Then he glanced at me. “No offense. I didn’t mean you.”
“Nice.” I’d been so focused on the catastrophe with Adam, I hadn’t even processed that there were a lot of sex jokes in my future, courtesy of rude boys. I approached Mrs. Vader’s desk cautiously, because she looked like she’d had Just About Enough. “I wanted to remind you that you do not allow me to deliver boats, as I have been known to crash them.”
“It’s time you earned your keep around here, Lori,” Mrs. Vader snapped. “You’ve had your boater’s license for almost a year. Now you’ve turned sixteen. Whether or not you’ve learned left from right, you need to act like a grown-up. You can’t rely on the boys to do everything for you. Take some responsibility.” My jaw dropped lower and lower as she said this. First of all, I worked hard around the marina, mostly, and she paid me minimum wage. What did she expect me to do, scrub the wharf with a toothbrush?
Actually, as she seemed pretty miffed, I would not have suggested this, even in jest.
Second of all, bringing up the fact that I was directionally challenged was a low blow, since my handicap had caused me to wreck on my wakeboard and bash my forehead just three days ago.
And finally, the suggestion that I had been careless and irresponsible in sullying her youngest child with my sexiness… well, that called for a Retort. I shifted my dropped jaw to one side and gritted my teeth with the effort not to say a word. I could still salvage my relationship with Adam and convince our parents to let us date. I knew I could if I just kept my mouth shut for now, which, let me tell you, was about as ridiculous an idea as my sudden transformation into a teenage temptress.
Staying silent became even more difficult when, from behind me, Cameron moaned, “Woooo,” like his mom had dissed me good.
I pressed my lips together and backed out of the room, without so much as a “Yes, ma’am.” I was afraid of what I might say if I said anything at all.
Cameron moved past me and slid a few sheets of paper from his mom’s printer. “Hey,” she protested when he snagged a black marker and a roll of tape, but he just followed me out.
In the sun, with the office door safely closed behind us, he asked, “Why couldn’t you and Adam hook up last summer too, and the summer before? Y’all are a riot. Sure beats three-on-two water polo for my entertainment dollar.”
It was imperative that I pretend nothing about this bugged me. To Cameron, and especially to Sean, any inkling Adam and I were really worried would be like blood in the water to a shark. I waved at the paper in Cameron’s hand. “What’s with the school supplies?” He handed me the tape. Spreading one sheet of paper against the side of the building, he covered it with a big black ll in marker. He wrote an R on the other sheet and tried to hand them both to me. “Tape these on either side of you in the boat. They’ll keep you straight.” I looked at the ll and R, then at him. “I know my left from my right, thank you very much.”
“Okay then.” He pulled the boat tickets from his pocket and examined one. “The first place we’re going is about five miles to the right.” Before I thought, I gazed in that direction. Not that I could really pick out a house so far away along the forested shoreline.
“Caught ya,” Cameron said. “Your other right.”
Like Adam had taught me, I made an ll with the fingers of my supposedly right hand. If it had really been my right hand, the ll would have been backward. Oops.
“at’s not fair. Now you’ve got me thinking about it, which is what confuses me.” I took the sheets from Cameron anyway. I definitely didn’t want either of us to return them to Mrs. Vader in her office just then. Judging from her current mood, I should steer clear of her for a couple of decades. We trotted down the steps to the wharf.
“So…,” he said. “Did you and Adam do it or not?”
Risking death by taking my eyes away from the stairs beneath my flip-flops, I looked up at Cameron.
Suddenly I remembered the one time he and I had kissed, when I was eleven years old and he was fourteen and clearly very pedophilic and misguided, or perhaps just desperate. It was an awful lip-lock, especially compared with every bone-melting kiss I’d shared with Adam in the past few weeks.
Nevertheless, that’s what I thought about as I looked up at this nineteen-year-old college boy. He was asking me if I’d had sex with his brother. If I had, I would have been beyond mortified at this question. In fact, I probably would have refused to leave my house this morning, or ever. Frances could quit her gig with the fam across the lake and homeschool me.
However, as I had not, I found the question interesting. Empowering, even. People didn’t consider me a child anymore, or a tomboy. ey considered me Trouble in High Heels (or, at the moment, flip-flops—but I did own heels now). Maybe being an underage sex goddess wasn’t so bad. I fought the urge to pat my boobs underneath my bikini and test whether they’d grown.
“Adam told Mom you didn’t do it,” Cameron prompted me.
I blinked, realizing Cameron and I had paused on the stairs, facing each other. I galloped down them again, asking him over my shoulder, “Why’s your mom so mad, then?”
“Mom never believes Adam,” Cameron said. “And Adam didn’t make it easier on himself.” We’d reached the bottom of the steps. He nodded to the speedboat the boys used as a chaser when they made deliveries. “You drive the fifteen-thousand-dollar boat and I’ll drive the fifty-thousand-dollar, brand-new one. Sound okay?”
“Fine,” I muttered, stepping into the chaser boat. I did need to practice driving, even if it was a boat rather than a car. Every bit helped. I wanted to take my driving test this week—as soon as I could get off work for a few hours, drag a licensed driver with me, and convince someone to trust me with their insured vehicle. Adam and I had intended that licensed driver to be him and that insured vehicle to be his truck, but it looked like we’d blown any chance of that.
Or he had. As I puttered through the wharf behind Cameron’s boat, I felt bitter that I couldn’t grin and wave to a hot Adam at the gas pump. Hot as in obscenely good-looking with his shirt off, and hot as in an air temperature of eighty degrees at seven thirty in the morning. I couldn’t risk his mom seeing me flirting with him—not that he himself seemed to comprehend such concepts as subtlety and tactics.
At least I didn’t have to stare at the highway bridge all day like he did, with LORI LOVES ADAM freshly painted among the other graffiti of love. Last night it had seemed daring and romantic. Now I wished the words weren’t there to taunt Adam—in red, no less—or to irk our parents further.
I throttled up to keep pace with Cameron as he arced to the right, or left, or whatever. Upstream. Away from the highway bridge. And I pondered what Cameron had said: Adam didn’t make it easier on himself. What had Adam done?
I couldn’t ask Cameron about this at the house where we delivered the boat. We had to make nice with the customer. We made nice so well that Cameron came away with money, which he pocketed. en he saw me watching him and guiltily handed me a five without showing me what the other bills were. To determine whether I was being cheated (highly likely), I would consult with Adam later on the etiquette of sharing these tips. If I was ever allowed to speak to him again.
I couldn’t ask Cameron what had transpired this morning between Mrs. Vader and Adam when we launched the chaser boat either, because the motor was too loud. And when we idled it back to the wharf, Mrs. Vader stood in the office door, motioning to me with both hands above her head and phone message slips between her fingers.
“You worried a lot of people last night,” she said as she handed me the slips and walked into the show-room, leaving me alone in the office. I examined the messages.
For: Junior
Taken by: Sean
Time: 8-ish
From: Tammy