“You don’t love me,” I said. “You’re competing with Sean. Maybe you’ve even convinced yourself you love me, but it all comes back to Sean.” His expression changed from hurt back to anger. “Last Friday night in the lake didn’t mean anything to you.” Friday night had been the best night of my life. He was picking up each thing I loved about my life, grinding it to a point, and pushing it through my heart. I’d thought only Sean knew how to do that.
“The past week and a half hasn’t meant anything to you,” he went on. “The past sixteen years—”
“Sixteen years!” I howled.
“You told me you’re stuck on Sean,” he shouted. His voice made the metal wall of the warehouse hum. “You think your mother chose him for you—”
“No, I don’t!” Well, maybe I did. And maybe I didn’t care so much anymore, but this was hard to explain while yelling. “Look, Adam. Let’s say you had been in love with me all our lives, which, by the way, I don’t believe for a second.” Because why would any boy fall in love with a girl like me? “What you loved about me would have been exactly what I hate about myself. To stay the person you wanted, I’d have to stay the same. I want to change.”
“You think your mother wants you to change,” he corrected me. “Lori, when your mother said that, she was kidding.”
“You weren’t there. You don’t know. Your mother didn’t laugh.”
“My mother never laughs. It’s called a dry wit. You’re basing your whole life on one conversation you overheard when you were four years old that you don’t even remember right.”
I felt like I’d been slapped. When I’d shared my deepest secret with him, it never once occurred to me that he’d throw it back in my face. Adam, of all people, had betrayed me. I stepped out of the boat, onto the wharf. “Let’s end this now before we ruin our friendship.”
“Too late,” he called after me.
I intended to flounce across his yard and mine, but I ran straight into a cloud of gnats. I spent the rest of the walk pressing one nostril closed with my finger while I expelled gnats from the other. Eat your heart out, Adam!
Except I didn’t want him to eat his heart out. I wanted to be friends with him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to make out with him in the lake some more—that was for damn sure. I wanted him to stare longingly after me from the boat as I flounced to my house, which sounded a lot like I wanted him to eat his heart out. I didn’t know what I wanted.
I’d made it to my garage before I realized I was still wearing the skull and crossbones. I couldn’t get the knot undone. I turned the knot around to the front but still couldn’t pick it apart. e pendant was searing a hole through my skin. I cut through the leather string with garden shears and tried to grind the pendant into dust in my fist like a superhero. I opened my hand and found the outline of the skull and crossbones pressed into my palm.
I didn’t sleep well that night. is was probably a good thing. If I’d had to lie through one more dream about Sean being a tease, I would have had to slap him. When I woke up and found myself sleepwalking, who knew what wakeboarding posters I might have destroyed? I might even have found myself choking my childhood teddy bear, Mr. Wuggles, which would have traumatized me for life.
In the morning, I walked to the marina with the skull and crossbones in my pocket (actually, Adam’s pocket, the pocket of his cutoff jeans), intending to give it back to him and say something appropriate. This would have been a stretch for me, I know. To save my friendship with Adam, I would have found a way to do it.
Mrs. Vader assigned us both to the warehouse. Great, now she finally believed we were together? I tried to look at the long day with him as an opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with him. Another one. Actually, the convo the evening before had been more of a spleen-to-spleen.
I could never find the right time. He was busy locating boats to take down. I was busy checking the oil. e fulltime workers wandered in and out. Besides, this day of all days, he worked with his shirt off. Sweat glistened on his tanned muscles, and his brown hair fell in his eyes. He was so hot that I felt intimidated. He was telling me to eat my heart out, and it was working.
ere were a few instances when I could have screwed up my courage, sidled up to him, handed him the skull and crossbones, and talked him down. But whenever I started toward him with this in mind, he flashed those blue eyes at me, and I felt that slap all over again.
It was such a relief to go wakeboarding that afternoon. Yes, I’d be trapped in the boat for over an hour with Adam and Sean, but at least I was out of the warehouse and into the strong sun and oppressive humidity. e Crappy Festival show was in two days. We all needed to nail down the course we wanted the boat to follow and the tricks we planned to do—especially Sean. Maybe thinking about the show would get our minds off each other.
Or not. Adam climbed out of the water and onto the platform after busting ass four times. He had a stare-down with Sean, who was getting in the water for his turn. If two girls had been in a fight like this, one of them would have flipped over the side of the boat rather than face probably the tenth stare-down of the day. But Sean and Adam were not two girls. And because I was a girl, it stressed me out more to watch them than it stressed them to growl at each other, teeth bared. I left my seat and slid into the bow, watching ahead of us as the boat drifted across the choppy water kicked up by the afternoon traffic.
The bench sank next to me, pulling me down into the hole. “So you still want Sean?” Adam hissed. “Let me give you some advice.”
“No thanks.” I leaned further over the bow to watch the large waves. A whitecap rolled by. A whitecap? You didn’t see those on the lake very often. e water was choppier than I’d ever seen it.
“At first,” Adam went on, “we thought we’d make him want something I had. You. Now he wants something you have.”
“Boobs?” I asked, trying to sound bored.
“Your place at the end of the wakeboarding show. row a jump and fake an injury. You have to make it look like you’re really hurt, so Cameron doesn’t rib Sean about girls making sacrifices just to go out with him.”
Cameron cranked the boat to pull Sean up, and my brother spotted. With the motor roaring and Nickelback blaring, I was free to tell Adam (loudly) exactly what I thought of that plan. I sat up and turned to face him.
Before I could get the words out, he leaned close and said, “I told you before you’re not a good actress. I have a lot more confidence in you now. I thought you liked me.
You had me fooled.”
I stared into his blue eyes, trying to see what was behind them. “You really want me to throw a jump and go out with Sean?”
“This has nothing to do with me,” he said grimly.
“It has everything to do with y—”
He put his finger to my lips. “If you want Sean, this is what you need to do, because this is how he is. Love him or leave him. I’m just trying to help.” He slid off the seat with a high zipping sound of his board shorts against the vinyl and bounced toward the back of the boat. He plopped down in the seat across the aisle from my brother and crossed his feet on the edge of the boat, relaxed, satisfied by a job well done. When Sean landed a front flip, then tumbled a couple of extra times before face-planting, Adam’s shoulders shook. He was laughing.