Endless Summer

“Pardon,” I said to Parker as I reached back to remove his arm from around my shoulders. “Sorry,” I murmured to the couple I slid past in the row. “I can’t believe you,” I whispered to Adam as I stepped into the aisle.

I was so furious with him. But the theater was dark, and I was close to him for the first time in almost a week, if you didn’t count standing next to him on the dock yesterday and getting clobbered with his football pass. My skin tingled with awareness as I came within inches of him, and the hair on my arms stood up. I almost looked forward to the opportunity to tell him off.

I stopped when I reached my brother blocking the aisle. He actually looked angry at me. He was never angry at me. But no—his angry expression was directed past me, at Parker. None of this made any sense. Adam might have gotten dragged into my plan kicking and screaming, but the plan with Parker was McGillicuddy pre-approved!

McGillicuddy and I had discussed it!

I waited for Parker to catch up with me. Adam fell in behind us as if he and McGillicuddy were our jailers. With Parker’s reputation, I figured he probably got hauled into fake-boyfriend status every day of the week. Each weekend he probably really stole someone’s girlfriend. He could handle himself with Adam, I was sure. But I hadn’t prepared him for this level of rudeness from Adam. I took Parker’s hand.

Strangely, he refused my hand. It was hard to tell in the dark, but it sure seemed to me like my hand chased his hand back and forth around his hip, and his hand conducted evasive maneuvers. I knew he did not find me so loathsome that he would refuse to touch me—he’d just had his arm around me, after all. Perhaps he needed the barrier of clothing. Perhaps he didn’t want to hold my hand in front of Adam. Maybe he knew it would hurt Adam’s feelings. Maybe he was scared of Adam. But none of these things was part of the Parker I knew by reputation.

So I walked up the aisle and through the bright lobby by myself, rejected from holding Parker’s hand, wishing I were holding Adam’s. It occurred to me that this sort of teen intrigue was exactly what I’d always dreamed about as a tomboy tween paging longingly through fashion magazines that might as well have been written in Russian, as much as I understood about hobo bags and ankle boots.

“Vader!” called the movie worker standing in the doorway of the stairs up to the projection booth. “You didn’t beat the shit out of him. You owe me your admission fee.”

“I was in there for two minutes,” Adam said through his teeth.

“That wasn’t the agreement,” said the movie worker.

I truly hoped the movie worker would get a clue and shut up soon. Adam seemed to grow taller and broader every second, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to sock Parker right there, if that was the deal Adam had arranged with the movie worker, and then to sock the movie worker for good measure.

“How long is the movie?” McGillicuddy snapped.

“An hour and forty-five minutes.”

“Then he owes you seventeen cents,” McGillicuddy concluded, ever the engineering major, even when he was completely off his rocker. “Lori, give him seventeen cents.”

“There were two of you in there,” the movie worker protested. “That’s…” He took way too long to add seventeen and seventeen.

“irty-four,” I helped him out. “But Parker and I paid full price, and we were only in there for…” I pulled out the new cell phone my dad insisted I spend my birthday money on before I went on a date anywhere with anybody. I glanced at the time. “Fifteen minutes. So you actually owe us…”

“Fifteen dollars and nine cents.”

I started to grin at McGillicuddy for this brilliant bit of figuring. Then I realized the voice hadn’t come from McGillicuddy. It had come from Parker.

My astonishment at bad boy Parker letting loose with this nerd-bomb was exceeded only by Adam suddenly shouting, “LET’S GO!”

e four of us walked all the way across the parking lot. When we got close to my dad’s car, I saw that Adam had parked right in front of it. He’d pulled up so close that the bumpers were within a millimeter of touching, because Adam was like that.

I turned to McGillicuddy and said, “I need to talk to Adam alone.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“e alternative is for Adam to get in a fistfight with Parker here in the parking lot. at is assault. You will have aided and abetted him by coming into the movie theater and dragging Parker out of there. How is that going to look on your job application to NASA?”

“Well…”

“Didn’t you say Adam and I could talk as long as you didn’t see it?”

He gestured to Adam’s truck, looking ill. “Go ahead.” He said something to Parker and folded his arms while Parker climbed into the front seat of my dad’s car. en my brother slid onto the hood of Adam’s truck with his feet on the bumper and stared Parker down. My brother had never acted like this before, except when we were kids playing war and the boys next door made him be the evil German.

I turned to Adam. “Get in,” I said as forcefully as I could. I climbed through the unlocked door of his truck, into the driver’s seat. I’d been in the driver’s seat all night, and it made me feel more in control of my little teenage life careening down the toilet. I wasn’t ready to give up that control now—especially in the face of Adam’s anger. I cranked the engine with the keys he’d left in the ignition and hit the buttons to close the windows. Bad enough that everyone in this town between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one could see us have this argument. I didn’t want them to hear it, too.

Adam rounded the truck and slid into the passenger side. Except for our positions on the seat being reversed, we’d sat exactly like this lots of times a couple of weeks ago, when we were only pretending to like each other. I wanted to do that with Adam again. I was trying to get us back there, and he’d sabotaged me half an hour in!

e second he closed the door behind him, I hollered, “What part of ‘I’m pretending to go out with someone worse so my dad will let me date you’ don’t you understand?”

He swung his head around at me, pi

Then I stopped laughing. Adam obviously believed this had happened. Where in God’s name had he gotten this idea?

I leaned forward and said carefully, “Adam. You saw Parker and me when you so rudely interrupted our fake date just now. He did not have his hand up my skirt. And you did not give us a lot of warning that you were coming, so I would not have had time to remove his hand from my nether region. Honestly!” I blushed at the very idea of doing this in a movie theater.

“Not in the theater. In the lobby.” Adam’s words were still closed and angry, but the fire in his eyes had cooled a few degrees. Possibly he was realizing that he was—gasp

—wrong.

“Parker did not have his hand up my skirt in the lobby,” I said patiently. “at makes no sense. Even ho’s do not let boys put hands up their skirts in the lobby when they have a whole dark theater at their disposal. Who told you that?”

He looked out over the parking lot, then gestured toward a group of three football players weaving among the cars. One of them stopped, put his hand over the top of the beer can he was holding, shook it up, and spewed it all over the hood of an outsized Lincoln Continental.

“Reginald Evans,” Adam said.

We both watched Reggie hightail it across the parking lot, away from the driver of the Lincoln, dodging cars like they were defensive tackles. I saw why he was the star ru

He was not, however, somebody I would trust for personal information about my friends. I said, “Reginald Evans can’t read. I was in Spanish with him last year.”