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

it’s my first date in real life, and you’re taking me mud riding.” I’d been with the boys and Mr.
    Vader to the dirt track countless times to watch races. I’d always thought my first date would be with Sean. Adam wasn’t too far off. But I’d never imagined my first date would be with Sean’s stand-in at the dirt track. “You’re bringing sexy back.”
    He stuck out his bottom lip. “Where did you want to go?”
    “Didn’t Sean and Rachel go to the movies?”
    “Yeah, but I’ll bet she made him take her to the new Disney cartoon. That’s his punishment for stealing her from me. That and MTV. Endless reality shows on MTV.” He cracked his knuckles.

    “Adam, I don’t care if it’s Mickey and Minnie Bust a Move. We need to be there.”
    “We want to make them jealous,” he agreed, “but we can’t follow them around. We don’t want to admit we’re trying to make them jealous. And that’s exactly what we’ll be doing if we set foot in Mickey and Minnie Bust a Move.”
    I started to protest. But as I thought about it, I remembered every time I’d watched a DVD with the boys, Adam had left the room after thirty minutes, asking Cameron to call him back in for the juicy parts. And we were always telling Adam to be quiet. We couldn’t hear the movie over his CD player, or his drum set, or the roar of the blender as he made milkshakes in the kitchen. I asked, “You can’t sit through a whole movie, can you?” He frowned, which made cute little lines appear between his brows. He fished the lighter out of his pocket and flicked it, studying the flame.
    Either he couldn’t sit through a whole movie, or it hurt him too much to be around Rachel while she was with Sean. This wouldn’t help us make them jealous. But it was only the second night after the freaking shock of seeing Sean and Rachel together for the first time. Adam’s heart must be breaking every time we talked about Sean and Rachel, yet he’d come with me this far. I could be more understanding and give him a few days for the wound to scab over.
    “We don’t have to go to the movie,” I sighed, “but we need to go somewhere girls will see us. There’s no one here but boys. It’ll never get back to Sean and Rachel that we were together. Boys don’t gossip.”
    “Pah! You don’t know us as well as you think.”
    This was a disturbing prospect.
    He stuffed his lighter back in his pocket. “Here’s an idea. Call me crazy, but what if we actually enjoyed hooking up?”
    “Whoa, Nelly,” I said. “You scare me, thinking out of the box.”
    “What if we made hooking up productive?”
    “That’s what I’m talking about. Producing envy, with or without big fat teardrops.”
    “Forget about that, Lori. It’ll come without us trying so hard.” He took the box of fishhooks out of his pocket and rattled it. “You’re turning sixteen in less than two weeks.”
    That was a low blow. “You don’t have to rub it in that I forgot your birthday,” I protested. “You remember mine because yours is first.”
    “And didn’t your dad stop taking you for driving lessons after you ran his Beamer into the woodpile?”
    “Only because he told me to back to the left, and I thought I did. I would have done fine if he’d pointed instead of telling me the direction. Again, you don’t have to rub it—”
    “I’ll teach you to drive.”
    I blinked. He was a daredevil. “Around town?”
    “No, right here. It’s safer.”
    I pondered the mud field. “I might wreck the pink truck.”
    “Who could tell?”
    “I might hit somebody else.”
    “If they’re here, mud riding, they’d probably get off on it.”
    As if in agreement, Scooter Ledbetter chose this moment to start honking his horn in time to his stereo blasting Nine Inch Nails.
    “Oh, what the hell,” I said, spitting my petrified gum out the window. It had turned more of a metamorphic flavor anyway. I scooted into the driver’s seat as Adam crawled over me. Nose close to