Endless Summer

After years of him being vaguely pleasant to me but basically ignoring me, it had never occurred to me that we had nothing in common but wakeboarding—and I suspected wakeboarding might be a touchy subject right now. We didn’t need to talk. He kept his arm around me for the short ride back to the marina.

Instead of driving straight to the wharf where we usually parked the boat, Adam slowed at the marina dock so the boys could mock Mr. Vader, who hadn’t moved from the position he’d been in when I splashed him, except he’d started on another beer. e boys told him he was all washed up and he should enter a wet T-shirt contest with that figure, and so forth. My brother called to Dad, “Nice save, Pops.”

“Hey.” Dad tipped his beer to us. “You’ve got to be fast with Lori around.”

“I have to say, young lady,” grumbled Mr. Vader. “I was very impressed with all your shenanigans. Right up to the point I got doused. I want you to plan to close the Crappie Festival show until further notice.”

Which meant, Until you screw up. at was okay. He’d told me I was better than the boys at something for once in my life! I turned to Sean and beamed so big that my cheeks hurt.

Sean squinted into the sun, wearing that strange, fixed smile. Even my brother and Cameron gave each other puzzled looks rather than congratulating me again. Only Adam met my eyes. He shook his head at me.

Oh, crap. Crappy. Holy Crappie Festival! I had upset the natural order. After Adam had already upset the natural order in team calisthenics. I should have thought all of this through better.

Sean began, “But I didn’t even get a chance to—”

“I saw what happened,” Mr. Vader told him. “You had your chance. The Big Kahuna has spoken.”

“Race you to the wharf,” Adam called. Mr. Vader said something to my dad, put down his beer, and tried to hurl himself up the steps to the marina faster than Adam idled the boat. e boys were doofuses, and it was genetic. Adam let Mr. Vader win by half a length, touching the bow of the boat to the padded edge of the wharf just after Mr. Vader dashed past. e boys howled, and someone threw a couple of dollar bills at Mr. Vader. He picked up each bill like it mattered and limped back down the stairs toward my dad.

en Sean jumped out of the bow to tie up the boat. He, Cameron, and my brother tried to trip each other as they took armfuls of equipment into the warehouse with them. No one gave me a single backward glance.

Adam cut the engine. “Now you’ve screwed up.”

“How?” I asked casually, stepping out of the boat. “You think Sean won’t want to go out with me now that I’ve taken his spot in the show?” Adam just looked at me. at’s exactly what he thought. I was getting tired of his warnings about Sean. I gathered my clothes and my backpack, turned on my heel, and flounced away. Which was fairly ineffective with bare feet, on a rough concrete wharf.

“You’ll see at the party tonight,” Adam called after me.

“No, you’ll see,” I threw over my shoulder. Sean and his pride would prove no match for Stage Three: Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Top.

As I walked home, balancing on the seawall that kept the Vaders’ yard and my yard from falling into the lake, my cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my backpack without hurrying. e only people who ever called me were my dad, my brother, assorted Vaders to tell me to come early or late to work (including Sean, but he always sounded grumpy that he had to call me, so it wasn’t as big a thrill as you’d think), Tammy to tell me to come early or late to te

From the time Mom died until I was eleven, Frances the au pair had hung out in the background of my life. Once Sean overheard someone calling her Fa

“I’m on the dock,” she said.

I peered the half-mile across the lake and waved to her. I could hardly make her out at that distance, against the trees that sheltered the Harbargers’ house, where she na

“The children and I watched the last part of your wakeboarding run,” she said. “You’ve improved so much since last year!”

“Thanks! But that’s not why you called. You’re dying to know what happened with Sean.”

Frances was in on my Life Makeover. Not the fashion part—sheesh, look at her. She hadn’t even given me advice on what to do. I wandered into the Harbargers’ house every week or so and told her how my plan was shaping up, and she told me I was being ridiculous and it would never work. I guess I went to her because I wanted to hear some motherly input. We had the perfect relationship. She wasn’t really my mother, so I could listen to her input and then do the opposite. e difference between me and girls with mothers was that I didn’t get in trouble for this.

“Let me guess,” she said. “When Sean saw you in a bikini, he acted incrementally more cozy to you. erefore you expected him to profess his love. You honestly did.

And he didn’t do a thing.”

“Rrrrrnt!” I made the game-show noise for a wrong answer. I told her what had really happened.

“What?” she said when I told her Adam beat Sean at calisthenics. “What?” she said when I told her I landed the air raley. “What?” she said when I told her Sean wiped out.

As I got to the part about Sean touching my tummy repeatedly, she interrupted me so often that I had to pitch a frustrated fit. I threw the phone down to the grass, cupped my hands around my mouth, and hollered across the lake, “LET. ME. FINISH!” Inish, inish, inish, said my echo. I picked up the phone and told her the rest of the story, ending with my plan to implement Stage Three that night.

“But you don’t really think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will solve all your problems, do you?” she asked.

“Of course not. I think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will show Sean I’m ready for him.”

“Lori, no girl is ever ready for a boy like Sean. How were finals?” Clearly she wanted to change the subject to impress upon me that boys were not all there was to a teenage girl’s life. As if.

“Finals?” I asked.

“Yes, finals. To graduate from the tenth grade? You took them yesterday.”

Wow, it was hard to believe I’d played hopscotch with the quadratic equation only twenty-seven hours ago. inking back, it seemed like I’d sleepwalked through the past nine months of school, compared with everything that had happened today.

Time flew when you were having Sean.

Mr. Vader let the boys throw a party at their house every Friday night during the summers. He reasoned that if they were home, they weren’t out drag racing the pink truck against Mrs. Vader’s Volvo. So I’d been to a million of these parties. It should have been old hat. Yet it was new hat. I had put on my seductress bo

This would have dented my hair, which I’d blown out long, straight, and bryozoa-free.

We’d had a lot of rain in May, which made the lake full, the grass lush, the trees happy, and the ground soft. Walking through my yard into the boys’ yard in high heels was like wading in the lake where the sand was deep, feet sinking with every step. I felt like Elizabeth Be