Before that night, I’d never seen Sean and Adam voluntarily have a talk with each other. Ever.

“Well, fine,” I said. “I won’t go out with Sean either.”

We both jumped when a bird burst from a dogwood near us and soared away. Adam watched it as it went. I watched Adam. He tracked the bird with his eyes, chin lifted as if he’d regained his dignity. I expected the next thing out of his mouth to be an apology for doubting me.

What he said was, “Who’s your next choice? Cameron?”

Brilliant! I hardly even registered the sarcasm in Adam’s voice. I snapped my fingers. “at’s not a bad idea. Cameron’s three years older than me. He’s about to be a sophomore in college. My dad will pass out. He’ll be so happy to have me dating a high school junior again! Even if it’s you.”

“Plus, you and Cameron are so familiar with each other anyway, since you’ve already made out.” His blue eyes accused me. This time his sarcasm was hard for me to gloss over.

Exasperated, I put my hands in my hair, which was a mistake because it was up in a ponytail. I only managed more of a tousled, cornered-by-my-boyfriend’s-superior-logic look before putting my hands down. “Adam, we did not make out. We kissed once, when I was eleven. I should never have told you that.” I really never would have told him if I’d had any idea he would be my boyfriend a week later and he would throw it back in my face. “I am trying to solve this problem for both of us, and all you can do is be unreasonable and furious about everything.”

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to not want you to date my brothers or a freaking convicted felon,” Adam said. “What did Kevin Ye get arrested for, anyway?

Didn’t he steal a car?”

“He stole the driver’s ed car.” I laughed. Then I saw how Adam was looking at me. “He gave it back.”

“They make you give stuff back, Lori, after they arrest you for stealing it.”

I opened my mouth to respond. I was going to say something about Kevin passing driver’s ed the third time he took it, despite his brush with the law. But now Adam was giving me a look that said, I know you are not about to defend Kevin Ye. I closed my mouth.

Adam sighed through his nose, disgusted. “I can’t believe you’re trying to plan your way out of this. What we do together is none of our parents’ goddamn business, and if you try to work around what they say, you’re just giving in.”

“I’m not. It’s a means to an end. You have to think like them, Adam.” I poked at my head to signify thinking. “ink like a middle-aged man with OCD, a dead wife, and a teenage daughter. Think like a woman with three teenage sons who once ran a golf cart into the side of their granddad’s house.”

“Cameron and Sean shouldn’t have let me drive,” Adam said in his own defense. “I was seven.”

“You shouldn’t have asked to drive. You were seven.”

“And I don’t see why we can’t just run away to Montgomery.”

is idea sounded as ridiculous now as it had when he’d first suggested it last night. But the sentiment behind it—that was very sweet. As we’d argued, Adam had moved several feet away from me across the forest floor, and I’d backed against the tree. When we stood this far apart, it was hard to remember we were arguing because we wanted to be together.

Boosting myself off the tree with one running shoe, I closed the space between us, put my hand on his arm, and stuck out my bottom lip in sympathy. “I’d like to graduate from high school first.”

He looked down at my hand on his arm and muttered, “I’m not graduating from high school anyway.” I stepped even closer, put my other hand on his arm, and fluttered my eyelashes at him. I was getting good at this, if I did say so myself. “I told you I’d help you in chemistry next year.”

Stubbornly he held onto his anger. He didn’t touch me. But he didn’t back away or shake my hands off his arm, either. He said, “Even if your plan worked and they let us date again, the next time we did something wrong—”

“Why would we ever do anything else wrong? We would be very careful.”

“Lori. This is you we’re talking about. And me.”

I laughed. “I see your point.”

“The next time we did something wrong, they’d just tell us again that we couldn’t date.”

I stroked my thumbs across the golden hair on his tanned arm. “Not if we convince them that we’re meant to be together.”

“I’m not sure we are anymore.”

I looked down at the diamond and pearl ring that my mother had left to me, which my dad gave me for my birthday yesterday. Of course we were meant to be together.

My mother had seen this and as much as told me this before she died. It had just been a matter of me seeing this for myself. But if Adam didn’t believe it anymore… I looked up at him in confusion. “You’re not?”

“Not if you’re that desperate to go out with Sean.”

I pulled my hands off his arm. “So this is what it’s about. You’re still mad about Sean. What happened to what you told me a few days ago, that you’ve been in love with me forever?”

“You’ve been in love with Sean forever, and you expect me to believe you’ve switched from him to me in the past week, just like that?” I’d had enough of this. If he didn’t trust me when I said I wanted him and not Sean, what kind of boyfriend was he? I would tell him we should break up, as if my dad hadn’t broken us up already. ings would be so much easier this way. We could enjoy the rest of the summer. Our dating ban wouldn’t matter anymore, and we could go back to being friends and pretend we’d never gotten together. I hoped. Someday.

And then, something happened. e sunlight filtering through the leaves shifted on his face. He looked different. is boy I’d been staring at in disbelief and deciding to break up with… I knew it was Adam. I was in the middle of an argument with Adam. But in the dim forest light, he didn’t look like Adam. He didn’t even look like Sean, who was so much like Adam in appearance but was two years older.

is time, as Adam pierced me with those light blue eyes and privileged me with the full view of his tanned, muscular chest and the golden stubble on his face—I couldn’t quite get over the stubble—he reminded me of the senior football players whom I’d brought water and bandages to with the rest of the girls’ tennis team last fall.

Boys I’d considered so dreamy and so much older than me that I’d never have a chance with them, so why try?

It occurred to me that August football practice did begin in six or seven weeks. School would start a few weeks after that. With Sean a freshman off at college, Adam would be out of his shadow for the first time—the only Vader brother left in town. Adam would likely start for the varsity football team. He would get noticed. And he would no longer be my property all day every day like he was during the summer. I would have to share him with the other girls in my high school, including every flirtatious ditz in the lower sections of math, where he always got stuck.

