Free The Boys Next Door by Jennifer Echols

surface, the water glowed bright green for an instant. The lake said foop .
    Adam would probably ask me to help him collect the bottle rocket sticks off the lake bottom tomorrow, another one of his dad’s rules. I didn’t want to do this, because I’d had an unpleasant bryozoa scare climbing up the ladder of their dock last year. But I preferred the boys shooting bottle rockets into the lake to shooting them toward my yard, which tended to give my dad a nervous breakdown. And I couldn’t ask them to stop altogether. Adam got testy if he went more than a few weeks without setting something on fire.
    The boys shouted greetings to Adam and shared their bottle rockets with him. He watched the sparks with delight and hardly a hint of evil. Then he handed me a bottle rocket and lit it for me with a lighter from his pocket. I finally relaxed. We forgot all about Rachel and Sean.
    For a little while.

    During the school year, Holly and Beige had said micro-miniskirts should be the official tennis team uniform because we could move better during games, and material wouldn’t get bunched between our legs like it did with shorts. I’d never had the material-bunching problem myself. I figured Holly and Beige made this up so they’d have an excuse to wear micro-miniskirts to class when we had a tennis meet right after school. Thank God they’d graduated and I was (mostly) rid of them. For me, tennis and fashion didn’t mix. Serena Williams I was not.
    Normally I would have worn gym shorts and one of Adam’s huge T-shirts to play tennis with Tammy. However, the tennis courts sat between the high school and the main road through town, which also ran past the movie theater, the arcade, and the bowling alley. If Sean was out with Rachel, he would drive right by. So it was the official tennis team micro-miniskirt for me.
    “Is that part of your makeover to catch Sean? Wearing that skirt when you’re not forced to?” Tammy asked as we passed each other, changing ends of the court. We were the only idiots playing tennis on a ninety-degree Saturday night, so we had the court to ourselves. Besides the ball bouncing and the rackets whacking, the only sounds were the cars swishing by on the road and the buzz of floodlights overhead. Still, the echo off the asphalt court made it hard for us to hear each other while we played. So we’d been carrying on a conversation like this for an hour, one sentence every two games when we traded sides.
    She beat me twice, and we passed at the net again. “I’ll admit it’s not much,” I said. “I need a new plan, also referred to as The Back-Up Plan When Stage Three: Cleavage Has No Effect on Cradle Robbers. Any advice?”
    I won one game, and then she beat me again. As we approached the net, she suggested, “Make him jealous? I don’t know. I’m no good at being sneaky and going behind people’s backs.”
    I dropped my racket with a clatter on the court. “Don’t look now”—which of course was her cue to look—“but maybe my old plan worked after all! Sean dumped Rachel already, and the pink truck is coming for me!”
    The pink truck was an enormous pickup that used to belong to the marina, so old that the red paint had faded to pink and the VADER’S MARINA signs had peeled off the sides. Cameron had taken possession of the pink truck when he turned sixteen. We gave him no end of hell about it. Then, when he graduated from high school, his parents gave him a new truck to take to college, and Sean had inherited the pink truck.
    Sean, being Sean, had managed to make the pink truck seem cool. There were many rumors around school about the adventures of Sean in the pink truck with Holly or Beige. I had dreamed of my own adventures in the pink truck. Now my dreams had come true!
    Except that in my dreams, I was not a dork. “Sean came to pick me up!” I groaned. “This is terrible! What do I do?”
    “Act casual,” Tammy said in a level tone, watching the truck park just outside the