“Lori has picked a strange place to be left alone,” Sean commented. He sat in the bow with me, on the other side of Rachel, holding her hand in a death grip like their lives depended on it.

He did have a point. I was glad they’d finally gotten together. Again. And I wouldn’t have missed Adam’s fireworks for the world. Just thinking about him doing something he loved—setting off explosions—made me smile. But I did wish there were some way for me to see this show that did not involve proximity to other people, especially people determined to pick on me and draw attention to the fact that I was not myself.

I sighed yet again, a looooong sigh that encompassed my extreme fatigue exacerbated by being stuck in a boat with boys. “Lori has had a bad day.”

“Lori’s day is over.” Rachel reached over and patted my knee.

And just what the hell did THAT mean? On the one hand, it sounded soothing. There was a comfort in knowing your bad day was coming to an end, and all you had left to do was watch fireworks, ride back home in someone else’s boat, brush your teeth, and go to bed.

On the other hand, it sounded ominous, like Adam and I had already enjoyed our day in the sun, and now Rachel was signaling me to move over, Rover. When she’d come to the marina for lunch with Sean, she and I had talked a little. We’d told each other we were sorry for last night’s Xtreme Dating. But I could tell it would take a while for us to truly forgive each other.

And now she had that look in her dark eyes that she’d gotten a couple of times in the last few weeks when I’d asked her about Adam. The one that said she knew more than she was telling.

I didn’t want to go ballistic on her while all of us waited patiently and contently for the explosions, but God! “What do you mean,” I started, my voice rising over the eerily quiet lake, “my day is o—”

BANG!

We all jumped in our seats at the first explosion. Because the sound was delayed, we looked up to see the bouquet of golden light already spreading across the black sky.

In the pause before the next explosion, the crowd in the boats actually said, “Oooooh.”

More rockets snaked trails of smoke through the gold, then exploded green and blue. The percussion of their explosions reached us at the same time the strings of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” waltzed through the loudspeakers.

“Wow,” Rachel said. I looked over at her and Sean, gazing up at the sky with their heads close together, fireworks reflecting in their eyes. Everyone in the boat was gazing up. Everyone on the whole lake was gazing up. It would have been a great time to be a pickpocket. But only Adam would think of something like that, or the girlfriend of Adam who had gotten used to him over the years and missed him awfully.

Rocket after rocket zipped into the night sky, paused, then turned itself inside out in a rain of light. “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” ended and “America the Beautiful” began. “America the Beautiful” gave way to “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” I would have time enough to pine away for Adam when I lay awake in bed tonight, but right then I enjoyed the beauty of the fireworks and the fact that Adam was helping set them off from the grassy hill next to the yacht club and having the time of his life.

I jumped again—not at an explosion this time, but at my cell phone buzzing in the back pocket of Adam’s cutoff jeans. Maybe my dad was texting me that he and Frances were staying out later than me—but couldn’t he wait until the fireworks were over? I glanced at the screen to see who’d sent the text.

Adam.

I suppressed the urge to look around and make sure nobody was watching. Adam and I might not be together anymore, but the ban had been lifted. He was free to text me if he wanted. Again, his timing was not good, but then again, he might be asking me to call him an ambulance. I opened the message.

This one’s for you.

“You’re a Grand Old Flag” ended. The next song over the loudspeakers wasn’t a patriotic tune at all but a new rock song Adam and I both liked. A love song.

A smaller rocket cut across the sky, trailing smoke. It exploded in a red heart.

“Awwwww!” said the crowd.

“Upside down,” said Sean.

The heart was, indeed, upside down. It grew and grew, upside down, until its lights trailed and faded.

A bigger rocket exploded in bright golden sparks, and then came another red heart.

“Upside down,” said all the boys.

Three explosions layered on top of one another, gold, blue, pink. Then still another red heart exploded, growing and growing before it faded.

“Upside down,” said everyone in the boat but me.

My own heart expanded for Adam. I whispered, “I know what he meant.”

