“Spectacular.” I cut the engine and reached out for the side of the other boat so the two boats wouldn’t grind together, and so Cameron couldn’t get away.
McGillicuddy vaulted from one boat into the other and walked down the aisle until he stood in front of Cameron. “Hey, buddy.”
“Hey.” Cameron craned his neck to peer at the rock on the other side of McGillicuddy’s body. “Can’t see through ya.” McGillicuddy folded his arms. “I hear you kissed Lori in the warehouse when she was eleven.”
“Adam!” Lori shrieked.
I didn’t even care that she found out I’d spilled her secret. I focused on Cameron, who was floundering in his seat, looking at Lori and then at me looking for anybody to blame.
Finally he had to face McGillicuddy again. “I was fourteen,” he said sheepishly.
“I was fourteen a little over a year ago,” I said. “You give it a bad name.”
“If you want to teach him a lesson,” Sean called from the other side of the boat, out of the fray, “I have an idea.” He nodded toward Chimney Rock.
McGillicuddy reached down toward Cameron in the seat, and I reached forward. Between the two of us, with the threat of Sean as backup, we nudged and bullied Cameron into our boat, leaving Lori alone.
“Guys,” Lori called. “Y’all. Don’t do anything to him for coming over here with me. It was at my behest.”
“He needs to learn when to say no,” I threw over my shoulder at her as I started the engine. With McGillicuddy and Sean guarding Cameron in the bow, I idled the boat forward, easing through the crowd, until we touched land. Sean jumped out and tied the boat at the base of the path.
Cameron just sat there, refusing to budge, until McGillicuddy and I stood behind him and nudged him again. He was beginning to get the idea that there was no way out of this.
If all of us hadn’t been so accustomed to each other through years of bullying, he might have tried to escape into the water or to plead his case. But he knew it was no use, and if he begged, he’d be doing it in front of a crowd, which probably included some people he knew. He eased out of his seat and skulked to the bow like he had an appointment to walk the plank. Which, in a way, he did.
The three of us moved up the path. Sean fell in behind us, smirking. “Cameron, remember when you threw me off that first rock?” he called. “Remember I told you I’d get you back?”
“I was in third grade, you idiot. Only you would remember that.”
This was untrue. By pegging the grade he’d been in himself, Cameron had given away that he remembered it, too. And I remembered every insult as freshly as Sean did, every blow, every time Cameron had shoved me off that rock. On impulse I reached forward and slapped Cameron on the back of the head.
“Hey!” he roared, turning on me.
McGillicuddy put one meaty hand on Cameron’s chest to hold him off me. “Keep walking, my friend,” he said with a threat in his voice.
We emerged from the trees onto the highest plateau, with more graffiti sprayed on the flat surface: GO BACK! DANGER! JUMP AT YOUR OWN RISK! Cameron eyed it as McGillicuddy and Sean and I continued to walk him slowly forward, nudging him, shoving him, stepping on his bare toes.
“People really have died jumping off this thing.” He controlled his voice carefully, trying to keep face as the oldest brother, yet really, really not wanting to jump off this cliff. “If I die, Mom will kill you.”
“You should have thought of that before you made out with my little sister.” McGillicuddy pushed Cameron hard enough that Cameron stumbled dangerously near the edge, and there was a half second when I thought he would lose his balance and tumble over.
He righted himself, breathing hard. The rest of us stood in a semicircle around him—close enough that he had no escape route between us, but far enough away that he couldn’t pull a kamikaze move by grabbing one of us to take over the cliff with him. I seriously doubted Cameron had the balls to do this, but stranger things had happened, and it was in the back of all of our minds as we faced each other uneasily.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Stay away from my sister,” McGillicuddy said. “Or we will bring you right back here, and we will not be so polite about it.” I’d suppressed how I felt when I’d realized Cameron was with Lori. I’d acted cool on the boat, and I’d kept it inside for the walk up here. Suddenly I couldn’t keep it contained anymore, and it burst out of me in anger. “I wish you would go out with her again,” I challenged him.
“Adam,” McGillicuddy growled. “Wrong direction.”
