Endless Summer

After wakeboarding, I passed the office and heard Lori arguing with my mom about sending me to school. It wouldn’t work, and I didn’t let it faze me. I knew what I had to do.

The threat of Adam’s parents sending him to military school had lurked in the back of my mind for three weeks, like one of those bad backdrops in a school picture, a photo of a fake library. Even if your school picture turned out great for once, there was no getting around the fact that you were gri

Now the threat was finally real. And I refused to accept it.

I couldn’t tell whether Adam accepted it or not. Rather than being angry about it and throwing stuff, which is what I’d expected from him, he seemed confused, like he didn’t know what to make of it. Late in the afternoon he even executed a series of perfect tricks during his turn wakeboarding. e boys and I looked at one another, astounded. This was not like Adam at all. He wasn’t concentrating on new and exciting ways to fall down.

Was this a preview of what military school would do to him? Even if I never got together with Adam again, I had to save him from this. After I hung my life vest and wake-board in the warehouse, I knocked on the office door and went in to face his mother.

I slipped onto the stool behind her. She typed busily on her computer and didn’t turn around. She must know what I was there for.

I said, “I broke the rules too, you know. It takes two to tango, or to spend two hours in a tree house together. Wooooo.” I wiggled my fingers as if to scare her with my horrible infraction. Since she still hadn’t looked around at me, the drama was reduced somewhat.

Frustrated, I said, “Why is he in all the trouble and I’m not in trouble at all? Instead of him going to military school, we could each take half the punishment. We could set up a bivouac for you on the front lawn. We both have lots of experience playing army.”

“You’re not in trouble, Lori, because nobody believes you would have snuck out last night if Adam hadn’t convinced you.” She never stopped typing as she said this to her computer screen. “Adam, on the other hand, has a long history of going out of his way to do the opposite of what we say. e fact that we’re sending him to school doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me!” I exclaimed.

“It did at first,” she acknowledged, “but now it doesn’t. Adam’s father and I have given him an order that he refuses to obey. And if he can’t obey it because of ADHD, yet he refuses to take his medicine, then he needs to learn another way to get along in the world. His father and I have tried. We can’t help him anymore.”

e office door screeched open. Adam filled the doorway. “ADHD is overdiagnosed and overmedicated,” he said in a professorial tone. “Studies show that one in three teenagers diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulants doesn’t actually need treatment.” He slammed the door and was gone as quickly as he’d appeared.

“You are not that one of the three,” his mom hollered after him.

After her voice had stopped ringing in my ears, I said, “I don’t know. You think you can outsmart him, and then he comes up with something like that out of the blue.

You realize he reads the newspaper and he’s not as out of it as he acts.”

“Oh yeah?” Mrs. Vader asked. “Name one thing Adam has done this summer that displayed any forethought.”

“He left roses all over the marina for me. You helped him do that.”

“Granted, but he did that to apologize to you because he’d flown off the handle the night before. Name one more.” I opened my mouth to tell her about the sleeping bag, the pillows, the candle, and the Oreos in the tree house. I decided that evidence of advance pla

Instead I said, “I think some of his problem is ADHD. I’ve known him forever, and he’s always been that way, so it’s hard to imagine what he’d be like otherwise. But some of his problem is Sean and Cameron egging him on. I know this sounds crazy, but I have seen Adam exercise extraordinary restraint in the face of incredible taunting.

The first year I knew y’all, I thought his name was ADD.”

Mrs. Vader hit the space bar over and over, so hard that I thought it would fly off. “Sean is not supposed to call Adam that.”

“I am aware of that. Sean does it anyway.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this some time in the past umpteen years?” She kept her voice low, but I could tell she was fed up with me.

“If you tattled about anything, you got kicked out of the club,” I explained. “I don’t want to be a member of the club anymore.”

“Well.” She clicked the mouse to close the document she was working on, then opened another and resumed typing. “We think this is what’s best for Adam in the long run. You might as well get on board.”

I sat there for a few more minutes, listening to her fingers tap on the keyboard. Since I’d come in, she hadn’t once stopped typing or turned around to look at me. is told me she was upset. Normally she would have given me her outraged face a time or two during this conversation.

She was upset about sending him away. She was sending him away anyway.

And it was all my fault.

I wanted to stay and argue with her. I would have if I’d thought it would have done any good. But I was all out of vague arguments, and I was afraid if I got further into the specifics of Adam and me, he’d get sent to school faster, like he’d said.

I spun around on my stool and stalked out of the office, hell-bent on showing my dad that Adam wasn’t so awful, once and for all. Mrs. Vader didn’t think I was capable of disobedience on my own, did she? I was a good little girl without a mind of my own who only got in trouble if a boy led her astray? I would show them all and save Adam from military school at the same time.

Outside in the fading sunlight, Adam leaned against the wall. When he heard the door squeak open, he stood up straight and took a step toward me, worry lines deep between his brows.

I carefully closed the door all the way, then skittered toward him.

“I’ll take care of it,” we whispered at the same time.

“No—how will you take care of it?” I said quickly. We didn’t have much time to talk before someone discovered us together again. “I’ll go with Sean to the party tonight and horrify my dad.”

“You won’t!” Adam exclaimed, voice edging above a whisper, eyes intense with anger. “You promised you wouldn’t.”

“I did, but that was before you got sent away!” Surely he saw the difference and understood what was at stake here.

We stared each other down, stubborn, the heat from a whole day of sun breaking loose from the sidewalk under our flip-flops and rising between us.

“I will take care of it,” he growled, a threat. He stepped past me and hiked along the showroom wall, up his yard, toward his house. I wished he would take care of it, but he did not have a stellar track record for getting himself out of trouble.

Out the corner of my eye I saw Sean sliding the big metal door of the warehouse closed for the night.

I knew what I had to do.

First I shaved. This was harder than I thought. I’d only shaved stubble before, not the full mountaineer beard I’d been working on. I had to hack at it for a few minutes to get it off.

Then I ironed. I dragged the iron and the board from my parents’ room into mine and pressed a pair of shorts, then a long-sleeved button-down shirt. I would roll up the sleeves like an asshole. I would have worn a suit, but that seemed like overkill. I was going to see Lori’s dad and I wanted to look like a presentable guy who should be allowed to date his daughter, not a criminal who’d dressed up to face the electric chair.