Sean stood up more slowly than Adam had, taking deep, ragged breaths, clearly hurting. I waited for Adam to decide Sean had had enough of his wrath for now, and turn to Rachel. I looked forward to hearing what Adam would call her, to save me the trouble. But he never even glanced in her direction. He said again, still to Sean, “What the hell is the matter with you?” His voice broke.

Now Cameron and McGillicuddy came jogging through the trees, with Tammy behind them, and more interested spectators from the party bringing up the rear. Even though the fight was over, McGillicuddy stepped between Sean and Adam. A smart move, because these things had been known to flare up again. Which was exactly what the ring of spectators hoped for. Tammy tried to catch my eye. I shook my head.

Cameron took Adam’s face in both hands and peered at the big smudge under his eye. He let Adam go and hissed at me, “Get rid of him in case Mom comes down.” I felt honored to be included in the intrigue. But why couldn’t Cameron ask me to get rid of Sean instead?

at was okay, for now. Adam needed me. I put my hand on his back and said, “Walk away.” We moved through the yard, toward the side of the house. A pine needle hung from one of his brown curls in the back.

After fifteen paces, his breathing had slowed almost to normal. I felt him start to turn. “Don’t look back,” I said.

He took a deep, calming breath through his nose. He was fighting the part of ADHD that made him short-tempered and impulsive. e part that made him attempt to smash his big brother’s face in.

“Try not to take it so seriously,” I said in what I hoped was a soothing tone. Which was hard for me. Generally I was about as soothing as body lotion with skin conditioners and ground glass, but this was important. “It’s probably a temporary thing. He’s mad at you for making the size jokes this afternoon—”

“I didn’t start the size jokes!”

“You finished the size jokes. So he seduced your girlfriend. She said yes because you’ve been together for a whole month. Maybe things have gotten into a rut.” We passed the corner of the house and reached the side yard, where no one lingering in the front yard could see us. I stopped him under the floodlight hanging from the eaves. “Let me look at your eye.” I reached up to cup his face in my hands, like Cameron had.

“Is my mom going to notice?”

Yes, I thought. “I can’t tell,” I said. I didn’t want him dashing after Sean to get revenge. “Maybe if we cleaned it up.” He pulled off his T-shirt, wet the edge of it with the faucet attached to the house, and brought it to me.

“Sit down,” I said. “I can hardly see you way up there.”

We sat in the grass. I leaned close, tilted his face to the light, and wiped at the half-dried blood. He watched me with serious eyes.

And I felt that tingle again. e same pesky tingle I’d felt when I hugged him in the living room, when I thought he was Sean. Only I knew now he wasn’t Sean. And I’d seen Adam without his shirt a million times, including hours of no-shirt goodness that very afternoon. The tingle stayed.

is was only natural, I guessed. We both were still pumped full of adrenaline. We were excited about the fight and mad about Sean and Rachel, and jealous. I was leaning close to him, our lips almost touching. He still smelled like cologne, plus something sexier.

“Well?” His voice broke again. He cleared his throat and said in his deep boy-voice, “Well?”

“Well, it’s not coming off.” I gave the oozing blood one last gentle wipe and sat back on my heels. “I’m sorry about what happened.” He shrugged and kept giving me that intense, serious look. And I kept tingling. It was almost like he was sending me his adrenaline telepathically, and I could feel what he was feeling.

Which didn’t make sense. Because he ought to be heartbroken about Rachel. But this felt good.

“e fireworks are starting without you.” I stood up quickly and held out my hand to help him up (for show only—he weighed twice as much as me). He put his shirt back on. Pity. Keeping my hand on his back, I steered him toward the muffled noise of explosions, down through the shadowy backyard to the dock.

Boys—mostly football players my age or a year older—lit bottle rockets and held them until the fuse sparked almost down to their fingers. At the last possible second, they tossed them into the black lake. A pause. Then deep under the 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.

e boys shouted greetings to Adam and shared their bottle rockets with him. He watched the sparks with delight and hardly a hint of evil. en 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. ank 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!”

e 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. en, when he graduated from high school, his parents gave him a new truck to take to college, and Sean had inherited the pink truck.