Endless Summer

Tammy laughed.

“—shut up, and then there’s the very idea of his parents telling him he can’t do something. It’s a perfect storm for Adam to self-destruct. I need to get us out of this mess before that happens. And I have a plan.” I explained my ingenious mission with Kevin Ye, ignoring Rachel when she choked on her lemonade at several points. I finished,

“Isn’t that a good plan?”

“No,” McGillicuddy spoke up, “but it’s consistent.”

I went on. “The problem with this plan—”

“The problem?” Tammy asked. “Like there’s only one?”

“—is that I ran it by Adam, and he does not like it.”

“You have got to be kidding,” McGillicuddy said flatly.

“It’s the Kevin Ye aspect. Adam doesn’t want me dating a felon.” Or his brother, or his other brother. “It could still work if I thought of someone who passed muster with Adam and horrified my dad at the same time.”

“What about Parker Buchanan?” Rachel asked. “Your dad must know him by reputation. Everybody in town’s heard that he made out with three different girls in the food court at the Birmingham mall and all their boyfriends tried to jump him in the parking lot.”

“That’s perfect!” I pounded my fist on the table. Rachel’s lemonade sloshed over the side of her glass. “Sorry.” I stood up to snag a towel.

“I was joking,” Rachel said.

My brother warned her, “Do not make jokes to Lori that you don’t want to be misunderstood and taken seriously.”

“Why is Parker perfect?” Tammy asked. “He’s a playboy who lives on the edge. Why would that be so scary to your dad? He sounds like a combination of Adam and Sean.”

“Yes, but he’s from Birmingham,” I pointed out as I wiped up the lemonade at Rachel’s place—or tried to, and ended up scooting the puddle into her lap. “Sorry. Maybe you should do this.” I handed her the towel and sat back down in my place. “You know how people around here feel about Birmingham. You don’t even have to explain that anything from Birmingham is more intense. If you wreck your car and people want to know how badly you were hurt, all you have to say is, ‘e ambulance took me straight to Birmingham,’ and everybody knows you went to the university hospital because you were at death’s door. If you’re going on a date and you say, ‘We went to Birmingham,’ people know your boyfriend took you to the fanciest restaurant in the state because he’s trying to get in your pants.” McGillicuddy cleared his throat. Next to him, Tammy took a huge bite of her sandwich. He must be taking her on a date to Birmingham sometime soon.

To cover his own embarrassment—or just to make sure he understood my plan, but I doubted this—my brother reached behind him and snagged the pad and pen on the counter beside the phone. He drew a little diagram. “So an ADHD boyfriend is bad, and a playboy ADHD boyfriend would be worse, but a playboy ADHD boyfriend from Birmingham is the top of this hierarchy.”

“at’s what I’m counting on,” I said. “I would not rely on Parker’s reputation alone. I would go out with him on a couple of dates, enough to let Dad know we’re getting serious, and then stage a Teen Crisis.”

Everybody cracked up but me. Tammy asked, “What kind of Teen Crisis?”

“I have no idea,” I said defensively. “You’ve been watching MTV longer than I have.”

“Are you just going to flirt with Parker and win him over,” Rachel asked, “or are you going to explain to him what you’re doing?”

“I’ll explain to him what I’m doing,” I said. “Otherwise I would feel awful. What if he fell for me for real?” Rachel and Tammy looked at each other.

“It is not beyond the realm of possibility,” I grouched.

“What makes you think he’ll do it?” Tammy asked.

“I’ll offer him something in return. I’ll take him around town, introduce him to people, show him where we hang out. I will leave out the part where I am extremely unpopular and kind of socially challenged. Do you think he might believe I’m popular?”

“Depends on how long you’re together,” Rachel said. “He’ll wise up eventually.”

My brother tapped the pen on the pad. “Won’t you feel guilty for lying to Dad?”

I did feel a twinge of guilt at that, but anger took over. “I won’t be lying to him. I will be going out with Parker. I might not be going out with him with romantic intensions, but I will not say I am. Dad will only infer this, and everybody knows you should not infer anything. You should get it in writing.” All this lawyer lingo reminded me that my brother was leaving behind incriminating evidence. I reached across the table, snatched the pad in front of him, and tore out the sheet where he’d made little notes about the plan. I tore out the sheet under that, too, in case the imprint of the pen was clear enough to show up if a paranoid father rubbed a pencil across it. I tore both sheets into a pile of tiny pieces while the three of them watched me as if I had completely lost my mind.

“e thing is,” I said, trying to sound sane, “I need to explain all this to Adam in private. I can’t get McGillicuddy to explain it to him. Something will be lost in the translation.”

“Well, excuse me that I can’t look at him all googly-eyed,” my brother said.

“And he’s liable to punch you,” I said.

“Very true,” Rachel agreed. I felt another twinge of a

My brother’s eyes slid to Tammy for a fraction of a second, then back to me. He said, “Punch me? He can try.”

“Right.” I needed to keep my brother on my side. Best to support his machismo in front of Tammy. But he knew, and I knew, that asking Parker to help me and scaring my dad with Parker would not be nearly as difficult as persuading Adam to play along.

Friday night my family had Lori’s family over for di

I thought I would be glad for the chance to get close to Lori. It ended up being three courses of frustration. I’d felt exactly this way wakeboarding with her an hour before. I always looked forward to being near her, but when the time came, we were both scared to exchange more than a “hi” for fear authority was watching us.

Even worse, the longer this went on, the more shy I felt around her. Not shy, exactly—I was not shy, and Lori was so friendly that nobody could feel shy around her. It was more like I wanted to impress her as her boyfriend, and for about two days I’d felt confident I could do it. Now I was regressing back to the way I’d felt ever since I could remember, knowing I liked her more than she liked me, and deathly afraid to make a move for fear of messing things up with her. Or getting sent to military school.

So when she gri

But after di

“Run down the hill,” Sean said. “Hurdle the cooler. Get sprayed by the hose. Swing on the rope. Catch the ball.”

“Agreed,” Cameron said. “One, two, three…”

“Break!” the five of us shouted, raising our hands from the pile in the center. I walked to the end of the dock, where I had a clear shot to pass the football to whoever swung over the lake on the rope hanging from a branch of the enormous oak tree. Lori followed me, dragging the garden hose. I was a little surprised her dad didn’t complain about this, because she’d stripped off her tank top and my shorts to reveal her pink bikini underneath. Sean and McGillicuddy wandered over to sit with my parents and Lori’s dad and Frances under the tree. Cameron hiked up the yard to get a ru