I stood up and started to put one foot over the side of the boat.

“Where are you going?” Sean grabbed me by the wrist. “Are you bailing on us? You’re not upset, are you? Adam’s planning to ask you to go to Birmingham with him in a couple of weeks. He thought you needed a while to cool off but the fireworks would soften you up.”

“Birmingham!” I exclaimed. “That’s serious!”

“That’s what I said to Adam.” Sean raised one eyebrow at me.

I watched a Roman candle pulse into the air: foop, foop, foop, with very bad aim, too low. In silhouette, the people in the boats closest to the shore ducked and covered their heads with their arms. “Adam makes terrible plans,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” Sean said in his most persuasive voice. “Wait a few weeks like he said, and maybe you’ll feel differently. He’ll explode something else to impress you. It wouldn’t be my choice of method to get Rachel back if I were in the doghouse with her, but there’s no accounting for taste.” Rachel batted her eyelashes at him.

And I gaped at him. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying with fireworks flashing and booming above us, but I did believe that, while trying to put in a good word with me on his brother’s behalf, Sean had managed to insult both of us. Then I shook my wrist out of his grasp. “It’s a terrible plan because I’m not waiting a few weeks.”

Before Sean could stop me again, I leaped out of the boat and into the one next to it. The men relaxing in lawn chairs in the bow hardly had time to turn around to see what blonde goddess had descended on them before I traversed that boat and leaped over the side, onto a pontoon boat loaded with drunks. They braced themselves as the boat shifted under their feet, but they were inebriated enough and fascinated enough with Adam’s light show that they assumed it was the alcohol making them sway rather than a teenage pirate on a mission. They never turned around.

Quite a few boats were like that. A few had more alert passengers who stared at me. One old lady tried to lecture me about boat-hopping among strangers at night, a nice girl like me. And a couple of times I had to convince people to start their engines and putter a few feet forward so I could make it to the next boat without going into the lake. At the beginning of this summer I would have sworn I was not capable of drowning, but my last wakeboarding accident had convinced me I was wrong about that.

And it would be my luck to go out that way: floundering in the lake and succumbing under the boats to the jaunty tune of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

The boats always obliged. Whether I knew the people in the boat or not, the driver idled closer to the next boat, just to stop me from interrupting the fantastic show overhead. I chose a safe path through the boats that would put me onshore at the yacht club wharf, rather than heading straight for the hill where the fireworks were coming from. It would be just our luck for me to get stabbed through the heart by a wayward rocket just as I was making my way back to Adam.

Come to think of it… wasn’t Adam the one more likely to get killed by a rocket, since he was the one setting off rockets? The detail was different, but our luck was the same. I pictured reaching the hill a few minutes too late and the other pyromaniacs pointing to the chalk outline sprinkled with ashes that was the only evidence left of his body.

I leaped from the last boat, hit the yacht club wharf, and ran.

Thick ropes anchoring huge white sailboats crisscrossed the wharf, but I was a master at dodging maritime obstacles. I skittered toward shore as fast as my flip-flops would carry me, all the time watching the hill. Between explosions, the hill was dark and silent. Adam had been killed, and the show was over. Then pink light flickered through the grass, and silhouettes ran away from the light with their ears covered. Funny that I recognized Adam from the way he ran in silhouette. I would have known him anywhere.

I slowed to a walk now that I knew he wasn’t in (immediate) danger of dying. I hadn’t realized how hard I’d been running, but my lungs felt like they were about to fall out as I turned backward to watch the latest rocket arc impossibly high into the air. It paused, quiet. Then it burst into a million golden sparks, and the thunder came afterward to thump me in the chest and take my breath away all over again. The sparks faded into the black sky, then came back in a lovely surprise, bursting suddenly brighter and chasing one another around in circles as they fell. The entire bouquet of golden light reflected in the water. The lake looked like it was rising to meet the light instead of the other way around.

