I reached the den again and my dad was still grinning, which did not bode well for the Talking-To from the concerned parent. Also, Frances hadn’t budged her organic cotton–covered booty, which confused my interpretation of what my dad had meant by “alone.” I could almost see her waving a monkey wrench at me.

“Young lady,” he said, which was a pretty good start for the Talking-To, “I am so proud of you.” DAMN IT!

“Thank you!” I beamed at him like I knew what the hell he was talking about.

“I have been Parker’s grandparents’ counsel since they founded the yacht club,” he said. “I’ve watched Parker grow up. He’s a terrific student, as I’m sure you know, with designs on Yale. But his grandparents have always been concerned about his social life and frankly, his mental health. He hardly peeks out of his shell at his private school in Birmingham. Then he comes down here to stay with them in the summer, and apparently he tells a lot of tall tales, making himself out to be some sort of Lothario.”

“You’re kidding!” I did not need to fake my astonishment, though I was not astonished for the reason my dad assumed.

“It’s wonderful that you’ve started a friendship with him,” my dad went on. “I’m sure it will do him good.” I was sure a knuckle sandwich would do him more good, but I refrained from saying this. “Dad, your pride means more to me than you know.” We gave each other a final manic grin and I headed for the stairs again, but not before I caught a glimpse of Frances watching me. She knew I was up to something.

Well, lucky for her and Dad, I was not up to a whole lot at the moment. I slogged up the stairs, into my room, and closed the door behind me.

Parker was sitting on my bed, thumbing through one of the issues of Playboy I’d stolen from McGillicuddy for fashion advice. He threw it back into the drawer of my nightstand and slammed the drawer shut, as if I would be completely fooled by this and had not been the one who put the magazine there in the first place.

I sat next to him on the bed and smiled sweetly at him. “You’re so tense, Parker. You’re not still worried about Adam and my brother kicking the shit out of you, are you? To be honest, I think they’re still mad, but they don’t have martial arts training like you do.” He stared at me. His eyes were so wide that I swore they were going to rebel and pop right out of his head and wander around the room, looking at whatever they wanted. If they ventured up my skirt, I was going to step on them.

“What am I going to do?” he cried.

“What do you mean, what are you going to do?” I asked him innocently. “You trained in Japan for your black belt. Just get in a good lick or two, and maybe they’ll leave you alone. Maybe, I’m saying. McGillicuddy probably will. Adam might not. Adam doesn’t always respond to negative reinforcement like you’d think.”

“Lori!” Parker cried. “I’m not who you think I am!”

I cocked my head and blinked at him. “You’re not Parker Buchanan, grandson to the Buchanans of the Buchanan Yacht Club, student at a fancy schmancy private school in Birmingham?”

“I am all that,” he admitted, “but I don’t have a black belt.”

I had surmised this already, but I played along. “You don’t?”

“No. And… Lori, can you keep a secret? I have so much bottled up inside me, and the pressure is getting to me.” He swallowed. “I didn’t date Miss Alabama when I was in middle school.”

“You didn’t?” I tried to feign continued interest. But if he wanted to self-debunk, he might go on all night, and frankly I was more interested in what Dad and Frances were watching on the Discovery Channel.

“No. I’m basically just a nerd. I have a 4.0 GPA, and I plan to matriculate at Yale and major in cognitive science with a double minor in statistics and ancient Greek.”

“You don’t.” I stifled a yawn.

“I do. The reason I’m spending the whole summer with my grandparents is that nobody knows me here, and I can be whomever I say I am.”

ere were a lot of things about this statement that made me angry. e lie. e fact that I’d been taken in by the lie. His smug tone of voice when he talked about it, revealing himself to be the biggest nerd I had ever met, even nerdier than the kid from my algebra class who collected antique motherboards, and absolutely the worst person I could have chosen to drive Dad into letting me date Adam again.

I said, “Can you be a person who is GONE FROM MY BEDROOM?”

