The Boys Next Door by Jennifer Echols Read Free Book Online Page A

why you called. You’re dying to know what happened with Sean.”
    Frances was in on my Life Makeover. Not the fashion part—sheesh, look at her. She hadn’t even given me advice on what to do. I wandered into the Harbargers’ house every week or so and told her how my plan was shaping up, and she told me I was being ridiculous and it would never work. I guess I went to her because I wanted to hear some motherly input. We had the perfect relationship. She wasn’t really my mother, so I could listen to her input and then do the opposite. The difference between me and girls with mothers was that I didn’t get in trouble for this.
    “Let me guess,” she said. “When Sean saw you in a bikini, he acted incrementally more cozy to you. Therefore you expected him to profess his love. You honestly did. And he didn’t do a thing.”
    “Rrrrrnt!” I made the game-show noise for a wrong answer. I told her what had really happened.
    “What?” she said when I told her Adam beat Sean at calisthenics. “What?” she said when I told her I landed the air raley. “What?” she said when I told her Sean wiped out. As I got to the part about Sean touching my tummy repeatedly , she interrupted me so often that I had to pitch a frustrated fit. I threw the phone down to the grass, cupped my hands around my mouth, and hollered across the lake, “LET. ME. FINISH!” Inish, inish, inish , said my echo. I picked up the phone and told her the rest of the story, ending with my plan to implement Stage Three that night.
    “But you don’t really think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will solve all your problems, do you?” she asked.
    “Of course not. I think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will show Sean I’m ready for him.”
    “Lori, no girl is ever ready for a boy like Sean. How were finals?” Clearly she wanted to change the subject to impress upon me that boys were not all there was to a teenage girl’s life. As if.
    “Finals?” I asked.
    “Yes, finals. To graduate from the tenth grade? You took them yesterday.”
    Wow, it was hard to believe I’d played hopscotch with the quadratic equation only twenty-seven hours ago. Thinking back, it seemed like I’d sleepwalked through the past nine months of school, compared with everything that had happened today.
    Time flew when you were having Sean.
    Mr. Vader let the boys throw a party at their house every Friday night during the summers. He reasoned that if they were home, they weren’t out drag racing the pink truck against Mrs. Vader’s Volvo. So I’d been to a million of these parties. It should have been old hat. Yet it was new hat. I had put on my seductress bonnet. Ha! Not really. This would have dented my hair, which I’d blown out long, straight, and bryozoa-free.
    We’d had a lot of rain in May, which made the lake full, the grass lush, the trees happy, and the ground soft. Walking through my yard into the boys’ yard in high heels was like wading in the lake where the sand was deep, feet sinking with every step. I felt like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (tenth grade English) hiking through pastures to a house party, her petticoat six inches deep in mud. Wait a minute—oh crap, I’d forgotten my petticoat.
    And what ho, cheerio, here was Mr. Darcy getting his groove on with Miss Bingley under a massive oak tree. Actually, it was only Adam and Rachel.
    I did a double take. Adam pressed Rachel against the tree, kissing her. Deeply.
    This shouldn’t have surprised me. They’d been together for a month. He was my age, and she was a year younger, so neither of them had a driver’s license. But they met at the arcade or the bowling alley. I’d even seen them kiss before, a quick peck. I’d just never seen them kiss like this .
    Knowing Adam, I would have thought his love life would be like every other part of his life: dangerous. It started that way. Since middle school, he’d followed in Sean’s footsteps, coming on to a