“Touch her,” I yelled at Cameron. “Just look at her. If you do—when does Giselle get back from Europe? Two weeks from now? I will drive straight to your college and tell her that you called my girlfriend buried treasure, and that you were willing to whore yourself just to make her daddy mad. And then I will take Giselle out for coffee to console her, and one thing will lead to another…”
I could feel McGillicuddy’s eyes on me. Sean covered his mouth to keep from laughing. But Cameron watched me carefully, as serious as I was. “Giselle would not be caught dead going out with a sixteen-year-old.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
McGillicuddy had changed his mind about the effectiveness of my threat. He chimed in, “With the beard, Adam looks older. Hell, he’s taller than Sean.”
“Hey!” Sean protested.
“Okay,” Cameron said. “I mean, of course I’m going to stay away from Lori. I didn’t seek her out in the first place. She came up to me and said…” I took a step toward him.
He eyed me. “… And I was just trying to help her, and you…”
I took another step toward him. I didn’t care whether he took me over the cliff with him or not. If he didn’t swear to stay away from Lori, he was going over.
“Okay!” he exclaimed. “Yes, I was wrong. Okay?” When I didn’t budge, he turned to McGillicuddy to save him. “Okay?”
“Okay.” McGillicuddy grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him away from the edge. “Let’s go.” For all their big talk and big threats, the three of them sure did hurry away from the edge now that we had this settled. They reached the trail and disappeared into the trees without looking back to see if I was following them.
I stepped all the way to the edge. The boats were tiny, and the water was dark blue here, the deepest part of the lake. In one of the boats closest to the cliff, I picked out Lori by her long blonde hair and perfect body and pink bikini. She stared up at me with her hands over her mouth. Somebody in another boat must have recognized me, or more likely thought I was Sean, because a faint chant made its way up to me: “Va-der! Va-der! Va-der!
I backed up three paces, took a running start, and jumped.
The wind was what I noticed. Underneath it I thought I could hear Lori screaming, but the wind was too loud in my ears for me to be sure. It was cold on my skin despite the light of the setting sun. The boats and the lake rushed up at me. I felt high.
Then I hit the water hard—a lot harder than I expected, harder than it had felt smacking into me the millions of times I’d jumped off the middle cliff. The impact took my breath away, but only for a second. I sank so deep in the water that I hit a patch of bone-soaking cold. That woke me up again. If I sank any farther, I wouldn’t make it to the surface before I had to take a breath. I clawed my way toward the sunbeams shining through the surface.
I burst into the air and sucked in big lungfuls of it. Now that I knew I was alive, the high was wearing off already. My skin stung where I’d hit the water. And when I saw Lori in the boat with her hands still covering her mouth, I remembered how angry I was. I swam over to her and hauled myself up on the wakeboarding platform in back.
She rushed toward me. “Are you okay?”
I frowned at her. “No, I am definitely not okay.” I wrung out my T-shirt on her pink-tipped toes.
Her expression turned from concern to irritation as she realized I was upset about her escape across the lake with Cameron. “I mean, did you break your wrist or something? Again? You look really pale.”
“I think that must be left over from the shock and horror!” I started this sentence calmly, but by the time I finished, I was yelling at her, unloading everything I felt.
Luckily my brothers and McGillicuddy had descended the rock and were heading in our direction in the other boat, so I wouldn’t have to stay here with her much longer.
She flinched at my voice. Slowly she recovered, putting her hands on her h*ps and frowning down at me. “I thought we had a nice afternoon, Adam. I thought we fixed everything.”
The other boat arrived and floated slowly past, allowing McGillicuddy to jump on next to me. I traded places with him. Then, just as Sean started the engine again to take us home, I looked her square in her green eyes and let her know exactly what I thought of her and her plan right now. I said, “So did I,” and turned toward the sunset.
11
“Stay home tonight.”
These were the first words Adam had spoken to me since he jumped off Chimney Rock last weekend. After the boys and I finished our wakeboarding practice Friday afternoon, I was tying the boat to the dock cleat when he jumped onto the wharf and bent to mutter this in my ear. He never stopped, just kept walking, carrying his life vest and wakeboard into the warehouse.