Foop, foop, foop. Three more rockets left the hill. I looked in that direction for Adam’s silhouette.

That’s when I saw him running down the hill— oh no, massive explosion, every man for himself, run for your lives! I did have that thought for a split second, but as I watched him, I saw he wasn’t running away from anything. He was running toward me.

The fireworks exploded in midair and lit him up. Two new burn holes had appeared in his T-shirt, giving me a peek at his chest. Soot streaked his tanned face, and his curls were dotted with small lengths of white straw—courtesy of ducking and covering on the ground, I guessed. He grinned at me.

We were on a collision course. Unless a rocket crashed down to explode just above our heads in the next ten seconds, we would meet in the middle, and I had no idea what to say. I’d told Sean that a few weeks was too long to wait to see Adam again. Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I should suggest we forgive each other but let things cool down between us before we started up again. We could have some long talks and discuss where we’d been and where we were going. That would be the adult thing to do—

He threw down his lighter, grabbed me with both hands, and kissed me.

I let him kiss me for a few seconds, shocked and relieved.

Explosions startled me. I’d gotten so lost in Adam, I’d forgotten we were standing in a fireworks display.

Then I moved forward, into him. I kissed him harder and put my hands in his hair, my fingers slipping past the pieces of straw. I wanted him closer.

More and bigger explosions went off behind him. I couldn’t tell whether the percussions in my chest were from the fireworks or from being chest to chest with Adam himself.

He kissed the corner of my mouth, kissed my cheek, and growled in my ear, “Fireworks or what?”

“Stars and Stripes Forever” ended with a flourish of horns. The silence grew, waiting for another rousing patriotic tune to fill it. The silence stretched. Then there was another noise—foop, foop, foop, foofoofoofoofoo—endless launches of rockets. The music had stopped because no one would hear it over the grand finale of explosions.

I put both hands on his chest and backed him up a pace. The black sky behind him was filled with color. I said, “Go. Hurry. You can still help. You’re missing it.” He pulled me close again and gazed down at me, tracing one finger so tenderly along my cheekbone. His finger was black, and he might be leaving an attractive black streak across my skin. I didn’t mind. The way he was looking at me with those light blue eyes, I had never felt more beautiful.

He bent his head close to my ear again so I could hear him whisper, “I’m not missing anything.” Check out another

romantic and fun book from

Jennifer Echols:

The Ex Games

seat belt

(sēt’ belt) n. 1. a trick in which a snowboarder reaches across the body and grabs the board while getting air 2. what Hayden needs to fasten, because Nick is about to take her for a ride

At the groan of a door opening, I looked up from my chemistry notebook. I’d been diagramming molecules so I wouldn’t have any homework to actually take home. But as I’d stared at the white paper, it had dissolved into a snowy slalom course. The hydrogen and oxygen atoms had transformed into gates for me to snowboard between. My red pen had traced my path, curving back and forth, swish, swish, swish, down the page. I could almost feel the icy wind on my cheeks and smell the pine trees. I couldn’t wait to get out of school and head for the mountain.

Until I saw it was Nick coming out the door of Ms. Abernathy’s room and into the hall. At six feet tall, he filled the doorway with his model-perfect looks and cocky attitude. He flicked his dark hair out of his eyes with his pinkie, looked down at me, and grinned brilliantly.

My first thought was, Oh no: fuel for the fire. About a month ago, one of my best friends had hooked up with one of Nick’s best friends. Then, a few weeks ago, my other best friend and Nick’s other best friend had gotten together. It was fate. Nick and I were next, right?

Wrong. Everybody in our class remembered that Nick and I had been a couple four years ago, in seventh grade. They gleefully recalled our breakup and the resulting brouhaha. They watched us now for our entertainment value, dying to know whether we’d go out again. Unfortunately for them, they needed to stick to DVDs and Wii to fill up their spare time. Nick and I weren’t going to happen.

My second thought was, Ah, those deep brown eyes.

Maybe snowboarding could wait a little longer, after all.