“Drop,” Adam whispered from below. “I’ve got you.”
I took one last deep breath. I had to psych myself up to take risks. I was not like Adam. I counted in my head, one, two, three… and could not quite bring myself to let go. I started over. One, two, I wanted to see Adam, didn’t I? Three.
“Oof!” Adam caught me all right, with the side of his head. I could tell by the feel of his skull on my foot as I kicked him. He grabbed me as best he could anyway, and we half landed, half fell in the pine needles.
He lay facedown on the ground. I flopped him over on his back to make sure he was alive. If he had a concussion, we’d have to call the ambulance, which meant we’d get caught and he’d get sent to military school. On the bright side, maybe the military school would not take him if he had brain damage. “I’m so sorry.”
“Worth it,” he grunted. He rolled onto his feet like a ninja and grabbed my hand. “Hurry, before they release the hounds.” We ran through the dark yard, chased by imaginary barking noises. We didn’t have far to go. He stopped in the woods halfway between my house and his and made an
“after you” gesture at the ladder of his tree house.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “A family of foxes lived in it last year.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve cleaned it out a little since then.”
I climbed the ladder and peeked up into the tree house. His old sleeping bag covered the plywood floor. Pillows cushioned the plywood walls.
“Ohhh, this is so cool.” He’d gone out of his way to plan this. I climbed the rest of the way up and slid across the soft padding to make room for him. He sat beside me.
The tree house was smaller than I remembered. It had seemed like a kingdom floating above the forest when we were kids. Now we could stretch out, but just barely.
He leaned behind me and flicked his lighter. A candle sputtered to life. The soft light kissed his intense face, sparkled in his beard, smoothed the worried lines between his brows.
“We’re going to catch the tree house on fire,” I warned him. “And the forest, your house, the marina, the whole neighborhood. My dad will be so pissed.”
“It’s in a container.” He showed me the candle in a jar. “And it’s on a metal pie plate. Check me out. I think ahead.”
“You do!” I really was impressed, because padded tree houses and candles in jars were not like Adam at all.
I sat back against the pillows and watched him. He put his hands behind his head and relaxed against the pillows too. We sat a little apart from each other, but our legs made an angle and our feet met in the middle. I stroked his broad, tanned foot with my pinky toe. He didn’t shy away, but he didn’t make a move on me either.
He took a deep breath and let out a slow sigh. “It’s been a long time since I’ve sat outside at night,” he said. “Well, it seems like a long time. I guess it was only three weeks ago, on your birthday, in my Secret Make-Out Hideout.”
“That fateful night,” I said ruefully.
“I forgot how loud it is out here,” he said.
We listened for a long time, and I stroked his foot with my toe.
“And how many layers,” I finally said. “A low hum on the bottom, then a medium, then a high hum. That’s the background. Then there’s the croaking, like a chanting, and every few seconds a chirp.” I moved my toe to the underside of his foot, where he was ticklish.
Now he jerked away, but he still didn’t take the hint and scoot in my direction.
I reached over and slid my hand underneath his shirt.
The hard muscles of his stomach jumped at my touch. I almost laughed—not because it was funny, but because I was so overwhelmed with surprise that I could make his body react like that.
“If you could draw this sound,” I said, “it would look like the surface of the lake when you dribble water into it. A circle around a drop.” I put my fingers together on his skin, then expanded them outward, trailing my fingertips. “Another circle.” I moved my fingers and expanded them out. “Another circle.” I moved my fingers. “And lines between them, as you move the water drops from one place to another on the surface.” I dragged my finger up his stomach to his chest.
He gasped.
I did laugh out loud this time. “Sorry.”
He put his hand on top of my hand, with only his T-shirt between them. “Don’t be sorry.” Then he slid his hand across his chest, onto my shirt, and ventured underneath. He did this very cautiously, probably waiting for me to hit him. I did not.
“I hear what you mean about the circles.” He drew expanding circles with his fingertips in different places on my tummy, just as I’d done to him. “And the lines. But to me, it wouldn’t look like the surface of the lake. It would look like fireworks.” He dragged one finger from the waistband of my shorts upward, dipping into my belly button and out again. A bottle rocket shooting off.
My whole body was going up in flames as I watched him in the candlelight. Any second he would lean forward to kiss me, and it would be a doozy.
Instead he asked, “Do you remember this?” Sitting up again, he reached behind a pillow and pulled out a weathered wooden sign that had hung over the ladder years ago.
The letters we’d scratched with a pocketknife were still visible.
“Oh my God.” I laughed. “KEEP OUT JERKS. You remember that day?”
“Of course I remember,” he said. “Sean told us that we couldn’t play, and McGillicuddy and Cameron sided with him—”
“I hated when they ganged up on us,” I mused.
“—and usually we did what they said and hung around them like abused dogs. This time we said to hell with them and came here. We made this sign and nailed it to the tree.”
“And then we waited for them to notice we were gone and come looking for us,” I said. “They would see that we were the cool ones and they were the ones excluded, and they would rue the day, I tell you!” I thought for a moment. “And we ate Double Stuf Oreos out of the bag and talked, and finally we went home. They never did miss us and I doubt they rued the day, but it was a nice afternoon.” I thought again. “Do you have any Double Stuf Oreos?” He gave me a reproving look. I wished I hadn’t said this, because now it seemed like I didn’t appreciate everything else he’d brought.
I started, “I’m just jok—”
He reached beneath a pillow and dragged out a package of Double Stuf Oreos.
Frances had never bought Double Stuf Oreos for McGillicuddy and me. One stuff was enough, she said. All we got was single-stuff whole-wheat faux Oreos from the organic grocery store. I would not swear to it, but I’d bet the stuff was made of tofu. Mrs. Vader, in contrast, did not go to such pains for her family, or perhaps she was just tired. This would have made her home a very attractive place for me to hang out even if there had been no boys. With boys and Oreos, it was heaven.
