The Throwback List

by Lily Anderson

“Drop by for a co-op game sometime, Jo!” Birdy called.

  “Hush, mano,” Lita chided. “You’re shouting.”

  “Fortnite! Warhammer!” Birdy whisper-shouted. “You name it!”

  “I know things are sort of in flux right now,” Jo said to Bee diplomatically. “But can I still put you down for public hide-and-seek for the Throwback List? We can tailor the time and place to fit your needs. Just around the neighborhood or down at the boardwalk on your lunch break. I want to get as much done as I can while I’m waiting to hear back on my job interviews. Autumn loses access to the Main Street house on May first. And since digging up the time capsule is supposed to be last, that only gives us three weeks to catch up….”

  Jo was nervous-rambling, but Bianca didn’t have time to soothe another person’s feelings.

  “We’ll see. I don’t think I’ll have a lot of leisure time coming up. Thanks again for dropping my stuff. I’ll see you when you and Wren do your glitter photo shoot on Sunday. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Jo said.

  Bianca closed the door.

  AUTUMN: Wren seems unclear about what a glitter fight is.

  JO: I really don’t understand where she could be confused. What could be clearer than glitter + fight?

  BIANCA: As long as she remembers what time to show up tomorrow. I’m sorry to rush you but I have to have the store’s alarm set again by five so I can cook dinner.

  On Sunday morning, Quandt Corporation’s social media accounts were all emptied to make room for the HeartChart announcement. Every social media campaign Jo had ever professionally written and designed had been erased from existence.

  And then she got a form rejection email from the Seattle City Orchestra, thanking her, in not so many words, for wasting her time and getting her hopes up. Her youthful exuberance hadn’t been enough to get her back on track.

  She drafted messages to the group chat, but every version felt too whiny in comparison to the Birdys waiting to hear from an orthopedic surgeon.

  She went into Days even though she wasn’t scheduled to take pictures and found herself faced with the brunch rush. For the first time since she’d come home, she clearly spotted two tourists sitting next to the window, even though the view was only the matching Wolcott Furniture and Mattress Emporium.

  Jo was relieved to see Florencio was behind the bar, stirring electric-blue drinks in tall glasses. She sat herself at the nearest stool and propped her elbows up on the counter. “You’re in early today, Coach!”

  “I’m here for the tips. Brunch is the perfect intersection of tourists and kooks,” Flo said. He plopped maraschino cherries into the blue drinks and passed them to a barback before steering back to Jo. “You don’t have your photography rig with you. Can you take pictures without your big umbrellas?”

  “I could, but the lighting would be worse,” Jo said, sticking her tongue out at the tease. The umbrellas were in her car, ready for the glitter-fight photo shoot. “I’m not here to take pictures. I’m here as a regular customer. A townie customer.”

  Flo set his beefy biceps on the bar, leaning in just close enough that Jo could smell something piney on him. Maybe it was the pomade that made his black hair so glossy. “As a townie, you should know that cotton-candy milk shakes aren’t available on Sundays. We usually run out of the blue milk on Saturday nights.”

  Jo recoiled, remembering chugging cotton-candy mistakes with the Nicotera sisters. “I never want to drink cotton-candy anything ever again. My morning has already been shitty, and I have a list-item date with Wren in two hours. Give me”—she paused, taking a sobering breath—“a Sandy Point shake, hold the pineapple. It’s the last thing on the menu I haven’t tasted.”

  “Do you want the sand dollar that comes with?” Flo asked. “I know you hate everything that comes out of the ocean.”

  “Keep your sand dollar. But I will take an order of totchos, please. Extra jalapeños on the side.”

  “One Sheet Load for the lady,” Flo said with a wink.

  Jo rolled her eyes at him. “You like the names here too much, Coach. We have to get you a real job.”

  “I’ve got a real job with the school district,” Flo reminded her. “It just doesn’t pay anything. The education system is broken.”

  As Jo waited for her order and Flo went to blend her booze shake, she started scrolling through her phone, only to realize that she didn’t know what news she could hope to find there. It wasn’t like the orchestra was going to call back and change their minds. She could either wait for an official offer from Gia’s family or she could keep applying.