I couldn’t break up with him. I couldn’t watch him date another girl, or a series of them, for the rest of high school. I would regret it for the rest of my life.

And I couldn’t afford to argue with him like this. I had to convince my dad to lift the Adam ban before the summer was over. And I had to convince Adam the plan was worth it.

Unfortunately, Adam couldn’t read my mind. “You know what?” he asked. “Screw this.” He turned on his running shoe and crashed through the fallen leaves, toward the road. He must have thought I had no defense for switching from Sean to him so fast.

I had to fix this. But jogging after him, clinging to his arm, and begging him to be reasonable would not convince him I was a terrific catch myself, one worth all this trouble. So I used a little strategy, joking my way back into his good graces. “You have no right to dis my plan,” I called after him. “Your idea of a plan is to grow a beard.”

“Hey. It’s a lot harder than it looks. I’ve only been shaving for a year.”

Good. He was joking back. That meant my humor was working on him.

Bad. He didn’t even call this over his shoulder to me. He yelled it facing forward as he stomped through the forest. I could hardly hear him. My humor was not working well enough.

I skipped after him until I caught up. I kept pace beside him, which was difficult. He was much taller than I was, with a longer stride, and he maintained a straight course while I had to dodge around bushes and briars.

“This is good,” I panted. “We’re both awful actors, as we’ve established. If we’re genuinely angry with each other, we won’t have to fake being broken up.” He never slowed down. I practically ran beside him. Branches slapped my face. Acting genuinely angry was getting easier, and I may have forgotten some of my resolve to patch things up with him. “While we’re at it,” I said, “why don’t you call me a bitch like you did a couple of nights ago?”

“Why don’t I call you a slut for hooking up with me just to get Sean?” he snapped.

“Why don’t I call you a slut for hooking up with a different girl every month for the past year?” I yelled at him. “I’ll bet your so-called Secret Make-Out Hideout isn’t even a secret. You’ve had your license for three weeks. You probably took Rachel there before you took me.” He stopped, finally, and gave me a shocked look. Ha—he could dish out the jealous accusations, but he couldn’t take them.

But I didn’t want to one-up Adam. I wanted to be with him and make out with him again, preferably sooner rather than later. “Hey.” I reached over to grab his hand.

Before I could touch him, he dodged away and jogged ahead again. We’d reached the edge of the forest. He barreled right through the blackberry brambles and onto the road.

“Adam,” I called, determined he wouldn’t get away before we could talk this out. I ran after him, hardly noticing the briars scratching my legs. I emerged onto the road in bright sunlight and the full glare of my dad and Frances, who were holding hands.

My first thought when I saw them was, Why are they walking together? Frances was supposed to be my dad’s employee. I was used to seeing them talking, but never touching. en I remembered Frances had not been my nanny for years, and she and my dad were dating as of yesterday. My second thought was, Why are they walking in this heat? Nobody in their right mind would be out exercising in this heat. And—by now you are figuring out I am a little slow on the uptake—only my third thought was, Busted.

6

The instant I saw Lori’s dad and Frances across the hot asphalt road, I spun around, hoping Lori was still hidden by the trees.

She stood right behind me, in full view. And if my expression matched hers, we couldn’t have looked more guilty.

I turned back around. Her dad’s face was even worse. Glaring at me, he worked his jaw like he was going to say something, but he wanted to make sure he’d thought of the worst possible insult first. He turned redder and seemed to swell, like all his holes were plugged up and the pressure had nowhere to escape.

He opened his mouth.

“It was my fault,” I said quickly.

“I know!” he roared.

At the same time, Lori stepped in front of me and muttered, “Wrong thing to say, Adam.”

“Right.” I put my hand on Lori’s shoulder and pushed her an arm’s length away so it wouldn’t look like I was hiding behind her. “It’s nobody’s fault, because we didn’t do anything wrong.”

Her dad brought his hands together and popped a knuckle.

“Trevor,” Frances said soothingly, rubbing her hand on his back. But she was looking hard at me over her glasses, telling me upstanding citizens did not act this way.

When we were kids, that look from Frances could make Lori and her brother behave, and sometimes even my brothers, but I never seemed to get the message.

“I saw you coming out of the woods,” Lori’s dad shouted at me. “Together!”

“We weren’t rolling in the leaves or anything. Look, no evidence.” I put my other hand on Lori’s other shoulder and turned her around backward, hoping against hope she didn’t have scratches from the tree on her bare back, or bark on her butt.

“Get your hands off my daughter.”

Either I jerked away from her at the force of his words, or she started out from under my hands. I wasn’t sure which. She and Frances and I stared at Lori’s dad in horror.

He was excitable, yes, and he had yelled at me before, yes, but always about safety issues. He thought I was going to set his house on fire with bottle rockets or run my four-wheeler into his Beamer again. When he hollered at me about that stuff, his voice pitched into a whine like a woman.

This was not that voice. This was a full-bodied boom that meant business. He looked and sounded like a big dog defending his territory.

“Here’s what you did wrong, Adam,” he barked. “I told your parents to make it clear to you that you were not to see Lori again. You did it anyway. at’s what you did wrong.”

“But—,” I started.

“Shhh,” Lori said beside me.

“That’s—,” I started again.

“Shut up,” Lori muttered.

“—ridiculous,” I finished.

“Adam, stop talking,” Lori said.

“Adam, stop talking,” Frances repeated.

I knew I was only getting myself in more trouble. Lori’s dad unballed and balled his fists, daring me to talk back. I was beyond caring. I was right and he was wrong. I said, “Of course I’m going to see her. I live next door.”