Endless Summer: The Boys Next Door; Endless Summer by Jennifer Echols

was to threaten to have me arrested.”
    “Oh, pshaw.” I swallowed a mouthful of artificial flavoring. Mmmmm, igneous. “He threatens to have me arrested. It’s a term of endearment.” I walked down the dock so Adam would follow me. When I glanced back, he was still standing at the end of the dock. I threw over my shoulder, “I’ll visit you in prison.” He jogged to catch up with me, and held my arm to balance me as I slipped my heels on. I knew better than to wear heels on the dock. I’d seen too many girls wear them at the boys’ parties. Heels got caught between the planks and arrested forward motion, yo.
    “Why didn’t you tell your dad we’re hooking up?” Adam asked. “I told my mom we’re hooking up.” He sounded almost hurt, like he thought I was embarrassed of him.
    “Would you come off it? You shouldn’t have told your mom. She gave me the third degree this morning, like she knows something’s up between you and Sean. You tried to get her to ground him? How am I supposed to go out with him if she grounds him?”
    Adam shrugged and said with a straight face, “If you really loved him, it wouldn’t matter what you did when you went out, as long as you were together.” He pressed his lips together.
    “You are so full of it. Anyway, I told Dad you were giving me a lift to town to buy an eyelash comb tonight, and we might hang out for a while. I figured he’d stage an intervention if I told him the whole truth. And if I told him you and I were hooking up for real, he’d give me the fourth degree about it, and you, and sex, and… oh.” Adam nodded. “Whereas if you didn’t tell him, he’d give me the fifth degree.”
    “I guess I didn’t think it through. It didn’t seem worth the trouble, since we’ll only be together a couple of weeks.” Truth was, I’d focused on how our diabolical plan would help me get Sean. With an emphasis on Sean. Not that Adam’s relationship with my dad didn’t matter, because they did have to live next door to each other for several more years, but come on. What were a few fake dates between friends?
    We walked up the hill to Adam’s driveway. I opened the passenger door of the pink truck and climbed inside—and I do mean climbed, because when I stood on the ground, the seat was even with my head. Adam sat in the driver’s seat, weirdly. He’d driven McGillicuddy and me home from tennis the night before, but I was used to sitting in the backseat with Adam while someone older drove. I wasn’t used to seeing him as a driver himself.
    Sean’s new truck had already left the driveway. He had to drive all the way across town to pick up Rachel. No worries. We’d see them at the movies. Our biggest problem would be deciding whether to sit on the back row with the other couples who planned to make out, or further down where Sean and Rachel could see us. Then maybe there would be the additional problem of the making out. But I was getting ahead of myself. We could solve that problem when we came to it, and we hadn’t even reached the movie theater yet. We were taking a detour at the dirt track, probably to show some of Adam’s friends the new (to him) pink truck. And the hot prize of a girl inside! Yeah, probably not.
    Instead of parking in the dirt track lot, he drove around to the mud field. It was just a huge pit of mud that the owners of the dirt track lovingly sculpted into valleys and bumps, and watered daily. Build it and they would come. Boys loved to splash across the mud pit in their pickup trucks. They didn’t do this with their girlfriends, though.
    Girls wouldn’t put up with this.
    And yet here we were, perched on the lip of the pit. Scooter Ledbetter pulled up behind us in his jacked-up F-150. We couldn’t even back out.
    I ventured to ask, “Is this our date?”
    “In all its glory.” With one arm, Adam made a sweeping motion across the mud field before us.
    “Great. We’re trying to make Sean and Rachel jealous, besides which