  If Gia had told her about a liquor sales job in Portland the day she’d been laid off, Jo would have dropped everything to go. No questions asked. Back in Palo Alto, Jo would have done anything for a life preserver.

  She didn’t want to drop everything and leave now. Not when she was so close to finishing the Throwback List. That was one silver lining of not getting the job in Seattle. And she and Wren wouldn’t have the looming threat of her possibly moving two hundred miles away keeping them from moving forward in their rekindled romance. A picture of the two of them sprinkled in silver glitter could make a delightful first couple photo.

  If they decided to go back to being official.

  Not to brag, but Johanna Freeman often went on to date people she had sex with.

  She smoothed out her bullet journal on the bar. In the next two weeks, she still needed to:

  Surf the Point

  Do a keg stand

  Play hide-and-seek in public

  Break something with a sledgehammer

  Climb the giant anchor on the boardwalk (and survive)

  Get a high score at the boardwalk arcade

  Have a bonfire

  Dig up the time capsule

  After yesterday’s stop by Bianca’s house, Jo was fairly sure that her social circle was about to shrink again. When she saw Wren today, she’d drop a hint that she was ready for an invite to meet the Portland queer-professionals group Wren was in. From Wren’s stories about them, they mostly drank craft beer and talked about the Trail Blazers.

  The basketball team, not queer historical icons as Jo had naively hoped.

  Dating as adults was so different from dating as teenagers. Other than a fuller scope of Wren’s biography, playing the game before gave Jo absolutely no leg up on it now. Instead of stealing short bursts of togetherness between classes, they saved up conversation for days at a time. Wren’s disinterest in texting meant that Jo spent more time wondering what she was doing than knowing for sure. It saved Jo the trouble of having to seem busy when she was really sitting around her parents’ empty house while everyone else was out at work.

  But it was slightly aggravating when Jo rushed out of Days to make it to the boardwalk parking lot on time and there was no Wren and no way of knowing how late she was going to be.

  Rather than wait in the parking lot, staring at the ocean, Jo went into the Salty Dog and let Bee usher her upstairs to set up her lighting equipment.

  Bianca was jittery as fuck, double and triple checking that Jo would be careful and clean up meticulously and let herself out and jiggle the handle three times on the upstairs toilet but only twice downstairs. When Jo mentioned family dinner that night, as she’d sworn to Autumn she would, Bee didn’t warmly issue her an invitation—as Autumn had sworn she would.

  “Sunday,” Bianca said. “Dinner. Sunday family dinner. I still need to go to the store.”

  She jabbed her watch so hard Jo was surprised it didn’t crack in half like an egg. Shortly after Bianca rushed out, Wren strode in.

  Wren kissed Jo hello not quite on the bull’s-eye, already mid-rant.

  “Look at this place!” she said, gesturing up at the ceiling, one side of her mouth curved to frowning. “This is ready-made rental space. Why aren’t you living in here instead of with your parents?”

  “It’s Bee’s dead grandpa’s apartment,” Jo said. “She said she wouldn’t want it to be
living space for nonfamily members.”

  “She’s letting you rent it out for this, though,” Wren said. “It could be any number of things this town doesn’t have. Weren’t you complaining about the lack of a wine bar here?”

  “Here meaning the Oregon coast itself,” Jo said. “I wasn’t saying Bianca should open a speakeasy over her tattoo parlor.”

  “That’s exactly the sort of shit that might get more people to visit this town. Instead of catering to the nouveaux riches of Waterfront Cove, someone should take a chance and open something interesting. A speakeasy. A bottle shop. A good barber. Bike rentals. Anything.”

  Jo blinked twice. “That is…literally everything in your neighborhood.”

  Perplexed, Wren cocked her head. “Yes, Johanna. I like my neighborhood. That’s why I live there.”

  Jo breezed over to the desk and retrieved the bags of glitter she made—in the driveway, at her mother’s request. “Here is your pixie dust. We should take off our shoes so that we don’t track anything off the tarp. It’ll brush off your socks.”

  “Remind me the point of this one?” Wren asked, frowning at the bag in her hand.

