And I couldn’t go through with it. When McGillicuddy said he was heading for the party, I stayed behind. I actually started the enormous project of picking up all the books and magazines scattered three deep on the floor of my room. After about an hour and hardly any progress, I realized that by shelving them, I was messing up a filing system I didn’t even know I had. Books I wanted to read again were thrown on one side of my bed. Bad books were abandoned by the window. Wakeboarding mags were strewn from my dresser to my desk in approximate order of how hot the boys were in them, and so forth. I gave up and sat downstairs in the den with my dad for a long time, watching Dirty Jobs.
My cell phone rang. I pried it from the pocket of my tight miniskirt. I knew girls were supposed to carry purses instead of stuffing everything in their pockets, but I needed to ease into this transition over the coming year. Sirens weren’t built in a day. “Hello?” Sean was on the other end of the line, making chicken noises.
I hung up and said bye to my dad. Again, I didn’t notify him what was going on with my many suitors. I figured the situation would change anyway in the next fifteen minutes or so.
Sean stood in the doorway of the Vaders’ house, letting all the air-conditioning out into the hot night. Waiting for me. “Where have you been?”
“Duh, I’ve been next d—”
He grabbed me, pulled me into the foyer, and slammed the door. “Rachel and Adam are inside talking. To each other! And I’ve told everybody here that you and I are together. When you didn’t show up, it looked like you didn’t love me as much as I love you.”
“Stop the presses.”
“So we need to make up for lost time.” He body-slammed me against the wall and stuck his tongue in my mouth.
Well, I just let him do it. Why not? I let him slide his hands up and down my sides, too, in case that helped the cause. If he wanted to touch my boobs, I would need to take that under advisement, but otherwise I found I had a very high tolerance for a handsome ass of a boy using me as target practice.
Besides, out the corner of my eye, I could see Holly and Beige watch us from the end of the hall. ey disappeared around the corner. Next a couple of guys from my algebra class walked very slowly by the opening, pretending not to watch us.
Sean came up for breath. I tried not to gasp quite as hard as I had after bashing my head and nearly drowning.
“How many gawkers is that?” he asked.
“Four,” I said. “Is that enough to spread it around the party? And how can you stand to kiss a girl like that when you don’t feel anything for her?” He rubbed the back of my neck, like a lover. “I feel something for you. You clean up okay. Don’t you feel something for me?” I shook my head. “I’m not feeling you, dog.”
“Don’t shake your head,” he said through his teeth. “We’re going into the party now. Don’t do anything negative. Agree with everything I say. Laugh a lot. Can you put your hands on my crotch?”
“Why, hell no, I cannot.” I didn’t remember anything like this happening in Pride and Prejudice. “Can I find Tammy, take her to the bathroom with me, and giggle about you?”
His eyes widened in admiration. “That would be awesome!”
I was getting good at this. I gave him a peck on his stylishly stubbly cheek, patted his ass, and walked into the living room.
Every head snapped up to watch me.
Including Adam’s. ere were thirty-something people in the shadowy room, and I saw him right away. He sat on the couch with Rachel, exactly where Sean had sat with her the night he insulted me. Adam wasn’t wrapped around Rachel like Sean had been. He wasn’t touching her at all. He was talking to her. ey could have been friends.
So they weren’t doing anything to make me jealous. All he did was look up at me with such fury in those blue eyes that I knew I was going to throw up.
“Help,” I croaked, putting a hand on Tammy’s shoulder.
She looked around at me. She looked at the boys she’d been talking with: Cameron and McGillicuddy. “Can Cameron help you?” she asked me coldly. “ey’re his brothers, so he could help you better. Bill and I were talking.”
Hadn’t she heard Sean’s blitzkrieg rumors? I wasn’t pretending to hook up with Adam to get Sean. Surprise! I was pretending to hook up with Sean to get Adam, and if ever something was giggle-in-the-bathroom material, this was it. I was calculating how much of this to divulge to her while Cameron and McGillicuddy were listening, when something else clicked in my brain. “Are y’all going out?”
“Yes!” McGillicuddy beamed.
Tammy beamed too, then tried to hold the smile as she realized she’d been busted.
“So,” I said to Tammy, “when you told me you came to the last party to see me, really you were using that as an excuse to see McGillicuddy.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Tammy said distantly, a tone she’d never used with me before. e tone Beige used all the time. “I guess I didn’t understand you and I were that close.”
“I guess it was my mistake,” I said.
“I want to go back to college,” Cameron said. “Linear Differential Equations class will seem so relaxing after this summer.” McGillicuddy frowned at Tammy, then moved toward me like he would pull me aside and talk to me. But McGillicuddy didn’t go out much. He’d actually asked someone out! I didn’t want to mess up this thing with Tammy for him. Not over some weird girl-jealousy that I didn’t even understand completely.
“I gotta do something,” I mumbled, pulling the skull and crossbones from my pocket. This took a couple of tries when my fist got stuck.
Across the room, Sean stood with some of his many friends. Down by his side, where the crowd couldn’t see, he motioned to me. Rachel and her friends were right behind him. If I went to him, he’d make sure they saw everything that counted.
From the sofa on the other side of the room, Adam glared at me.
I took a step toward Adam. e force of his glare was like a magnet turned the wrong way against another. I took another step toward him and felt the force in my stomach. I would never be able to reach him in the face of such force. Plus Scooter Ledbetter was trying to start a mosh pit in the center of the room. So I skirted the force like I was headed out the door to the deck. Then, when Adam bit his lip and looked down, I snuck past the repellant force and plopped next to him on the couch.
“Here.” I held out the skull and crossbones in my sweaty palm. Attractive! It didn’t matter any more. “Look,” I said in a rush, “I didn’t crash into the pontoon boat to get Sean. Even I am not that unbalanced.”
His mouth moved so little that I almost thought he used telepathy to tell me, “I don’t believe you.”
“No shit. And I’m sorry about the PDA with Sean. I don’t know what I was thinking, Adam. I want another chance with you, and I know that wasn’t the way to get it.”
“That’s okay,” he said so brightly, so unlike him, that I knew something evil was coming. “I like Sean taking my seconds.”
“See, that’s the problem,” I snapped, angry again despite myself. “You say you love me, but you’re always looking over your shoulder for Sean.”
“And you’re always looking over your shoulder for Sean. Or Holly, or Beige.” e Foo Fighters song booming through the room ended at the precise moment he said,
“Or whoever’s made you change from what you were into a first-class bitch.”
Only a moment more of silence ticked by before Fall Out Boy started. But the damage was done. People at the edge of the crowd were slow to start dancing again. ey thought we couldn’t hear them over the music as they yelled in clear voices, “Did you hear what Adam called Lori?” I told myself he wouldn’t have said anything so horrible to me if he weren’t jealous. Of course, I’d told myself the same thing when Sean mentioned the shrink. But Sean was Sean, and Adam was Adam. And while I was trying to use my intimidating brain power to turn myself into water vapor and vanish into thin air, Adam snatched the skull and crossbones from my open palm. “I have just the use for this,” he said as he stomped out the door to the deck.