I lifted the chocolate lid and dug into the icing. “Mmmmmm,” I said. It was even better than I remembered. Mmmmmm, I put the rest of it in my mouth and shamefully, I might have forgotten Adam was sitting there, until I looked up and noticed he was watching me. “Wha?” I asked around cookie.
“You look like you are really enjoying that Oreo.”
Embarrassed, I swallowed. “I beg your pardon. I have been living on an athletic training diet of microwave pizza and Frances’s muscadine chutney from five years ago.”
“Is chutney supposed to age? Yikes.” He munched his own cookie and scooted the bag closer to me. “Have another.” I dug into the bag and munched on a second cookie, happily looking around our dark, cozy nest in the flickering candlelight. “The tree house seems smaller,” I said. “You seem bigger.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“But the Double Stuf Oreos taste exactly the same.” My voice cracked from a crumb caught in my throat. I might need to bail out of the tree house and drink from the lake.
“I’m sure they have very good quality control.” Then the boy who Never Planned Ahead dug under yet another pillow to produce two bottles of water. He always brought two, I’d noticed. Either he was afraid of my cooties, or he knew I was afraid of his cooties, ever since the time years ago when Sean spit in my Coke.
“Thank you so much,” I croaked. As I sipped the cold water, I eyed him. Except for the beard, he looked relaxed and innocent, which was not like him at all. “So, what’s the occasion?”
“What do you mean?” he asked too quickly. “I wanted to see you. I’ve been dying to see you.”
“Right, but normally you would just spontaneously drag me into the woods. If you’ve engineered all this, something’s up.” He blinked innocently at me for a few more seconds, then gave in. “Okay. It’s about the plan.”
“Your plan for us to run away to Montgomery? Let me guess. You’ve decided we can stay in the tree house and live on Double Stuf Oreos instead.” I slid my hand onto his thigh. “That’s actually not a bad idea.”
He looked at my hand. “No, it’s about your plan to change your dad’s mind about me.” He picked up my hand. “I have something important I want to ask you.” He kissed my hand. “You know, when you were out with Parker and Cameron, I got angry.”
“You brought me here and wined and dined me”—I nodded toward the Oreos—“just to tell me this? Your temper is not news.” He put our hands under his chin and locked eyes with me. “Sean’s next, isn’t he?”
He seemed so earnest, I didn’t want to leave this question hanging in the air. I wanted to reassure him. But I didn’t want to lie to him, either. He would have seen through it, anyway. He already did. Sean was my last resort, if only I could figure out a way to use him.
“Don’t go out with Sean,” Adam said. “Stop the plan. Just give your dad some time to cool down, like my parents wanted. Maybe we won’t have the rest of the summer together. But in the fall, I’ll do my best on the football team. Everybody loves football players, right? We seem so all-American and wholesome.” I took back my hand. “College football players have been involved in a rash of shootings.”
“We’ll worry about that later. This is high school, and I can be the hometown darling if Coach lets me start as quarterback.”
“What are the chances of that?” I asked. “I mean, I have every confidence in you, but you have to get past that rising senior with a sixty percent completion rate in last year’s postseason.”
He just looked at me. Most boys seem taken aback when I spout sports statistics, as if girls aren’t allowed to keep up with that sort of thing. Not Adam. He was used to me. He was staring at me because he was honestly trying to convince me his own plan would work.
“I have every confidence in you,” I repeated.
He huffed out a breath through his nose like he didn’t believe me. “Plus, I swear I will not get put on academic probation this year. I will make the minimum GPA for eligibility. I might even stay a tenth of a point or two ahead.”
“A 2.2?” I asked. “Gosh, Adam, don’t put yourself out.”
“I’m serious, Lori. I will be a model citizen all semester long, and by Christmas surely your dad will let us be together, if you’ll just forget about your plan. And Sean.”
“And we wouldn’t see each other all that time?” I contemplated a whole summer and fall without him. We were supposed to spend the Fourth of July together. He would start as quarterback in the fall, like he said, and I was supposed to go with him to parties after games. And what about the homecoming dance?
He shook his head. “We would sacrifice the short-term for the long-term goal. We would be obedient.”
“Like dogs.” I hadn’t forgotten his woof at my dad.
“Something like that.”
“I think my plan would be better. A lot faster.”
“I’m not playing.” He took my hand again. “Tell me you’ll wait for me. Please.”
I probably would have tried to talk him out of it if I’d thought he was just jealous of Sean. I mean, honestly, higher than a rock-bottom C average? Adam? That would require him to make a B in something. But there was more to it than that. He lifted his chin when he talked about my dad being proud of him and our whole town worshipping the ground he walked on. He didn’t just want to get out of this awful sitch we were in. He wanted to earn his way out.
I swallowed and said, “Okay.”
“Okay?” He hunched down so his face was even with mine and looked straight into my eyes. “Really?”
“Really.” My stomach hurt when I said it.
He sighed. His whole body went limp with relief on the sleeping bag. “Thank you. You won’t be sorry. Now, there’s one more thing.”
“Oreos are poisonous? Then I’m screwed.” I laughed. “Hey, then it really would be like Romeo and Juliet, if we both ate poisonous cookies and died here in your tree house together.”
He stared blankly at me.
“Adam. Everybody has to read Romeo and Juliet. Did you flunk ninth grade English?”
“I made a D-minus. No, that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say, I was so happy that night we made out, and I’ve been kicking myself since then that we fell asleep. Now we won’t get any more time together until Christmas, maybe not then, maybe…” Not ever. I was afraid that’s what he was thinking. I didn’t say it.