  “It’s a glitter fight,” Jo said. She stepped out of her shoes and set them on top of the desk. Then, finding that disrespectful to the desk, the floor. “It has no point. It looks pretty.”

  Grudgingly, Wren rested her back against the wall and unzipped a boot. Her long legs were sculpted in skintight maroon jeans. “Wasn’t that why you did the pinup pictures?”

  Jo thought of what Autumn had said about upgrading to new teeth. The pinup shoot hadn’t fixed her relationship with her body, but it hadn’t hurt. At least now she knew she wasn’t too scared to stand in front of a camera in her best underpants.

  “The lingerie photos were for my self-esteem. This is aesthetically charming.” Wren didn’t seem convinced, so Jo bloated the idea. Explaining things to Wren could make her feel like a robot, redacting all lines of emotion from her code and replacing them with endless philosophical hypotheticals. “It’s to capture beauty in the frivolity of life through the fragmented lens of unrecycleable bits of shimmery plastic. Okay?”

  That last word might have been sharper than she intended, but Wren accepted it with a nose twitch.

  “We’re gonna do everything on top of this tarp so that we don’t track glitter all over Bianca’s store. I don’t need her stress-cleaning after us. She’s got enough on her plate right now. I’ll frame you in the shot and then set the timer to jump in myself. We’ll do one glitter throw per shot sequence. You hit me, I’ll hit you. We’ll do one at the same time, then freestyle until we’re out of glitter.”

  “That’s it?” Wren asked. “Doesn’t sound like it’ll take long. I drove almost two hours to get here. On my day off.”

  “I know that,” Jo said, feeling wounded. It would be nice if Wren thought she was worth driving to see, regardless of how long. But that wasn’t practical. You couldn’t ask Wren to be impractical. “I had a not-great morning, too. But after we’re done, we can go to the Thai place you wanted to try. It’s early enough to reclaim the day from the shitter.”

  Wren glanced at her phone. “We’ll see how it goes. I don’t know if I want to wander around covered in glitter. Let’s see how well it brushes off.”

  Devo Quandt, Jo’s old boss, used to quote her back to herself in meetings in that same tone, suspiciously highlighting buzzwords in order to undermine her. When Wren did it, she wasn’t standing on Jo’s shoulders to feel tall. Terse was just baked into her backbone.

  Knowing that didn’t always take the sting out of being mocked.

  Jo imagined what Autumn would do. Relentless in her pursuit of a good time, Autumn would put on a smile and double down. Even if it meant ignoring pesky things like hurt feelings.

  “Ready!” Jo said, smiling twice as wide. She bounced up and down twice, psyching herself up. Music would be helpful for mood setting, but she didn’t want to reignite the argument they’d had after the dinner party about Jo’s Spotify subscription contributing to the collapse of the music industry.

  “Three, two, one!” she counted down cheerfully, sprinting toward Wren, and into the frame. “Glitter me!”

  An audible sigh from Wren preceded the first fistful of glitter flying at Jo’s face.

  It was awful, immediately. Glitter hit like the finest ground sand, ricocheting off her cheek and toward her nose and eyes. Instinctively, Jo panicked and turned away, her brain already playing the headline of her obituary on BuzzFeed: “Woman Asphyxiates on Glitter for Social Media; Dies.”

  The camera cheeped, alerting her that the burst of photos was done.

  Struggling not to scream This was a mistake!, Jo checked them. Unsurprisingly, the camera had only caught the truth of how miserable it had been. Disdain creased the captured lines of Wren’s brow, lips, and button nose. The glitter looked like a punishment.

  Jo cleared her throat. “Um…you don’t look like you’re having a good time.”

  Wren’s lips disappeared in a frown. “Maybe because I don’t particularly want to throw things at you?”

  Jo bared her teeth in a threatening smile. “Should I be more annoying to inspire you? Do you want to hear about how I got rejected for the orchestra job and drowned my sorrows in Days’ brunch?”

  “Time-out.” Wren’s lashes fluttered as she processed. “The Seattle job rejected you? Did they tell you why?”

