never hard to spot. ey stayed in one place, with Tammy and then Rachel in the water trying to pull up, and Lori driving and instructing them at the same time. I should have been over there helping her.

Or Cameron should, I thought bitterly.

Lori did not have one eye on me. I didn’t know how long I could stand this panicky feeling as I watched her across the water, waiting and wishing for her to glance in my direction. Now I knew how my friends on the football team felt when they drove around town on the slim chance they might cruise by the cute girl they liked in the parking lot of the movie theater. I’d never felt that desperate about Lori. Ever since we were kids, she’d sat right beside me in the boat. We might not have been officially together until yesterday, but at least she’d always been nearby.

Now I couldn’t even tell what she was saying to the other girls. The topic had better be boarding. It had better not be dumping me for the next Vader brother on her list.

Or for Parker Buchanan. As if it weren’t enough for my brothers to talk to Lori when I couldn’t, Parker roared past in a ski boat with some of his rich, spoiled friends from Birmingham. His grandparents owned the snooty private yacht club a few miles downriver. Our marina had banded with the others to host the festival on the lake yesterday, but the yacht club topped us all every year by putting on an enormous Fourth of July fireworks show over the lake.

I’d known Parker for a while. He showed up to our parties sometimes, and rumor had it he was blazing a trail through the ladies. He had dark hair and dark eyes and a habit of staring through people with his eyeballs wide open and unblinking like an owl. Girls thought this was sexy. ey said it was like he could see right through them into their souls. I thought it was one of the first signs of hyper-thyroidism, but I kept it to myself.

I had no reason to dislike him. I’d never considered him a threat before. Usually he water-skied on the yacht club side of the lake. Usually he didn’t venture this far from home. Usually he didn’t slalom through our wakeboarding course while waving to my girlfriend. Usually she did not wave back. ere was a first time for everything—