The Boys Next Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mr. Vader would pull the plug on our daily outing. No pressure. When my brother finally got around to opening up the engine, I let the boat pull me up and relaxed into the adrenaline rush.
    Wakeboarding was pretty simple. I stood on the wakeboard like a skateboard, and held onto the rope as if I were waterskiing. The boat motor left a triangular wake behind it as the boat moved through the water. I moved outside it by going over one of the small waves. Then I turned back inward and used one wave as a skateboarding ramp to take off. I sailed over the wake, and used the opposite wave as a ramp to land.
    After a few minutes I mostly forgot about the boys, even Sean. The drone of the motor would do that like nothing else: put me in this different zone. Even though I was connected by a rope to the boat and the outside world, I was all alone with myself. I just enjoyed the sun and the water and the wakeboard.
    My intention all along had been to get my wakeboarding legs back this first day. Maybe I’d do tricks when we went out the next day. I didn’t want to get too cocky and bust ass in front of Sean. But as I got more comfortable and forgot to care, I tried a few standbys—a front flip, a scarecrow. There was no busting of ass. So I tried a backroll. And landed it solidly.
    Now I got cocky. I did a heelside backroll with a nose-grab. This meant that in the middle of the flip, I let go of the rope handle with one hand, reached down, and grabbed the front of the board. It served no purpose in the trick except to look impressive, like, This only appears to be a difficult trick. I have all the time in the world. I will grab the board. Yawn . And I landed it. This was getting too good to be true.
    My brother swung the boat around just before we reached the graffiti-covered highway bridge that spanned the lake. Cameron had spray-painted his name and his girlfriend’s name on the bridge, alongside all the other couples’ names and over the faded ones. My genius brother had tried to paint his own name but ran out of room on that section of bridge.
    McGILLICUDD
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    Sean wisely never painted his girlfriends’ names. He would have had to change them too often. For my part, I was very thankful that when most of this spray-painting action was going on last summer, I was still too short to reach over from the pile and haul myself up on the main part of the bridge. I probably had the height and the upper body strength now, and I prayed none of the boys pointed this out. Then I’d have to spray-paint LORI LOVES SEAN on the bridge. And move to Canada.
    It was kind of strange Adam hadn’t spray-painted his name with Rachel’s in the past few weeks. Maybe he didn’t consider it daring enough, if Cameron had managed to do it. Adam had painted in red letters in the very center of the bridge, WASH ME. The bridge was a big part of our lake experience. Wakeboarding underneath it would have been cool. But driving the boat under the bridge while towing a wakeboarder was dangerous. Adam had been the one to discover this (seventh grade).
    My brother pointed the boat for the rail. A few summers ago, the boys had pulled the guts out of an old pontoon boat that also said VADER’S MARINA down the side. They anchored it near the shore and built a rail sticking out from it, topped with PVC pipe. You could really hurt yourself on this contraption (Adam: eighth grade) but my ride was going great, and I was in the groove. I zoomed far out from the wakeboarding boat, popped up onto the rail, slid across it on the board, and landed nice and soft in the water on the other end.
    Adam raised both fists at me. (Nice, but no love from Sean?) If Adam yelled, I couldn’t hear him over the boat motor. What I could hear as my brother paralleled the shoreline was the Thompsons and the Foshees, our neighbors hanging out on their docks. They came out to watch us practice a lot of afternoons. Cha-ching! Two sales we’d as good as made for Vader’s Marina when their