Instead of moving away from me, which I would have much preferred, he scooted closer to me on the bed. “Why are you angry, Lori?”

“Why do I have to explain this to everyone twice?” I ran my hands through my hair and squeezed my head to keep my brain from falling out. “I was trying to go out with Satan so Adam wouldn’t look as bad to my dad. If my dad already knows you have a 4.0 and you know that he knows, why did you agree to go on a fake date with me?”

“You made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Parker said. “You offered to show me around town and introduce me to people. I knew you were popular because you’re always at that party next door.” He nodded toward Adam’s house. ose Friday night parties, ethereal and magical in my memory, admittedly had been excruciating in reality because I’d always been trying to get Sean’s attention. Or, more recently, Adam’s.

“And you’re so pretty.” He scooted even closer to me on the bed and put his hand on my thigh.

Just what I’d waited for all night. And now, not so much. I glared at him.

He wisely removed his hand without further prompting from me. “Lori, come on. Don’t be mad. Aren’t you basically doing the same thing, putting on this big show for your dad to get what you want? You can’t be mad at me for fooling people. Besides, we have to survive another ten minutes in your car together. I don’t have another way home.”

“Why don’t you call your family’s helicopter to come get you,” I suggested, “or did you make that up too?”

“My family does have a helicopter, but I didn’t crash it into the statue of Vulcan in Birmingham. I hope you didn’t believe that part of the story. It only works on twelve-year-old girls.”

“Why are you trying to impress twelve-year-old girls? Are you that desperate?”

He opened his mouth.

“Don’t answer that,” I interrupted. I didn’t want to know.

A knock sounded at the door. I thought about tackling Parker on my bed, but now that I knew my dad saw through Parker’s whole bad-boy lifestyle, there was no point. I didn’t even leap over to Parker and snatch up his hand. “Come in,” I called like a girl without issues.

The door creaked open very slowly.

My heart raced. Adam!

No such luck. It was only McGillicuddy, peering into the room with that now-familiar scowl on his face. “Leave this door open,” he said.

“What are you doing home?” I demanded. “I thought you had a date with Tammy tonight.”

“I do,” he said. “I came home to get my car and take a shower before I go over to her house.” I thought for a second. “Why are you just now home? What did you and Adam do after we left the movies?” My brother looked guilty. “Nothing.” With a final dark look in Parker’s direction, he disappeared.

“McGillicuddy,” I called. Now I did drag Parker by the hand after me as I followed my brother into his room.

“at’s why I have to take a shower,” my brother admitted, opening a drawer and extracting a neatly folded T-shirt. He grabbed the center of the T-shirt he was wearing and stretched it out toward me. “Do I smell like kerosene?”

I sniffed tentatively. “A little.” I wondered whether Adam was home taking a shower before his mother could ask him about the peculiar kerosene odor. “If you’re going to Tammy’s anyway, can you drop off Parker at his grandparents’?”

“No!” Parker exclaimed from behind me.

I turned around. I could tell from the way his eyes flitted back and forth that the look on my brother’s face was not any more hospitable than the look on mine.

“I mean…,” Parker stammered. Suddenly he focused over my shoulder, and his eyes lit up. “Is that a B-17?” I looked where he was looking—at the huge model of a World War II–era bomber hanging by fishing line from the ceiling. “Why, yes,” I informed him. McGillicuddy had built it from a kit when he was fourteen, and I had applied the decals. It was our pride and joy.

“At home I have a B-17E, with the longer fuselage.” Parker stepped farther into my brother’s room, closing the gap between them. Clearly he had lost his fear of being eaten.

“I always wanted a B-17G, which has six more guns,” my brother said, and with that they lost me. Since I’d been trying to shake some of my grosser tomboy habits, I should have been glad that I was so easily out-boyed by a boy.

“Before I go,” I informed both of them, because clearly it was okay for my brother to take Parker home now, “I have one more favor to ask of Parker.”

