Endless Summer

Her dad glared at me. I put my hand down and stepped back two paces. He extended his hand to help her, then pulled her away from the group.

Now everybody stood around in knots in the fading light, talking about other times when Lori had gotten the wind knocked out of her. So I wasn’t the only one who remembered this. My mom mentioned the time Lori ran into the dock on water skis and broke her arm. Frances brought up an episode even I had forgotten about, when Lori fell out of my tree house. Frances watched me as she said this, trying to gauge my reaction.

Maybe it was just me, but it seemed like none of us knew what to do until Lori’s dad finished talking to her. I only half paid attention to the stories of Lori losing her breath. Underneath the laughter, I tried to hear what her dad was saying.

I couldn’t catch most of it. Finally she started to walk away from him, and he raised his voice. “You’re always getting hurt when Adam is around.”

“at’s because I’m always getting hurt,” she said huskily, “and Adam is always around.” She skipped back down the hill and stopped between Frances and me, careful not to look me in the eye.

“I’m really sorry,” I said as quietly as I could without whispering and attracting even more attention. “I forgot you were a girl.” I’d also forgotten Lori did not like to hear this. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly true. I never forgot Lori was a girl. I just never treated her any differently from the guys when we played games, because that’s what she wanted.

Maybe I should start.

Sean walked by, tossing the wet football from hand to hand. “Forgot she was a girl?” he mused. “Didn’t seem like it last weekend.” With one hand I shoved him hard enough to send him reeling into the lake. He sprang out of the water and yanked me in before I could dodge him. He pushed me way underwater and held me there. I wanted to punch him, but I knew from experience that it was hard to do any damage in the water anyway. And I kept repeating to myself that I was already in enough trouble. For myself, it didn’t matter so much, but Lori was at stake.

I stayed quiet under his hands, waiting for him to let me up. He didn’t. I ran out of breath and still he didn’t let me up. I scrambled past him toward the surface. He tried to hold me down in the darkness. I had an inch of height on him, but he had quite a few pounds on me. With all the strength I had left, I broke past him and gasped before he could dunk me again. I deserved this for knocking the breath out of Lori, but I’d had enough. “Uncle!” I yelled.

Above the surface, Lori and Frances and my mom were yelling too, hollering at Sean to let me go. He didn’t listen to them, but he listened to me. Poised to put his hands on my shoulders and shove me under, Sean paused and cocked his head at me. “What?”

“Uncle,” I repeated. “Isn’t that what people say when they give up?”

“I don’t know. You’ve never given up before.”

McGillicuddy and Cameron splashed through the shallow water toward us, wearing familiar looks on their faces that told me they thought they were saving the day, separating Sean and me. McGillicuddy reached Sean first and dunked him.

“I already said uncle,” I told Cameron just as he reached me, but this meant as little to him as it had to Sean. He turned me around and pi

He was still mad at me for trying to punch him in the boat last weekend.

We were even, then, because I was still mad at him for flirting with my girlfriend. I tried to jerk out of Cameron’s grasp. He held me so hard that even the water didn’t help me slip free. Then he pulled my arm higher behind my back until it hurt.

“That’s my throwing arm,” I yelled. “Get the monkey off me, Cameron.”

“Isn’t this fun?” my mom called in a voice bright enough to be a cartoon. “I’m so glad we’ve gotten the families together again. We should do this more often. Who’s ready for homemade ice cream?”

At the same time the next night, I crouched in my tree house, scoping out Lori’s house. Yes, I felt ridiculous, but the woods between her house and mine weren’t thick enough for stealth. If I was going to watch her driveway unseen, there was nowhere else to hide except in the bushes, and I absolutely refused to hide in the bushes. at would make me a creep.

The taillights of her dad’s car blinked on. She backed out of the garage and drove down her driveway, then turned toward town and disappeared.

I jumped from the tree house, ran across her yard, and burst through her front door. Maybe I should have rung the doorbell. Possibly I was no longer welcome in her house. However, I’d never rung the doorbell when I’d come to see McGillicuddy before, so it didn’t seem right to start now, just because I was persona non grata.

Luckily I didn’t have to deal with this. Mr. McGillicuddy didn’t notice I was there. rough the glass door in the den I could see him out on the screened porch, his favorite place lately. He was reading and didn’t look up. I dashed up the stairs. With only a glance into Lori’s disaster of a room—disappointing as usual, wakeboarding posters on the walls, books strewn everywhere, no underwear in sight—I ducked into McGillicuddy’s room.

He sat at his desk, pecking on his computer keyboard. He didn’t look around at me either, but he asked, “Yes?”

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Go where?”

“On Lori’s date with Parker.”

Now he looked at me over the nerdy spectacles he wore for reading. “I wasn’t aware it was a double date. And you’re not my type.”

“Cut the bullshit and let’s go. We’ve probably lost her already. We won’t be able to chase her to Parker’s. We’ll have to intercept her at the movie and hope she was telling the truth about where she was going on this date.”

He opened his mouth.

“Bill!” I hollered. “Come on.”

He kept his mouth open and raised his eyebrows. When it became clear to me that he was not going anywhere until I let him talk, and clear to him that I was not going to interrupt him again, he finally said, “I have a date with Tammy.”

“Go over to her house later,” I said. “That’s when the good stuff happens anyway. Come on.” He sighed at me, then turned back to his computer and moved the mouse.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Shutting it down? You don’t have to shut it down. Nobody is going to touch your computer while we’re gone. Come on.” He kept moving the mouse and tapping on the keyboard like I was not standing there breathing down his neck. “There might be a fire. I don’t want to lose my data.”

“It’s summer,” I said. “ere is no data. And there will be no fire. e only person who sets fires around here is me, and I will be gone. With you. Following Lori. Come on.”

I swear it took me another fifteen minutes to forklift him out of his freaking data center. By then Lori had picked up Parker and made it all the way to the movie theater, I hoped. It would be just my luck that now she would decide ru

And after I extracted McGillicuddy from his room, he slowed us down even more by sticking his head out into the screened porch and telling his dad where we were going. I couldn’t hear his dad’s end of the conversation, but I could hear McGillicuddy’s. “Adam…. Why not? I didn’t stay out all night with him…. If he’s with me, he’s not with her.”

“Come on,” I grumbled under my breath.

e only reason I was able to get him through the trees, into my driveway, and into the pink truck was that he called Tammy on his cell. e second he’d ended the call with her, climbed into the passenger seat, and slammed the door of my truck, he was arguing with me again. “Why are we going on Lori’s date?”

“To make sure Parker doesn’t try anything with her.” I cranked the engine and raised my voice over the motor. “To make sure she doesn’t try anything with Parker.