Of course, this was for the best. I glanced up at the screened porch of my house, where my dad was always watching—or if he wasn’t, I thought he was, which amounted to the same thing. Adam had taken a big risk by bending down to talk to me at all.
On the other hand, you would think a boy with as much savvy and—let’s face it—as many impulse control issues as Adam could have risked another tryst with me at some point during this whole week. He hadn’t because he was still mad about Cameron.
Plus… what did he want me to stay home for? Was he sending me a message via carrier pigeon? Or did he want me to stay home just so he’d know where I was while he went out and had fun? It was like him lately not to tell me and to expect me to play along.
And I’d had enough. I decided I should go out that night, just to spite him.
Problem was, I had no one to go with. Tammy would be out with McGillicuddy. I sure wished Rachel was available. I’d been itching to milk her for more about what had happened when she dated Adam in May. In the past he’d talked like their relationship hadn’t meant much, but last weekend at the island, he’d hinted at something more serious.
There would be no milking tonight. Rachel needed to spend Fourth of July holiday time with her family—which she said was an okay trade-off, since she got to take care of this on July the second. After a two-week hiatus for the beer infraction, the Vaders had reinstated the boys’ weekly party, just in time for a blowout tomorrow night on July the third. Rachel would be able to come to that. And she could come with all of us to watch Adam’s fireworks over the lake on the Fourth.
So nine o’clock Friday night found me sitting at my desk in my room, carefully piecing together the tail of a B-52 Stratofortress. I’d bought the model earlier in the week because McGillicuddy and Parker’s convo piqued my interest again. I missed building models. It was strangely calming to construct something according to someone else’s predetermined plan. A month ago I’d thought I needed to stop doing anything tomboyish so I could blend in with girls better and catch boys more efficiently. Now that I’d caught one and my dad had thrown him back, I didn’t see the point in trying.
As I carefully lowered my X-Acto knife to place one of the machine guns, the gun fired a cloud of bullets! At least, that’s what it sounded like. I bent to retrieve the knife, which had narrowly missed my foot, and wondered whether I’d inhaled too much glue. Then the noise came again—tiny rocks thrown against my window.
I turned out the lights, waited a few seconds with my eyes closed to adjust them to the dark, and looked outside. Adam stood between the trees. It could have been Sean
—they looked enough alike—but Sean would never hike around in the woods in the hot, humid summer night without good reason. It would mess up his hair.
Adam switched a flashlight on and off to signal me in Morse code, which I’d picked up through many years playing army. The boys always made me hold the grenades.
Dot, dash, dash, dash…
J-U-M-P
Was he referring to his fall from Chimney Rock last Sunday? Did he want a medal? I opened my window, leaned out as far as I could without losing my balance, and stage-whispered, “What do you mean, jump?”
He walked closer. I still couldn’t see his face well enough to make out whether it was Adam, but his skull-and-crossbones pendant glinted in the moonlight. He stood directly under the window and held out his arms as if he would catch me.
I looked guiltily around my dark room. I’d never snuck out of my bedroom before. I didn’t particularly want to be disobedient. I loved my dad. I wanted to get along with him. Being a wayward teen seemed like a lot more trouble than it was worth.
I looked back at Adam. He tapped his foot.
Decision made. I stuffed some pillows into my bed and pulled the covers over them. If this was supposed to be me, I had gained a lot of weight and I was not carrying it well, because I was looking awfully rectangular. However, McGillicuddy was out with Tammy and Dad was downstairs with Frances. I seriously doubted anyone would come up to check on me and discover that I had turned into polyfill.
I lowered the window until the opening was barely wide enough for me to squeeze my butt through. Then I eased out, feet first, realizing as my toes scraped the shingles that I should have worn shoes, and realizing as my thighs scraped the shingles that jeans would not have been a bad idea either. I crawled backward down the short section of the roof and hung my legs over the eaves. This was my last chance to go back. I looked up at the dark glass.