10

I didn’t talk to Lori again for a week and a day. I tried to stop being mad at her about Parker. I knew Reggie had made up the indecent incident at the movies. Trouble was, when Reggie had suggested it, I had imagined it, and in my mind it really happened. Maybe if I’d been allowed to talk to her, I could have gotten over it, but since my dad gave me the evil eye if I so much as looked in her direction, the whole insult of it continued to dog me.

Toward the end of the week I couldn’t stand it anymore. I called Rachel and asked her what she’d done lately about getting Sean back. Unfortunately for her, or fortunately, depending on what you thought of Lori’s plans (and I did not think very much of them), Rachel was not nearly as proactive as Lori. I could have told Rachel that Sean was patient and vengeful. If she didn’t do something, the summer would end and he would go to college without ever asking her out again. He might even pine away for her, if he had room in his very small heart to do that, but it would be worth it to him if she felt bad about breaking up with him.

So I suggested that she have everyone over to her grandparents’ place on the lake. She would see Sean and, God help her, win him back. I would see Lori.

Rachel’s grandparents’ house was far enough away that my parents and Lori’s dad weren’t likely to cruise by on the geriatric pontoon boat. It was close enough that we could all drive over there in the wakeboarding boat after business at the marina slowed down. It would look casual and spur-of-the-moment. It would not occur to Lori’s dad that Lori and I could get in much trouble there, on the same lake as him, under the watchful eye of extremely old people.

And maybe, just maybe, Lori and I could slip away from McGillicuddy for a few minutes in private.

At least, that’s what I figured. But Lori’s dad was smarter than I thought. Even though he knew I would be there, he allowed Lori to go. But he made her go in her own boat with McGillicuddy, while I drove with Sean and Cameron.

That was okay. I wakeboarded the whole way over, which helped me get out some aggression. Cameron was driving. He kept trying to run me into shore or over big logs floating in the lake. If I were ten, I would have crashed. But I was sixteen, and I had his number. The lake was mine.

e girl was not. At Rachel’s we swam, and we boarded, and we ate, and it would have been a lot of fun if I hadn’t been watching Lori the whole time, trying to look like I wasn’t watching her, wishing I could get her alone.

Rachel’s grandmother already liked me. But she liked Sean more, because he complimented her on her peach cobbler (which was awesome, almost as good as my mom’s, but it never would have occurred to me to compliment an old lady on her peach cobbler) and then insisted on helping her clean up the kitchen. He was really turning on the charm with her, but not with Rachel. us Rachel’s grandmother would ask her a million times a day, Why don’t you date that nice boy Sean? and Rachel would not want to admit that she had in fact broken up with Sean, and Sean had not asked her out again. I knew how Sean worked.

Late in the afternoon, the other guys went inside to watch the Braves game on TV with Rachel’s granddad. I should have been there, and I would catch flak from them later for not being there. However, I was not going to miss a chance to get Lori alone. I lay with her, Rachel, and Tammy on the pier, catching the steeply angled rays of the sun.

Rachel let out a satisfied sigh. “I’m so glad Adam called me and told me to have y’all over.” Lori looked over at Rachel. Lori had her shades on, but I could imagine the shocked look in her eyes.

Rachel wore shades too. However, she was sitting next to me, because we weren’t banned from talking to each other, and we had no fear of McGillicuddy looking out the window and seeing us together. Behind her shades, she cut her dark eyes at me.

Lori didn’t say a word. She turned and gazed out over the broad lake. But I knew she was wondering how deep my relationship with Rachel went behind the scenes. is moved me a long way toward letting go of my anger at Lori about Parker. Now she had some idea how I felt.

After a pause, she gestured offshore. “I am going to swim out to that island. Adam is going to swim out to that island also.”

“I am?” I didn’t like being told what to do. But of course I would have swum across the Atlantic to see her. I pulled off my T-shirt, the first time my chest had been bare in a week.

She did the smallest double take but quickly looked away from me again, toward the girls, and pretended to ignore me. “is is all purely for calisthenics, you understand.”