  “Nope; it’s just not my destiny to reinvent the image of Pacific Northwest classical music. It’s fine. It wasn’t a scene that, like, screamed Jo Freeman.” She set the camera back on the tripod, refocused the view. “Ready for round two?”

  Wren cracked her neck. “Fine. Hit me.”

  The camera blinked a warning countdown as Jo leaped back into the frame. Glitter sank in under her fingernails as she pinched inside her bag. She slid forward on the tarp, moving to sprinkle Wren while stealing a kiss. As the stream of glitter started to fall, Wren yanked her head back. The apartment echoed with the sounds of her slapping the back of her skull until the metallic dusting was out.

  “Fuck, Jo. I don’t want this shit in my hair. I have plans tonight. I can’t have this craft disease stuck to my scalp.”

  Jo tried not to show her surprise at being double-booked. She wanted to ask what Wren’s plans were but was afraid of prying. Should she not have assumed they’d spend more of the day together after the photo shoot?

  And just how late were Wren’s other plans if she was two hours away from home?

  “Sorry,” Jo said tightly. “We should have established more ground rules. No hair. Maybe don’t aim directly for my eyes?”

  Wren looked at her upside down as she continued to rake out her undercut. “I don’t want to kiss on camera. It’s disingenuous. We’re not a couple.”

  “It’s a picture, not a U-Haul!” Jo said with a disbelieving laugh.

  “It’s a picture that you want to broadcast to thousands of people on the internet.”

  “Oh my God, Wren,” Jo growled, throwing up her hands. “The internet is not a mythical place where shit goes wrong. It’s a communication tool, not the lost city of Atlantis. This list is a scrapbook, nothing more.”

  Wren dragged a hand over her eyes. When it came away sparkly, she snapped it toward the wall in irritation. “It’s a public forum, and has an international audience. If you had a public scrapbook where you wanted to hang a lock of my hair, I’d say no, too.”

  “Because that would be fucking creepy!”

  “As opposed to pretending to have fun for the amusement of strangers?”

  “Could you concede on anything? Ever?” Jo snapped.

  “Yes!” Wren shot back. “But first you need to score on me.”

  “Conversations don’t have a score!”

  “Everything can be scored, Johanna,” Wren scoffed, scratching her hair back into place. “And if the orchestra people turned you down, then you should be begging that friend for the liquor s
ales job. Take it and quit when you find something better. Portland is civilization. The list is for fun. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be done exactly the way you planned. This little photo shoot was too couple-y from the start. It implies a level of commitment we don’t have. You should have done this with your friends, and I should have said something earlier. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but if your feelings are hurt anyway—”

  “This has been you playing nice?” Jo asked.

  The switchblade flick of sarcasm didn’t touch Wren. She opened her arms like Jesus at the Last Supper, always the magnanimous martyr.

  “I can take pictures of you throwing glitter around if you want to keep faking a smile, but I’m going to bow out of the rest being on camera. It raises a lot of questions that are, frankly, premature.”

  Jo felt like she was waking up in the middle of a boxing match. She didn’t even have her hands taped up, yet there were her metaphoric teeth knocked against the metaphoric wall. “Because you don’t like that I post on social media? Something that has been completely and utterly normal for the last two decades?”

  Wren strode calmly over to her boots. She sat down on the edge of the desk to put them back on. “No. Because when you first came back here, you were talking about immediately moving again. You wanted to find a new job, a better job. And if we were going to open the discussion on the two of us becoming something more official, it would be conditional on you becoming the kind of partner who was more challenging, career-wise.”

  “Ouch,” Jo said. What was she doing dating a vice principal? Hadn’t she had her fill of efficiency-starved administrators in the real world? “Are you saying this because I’m not good enough to work for the orchestra? Am I not cultured enough for you and your Reedie friends?”

  Wren hopped down from the desk, almost toppling the red candle. “It’s not about culture, Jo! It’s about drive. I am on track to hit my career goals by thirty. Are you?”

  Knockout. Jo staggered backward before roaring forward. “I said ouch! Take the hint. We don’t have a safe word! I get it, Wren. You don’t have to rub it in. I’m not as good as you, and I’m not good enough for you.”