Also by
Jennifer Echols
Major Crush
The Ex Games
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This Simon Pulse paperback edition May 2010
The Boys Next Door copyright © 2007 by Jennifer Stimson
Endless Summer copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Echols
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Designed by Mike Rosamilia
The text of this book was set in Garamond 3.
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Control Number 2010922978
ISBN 978-1-4424-0659-9
eISBN 978-1-4424-0675-9
The Boys Next Door was previously published individually by Simon Pulse.
Contents
Part 1: The Boys Next Door
Dedication Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part 2: Endless Summer
Dedication Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19 About the Author
Th e Bo ys Nex t Do o r
For my brother
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to my wonderful editor, Michelle Nagler, and my friends who helped make this book possible: Nephele Tempest, Victoria Dahl, Catherine Chant, Marley Gibson, and Caren Johnson.
anks also to everyone who sent me an e-mail or MySpace message saying you enjoyed Major Crush. You went out of your way to do this, and I appreciate it so much!
You keep me afloat.
Sean smiled down at me, his light brown hair glinting golden in the sunlight. He shouted over the noise of the boat motor and the wind, “Lori, when we’re old enough, I want you to be my girlfriend.” He didn’t even care the other boys could hear him.
“I’m there!” I exclaimed, because I was nothing if not coy. All the boys ate out of my hand, I tell you. “When will we be old enough?” His blue eyes, lighter than the bright blue sky behind him, seemed to glow in his tanned face. He answered me, smiling. At least, I thought he answered me. His lips moved.
“I didn’t hear you. What’d you say?” I know how to draw out a romantic moment.
He spoke to me again. I still couldn’t hear him, though the boat motor and the wind hadn’t gotten any louder. Maybe he was just mouthing words, pretending to say something sweet I couldn’t catch. Boys were like that. He’d just been teasing me all along—
“You ass!” I sat straight up in my sweat-soaked bed, wiping away the strands of my hair stuck to my wet face. en I realized what I’d said out loud. “Sorry, Mom,” I told her photo on my bedside table. But maybe she hadn’t heard me over my alarm clock blaring Christina Aguilera, “Ain’t No Other Man.” Or maybe she’d understand. I’d just had a closer encounter with Sean! Even if it was only in my dreams.
Usually I didn’t remember my dreams. Whenever my brother, McGillicuddy, was home from college, he told Dad and me at breakfast what he’d dreamed about the night before. Lindsay Lohan kicking his butt on the sidewalk after he tried to take her picture (pure fantasy). Amanda Bynes dressed as the highway patrol, pulling him over to give him a traffic ticket. I was jealous. I didn’t want to dream about Lindsay Lohan or getting my butt kicked. However, if I was spending the night with Patrick Dempsey and didn’t even know it, I was missing out on a very worthy third of my life. I had once Googled “dreaming” and found out some people don’t remember their dreams if their bodies are used to getting up at the same hour every morning and have plenty of time to complete the dream cycle.
So why’d I remember my dream this morning? It was the first day of summer vacation, that’s why. To start work at the marina, I’d set my clock thirty minutes earlier than during the school year. Lo and behold, here was my dream. About Sean: check. Blowing me off, as usuaclass="underline" noooooooo! at might happen in my dreams, but it wasn’t going to happen in real life. Not again. Sean would be mine, starting today. I gave Mom on my beside table an okay sign—the wakeboarding signal for ready to go—before rolling out of bed.
My dad and my brother suspected nothing, ho ho. ey didn’t even notice what I was wearing. Our conversation at breakfast was the same one we’d had every summer morning since my brother was eight years old and I was five.
Dad to brother: “You take care of your sister today.”
Brother, between bites of egg: “Roger that.”
Dad to me: “And you watch out around those boys next door.”
Me: (Eye roll.)
Brother: “I had this rockin’ dream about Anne Hathaway.”
Post-oatmeal, my brother and I trotted across our yard and the Vaders’ yard to the complex of showrooms, warehouses, and docks at Vader’s Marina. e morning air was already thick with the heat and humidity and the smell of cut grass that would last the entire Alabama summer. I didn’t mind. I liked the heat. And I quivered in my flipflops at the prospect of another whole summer with Sean. I’d been going through withdrawal.
In past years, any one of the three Vader boys, including Sean, might have shown up at my house at any time to throw the football or play video games with my brother.
ey might let me play too if they felt sorry for me, or if their mom had guilted them into it. And my brother might go to their house at any time. But I couldn’t go to their house. If I’d walked in, they would have stopped what they were doing, looked up, and wondered what I was doing there. They were my brother’s friends, not mine.
Well, Adam was my friend. He was probably more my friend than my brother’s. Even though we were the same age, I didn’t have any classes with him at school, so you’d think he’d walk a hundred yards over to my house for a visit every once in a while. But he didn’t. And if I’d gone to visit him, it would have been obvious I was looking for Sean out the corner of my eye the whole time.