The Boys Next Door Read Online Free PDF Page B

us to share, and sat down again.
    “That’s bullshit,” Cameron said.
    “I was the one who helped her most with the air raley last summer,” my brother said.
    “Tough act to follow,” Adam told me, shrugging on his life vest. I would have treasured this comment forever if I hadn’t been high on Sean.
    But I was. So I peeled off my life vest and dropped it on the floor of the boat, sat daintily in the seat where Adam had been, and crossed my legs. Like my fingers had a mind of their own, they bent inward and rubbed my palm where Sean had touched me. I tingled all over again at the thought. Or maybe I tingled because my body was still jacked from how hard I’d worked my muscles out on the water. Either way, I felt so lovely and sated just then, with the sun in my eyes. I wished Adam weren’t jumping in for his turn.
    Because watching Adam wakeboard was not relaxing. He wasn’t careful when wakeboarding. Or in general. He was the opposite of careful. His life was one big episode of Jackass . He would do anything on a dare, so the older boys dared him a lot. My role in this game was to run and tell their mom. If I’d been able to run faster when we were kids, I might have saved Adam from a broken arm, several cracked ribs, and a couple of snake bites.
    Knowing this, it might not make a lot of sense that Mr. Vader let us wakeboard for the marina. But we’d come to wakeboarding only gradually. When we first started out, it was more like, Look at the very young children on water skis! How adorable . One time the local newspaper ran a photo of me and Adam waterskiing double, each of us holding up an American flag. It’s okay for you to gag now. I can take it.
    But Mr. Vader was no fool. He understood things changed. After the second time Adam broke his collarbone, Mr. Vader put us under strict orders not to get hurt, because it was bad for business. Customers might not be so eager to buy a wakeboard and all the equipment if they witnessed our watery death. To enforce this rule, the punishment for bleeding in the boat was that we had to clean the boat. Adam cleaned the boat a lot last summer.
    At the end of the rope, Adam signaled that he was ready to go. I told Cameron, who was driving now. He started too slow, and Adam tried to get up too fast. “Down,” I called.
    “Come on, LD,” Sean muttered as if Adam were right in front of him. Even though I’d heard this joke one billion times and didn’t think it was funny, I made sure to look over at Sean and laugh until he saw me laughing. He laughed too.
    Adam had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This was why I didn’t see a lot of him during the school year. I was in all the advanced classes, and he definitely was not. Sean had lots of fun with this. The boys actually called Adam ADD to his face. They called him LD (for Learning Disability). They called him SAS (for Short Attention Span) and Sassy and Sassafras. They told him the short bus was coming for him. He had a prescription to help him concentrate in school, but he refused to take it because it made him feel dead. In other words, he was perfectly happy with ADHD. Or he would have been, if the boys had left him alone about it.
    Sometimes I thought he took stupid risks to make up for being slow in school. Or maybe he was just like that. The skull-and-crossbones pendant was perfect for him. The boys told him if he improved his grades, when he graduated he could apply to pirate school.
    Cameron brought the boat around and straightened the rope. I told him Adam was ready to go. This time they got it right. Adam got up. Immediately he told me to speed up, and I told Cameron. Adam did a tantrum to blind, which meant he backflipped where he couldn’t see and ended with his back to the boat. He preferred tricks with a blind landing. He told me to speed up again, and I told Cameron. Adam did a turn to blind, touched down on the edge of his board, and miraculously managed not to fall.
    “Good save!”