“Is that why you decided to help her? How did she come up with the list? Was it like—”
“I gotta get to work,” my dad says, cutting me off midsentence. He shovels the rest of his breakfast into his mouth and stands up, the wooden chair screeching loudly on the kitchen floor.
I glance at our oven clock. Ten fifty-five. He’ll be a whole ten minutes early if he leaves now. I should’ve quit while I was ahead.
“I can clean up,” I say as he puts his plate on the counter.
He nods and rips off the apron. Hard to believe we were just joking about it ten minutes ago.
I watch as he takes one more swig of coffee. “Thanks, Em,” he says, giving me a quick kiss on the top of my head before heading to the hall closet, where his work boots are. “I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
“Okay!” I call after him, hearing the front door creak open. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” he calls back, the door slamming shut behind him.
I eat the rest of my pancakes slowly, the silence of the house ringing uncomfortably in my ears. I turn on music and clean the dishes, putting the syrup in the pantry and the eggs back in the fridge, all the while Blake’s words from yesterday still circling around in my head, my conversation with my dad layered just over the top of it.
My mom, completely worn out, bombing her SATs, wanting to… what? Do the things she had always wanted to do? Face her fears? Have a fun summer?
His closed-offness makes me want to know more.
But it’s pretty clear he isn’t going to tell me.
If I want to find out more, if I want to have this connection, I have to…
I grab my phone and bring up Instagram, my thumb finding the tiny circle that’s Blake’s smiling face, an unwatched story tempting me.
I click it to see her launching a tennis ball in the middle of a spacious field, a blur of a golden retriever barreling after it.
I let out a long sigh and chuck my phone onto the table, watching as it lands on top of my mom’s list, the paper crinkling underneath the weight, the thought I’d tried to push away coming back to me.
I have to do it myself.
I picture it for a second, seeing myself getting a tattoo at the parlor over on Sycamore Street, and watching the sunset on the beach, and being jostled around on the rental bus on the Huckabee Lake trip. Facing the fear of heights I apparently inherited from her, and…
My eyes land on the last item of the list, “Kiss J. C.,” and I fold the paper directly below number eleven. Even if I change the initials to M. H., with Matt not even talking to me, this one is a definite no-go.
Although… isn’t that the point of a bucket list? Doing things that seem impossible or scare you?
Maybe by the end of this I can find a way to make things right. A way for things to fall into place the way they did for Mom. If anyone could show me how to fix this, it’s her.
My eyes travel back up to the top of the paper. Where do I even start? Mom at least had Dad and Johnny.
I take a deep breath, and for the first time in a long time, I decide to try my luck.
Before I can talk myself out of it, the phone is back in my hand and I’m pressing the call button under Blake’s contact info, the phone ringing noisily in my ear until her voice comes through the speaker.
“All right. Where are we starting?” she says, like she already knows why I’m calling.
I’m stunned for a second, but then I smile and shake my head. “I honestly have no idea.”
Blake laughs. “Perfect.”
6
Lounging upside down on my bed later that day, I pull up my phone calendar, counting down the days until the end of the Huckabee Lake trip. The last day of the trip is my newly planned goal for finishing the list, according to Blake, at least.
Twenty-one.
Twenty-one days to get this list done, the trip being the very last item.
Twenty-one days from now, I will have finished my mom’s bucket list. Provided I actually pick an item to get things started.
I switch over to Instagram and scroll through Sycamore Street Tattoos’ page for the millionth time, since that’s number one. Photos of newly decorated arms and legs and underboobs glide across my screen as I try to make a plan of attack. I pause on a familiar picture of a red rose, planted for all eternity on the side of my best friend, Kiera.
We went last Galentine’s Day for a discount special that Sycamore Street runs for just about every major, minor, and entirely made-up holiday. You could go and pick from an overflowing binder of artwork, the price always ringing up under fifty dollars. They even ran a special on National Cheese Day, which I’m pretty sure isn’t actually a real thing.
True to Huckabee form, Sycamore Street Tattoos doesn’t bother with carding, which was why Kiera and about half our classmates have gotten their first tattoos long before their eighteenth birthdays. Like we were going to this past February.
“Come on, Em!” she had said. “Let’s do something bad for once. Like we—”
Like we used to. She stopped herself before she said it, but I could still feel the burn.
I remember Kiera spinning the binder around to face me after flipping through only two pages and pointing to the rose. “Arm or rib cage?”
I said arm, but she went for rib cage.
I chickened out a few minutes later at the sight of the needle, wondering when they’d last been cleaned, as the statistics I’d read on infections circled around and around inside my brain. I could tell Kiera was disappointed, but she still faithfully went through with hers, squeezing my hand so tight, I had entirely lost feeling in my fingers by the end of it.
Which had absolutely affirmed my decision not to get one.
Until now. If I can stop chickening out.
My phone starts vibrating in my hand, and Kiera’s name flashes up on the screen in white letters. Our first call since she left. She gets thirty minutes of phone time every Sunday night, and a chunk of it usually goes to Nina, so I don’t want to waste a second.
If she’s calling me first, it means she has some news.
I sit bolt upright and tap the green accept button for her FaceTime.
“Kiera! Hi! How are you?”
“Em, are you trying to give me a cavity?” Kiera’s voice pours through the speaker of my phone, her box braids and smiling face slowly coming into view, as blurry as it always is when she’s away at Misty Oasis. The service is so bad up at camp, most of the calls are glitches and frozen screens. She holds up the three shiny packs of Bubble Yum Cotton Candy Bubble Gum. “You know once I open a pack, I have to finish it.”
Even through the screen I can tell her nails are freshly painted, one of the nail polishes I sent her being put to use. Homesick box success!
“Give some to your campers! It’ll be a welcome relief from the cardboard and water they usually get.”
She rolls her eyes, but the corners of her mouth turn up. From what I remember from my traumatic week there, Misty Oasis made the sketchy buffet by the Goodwill look like a gourmet meal.
“How’s it going so far?” I ask.
“Pretty good! I got a weird rash on my leg a few days ago on our nature hike, but other than that I’m doing great.”
I grimace as she flicks the camera down to show me a lumpy red patch just above her ankle. Of course this is the moment the quality shoots straight from pixelated to ultra HD.
“Ew. That’s gross as hell.”
I still don’t fully understand how the same girl who cried over breaking a nail at our freshman formal two years ago transforms into a mountain man each summer. It’s like two versions of Kiera simultaneously exist in one body.
She laughs and the camera moves back up to her face. “Could be worse. One of the campers had to be sent home a few days ago after they got poison ivy on their eyelid.” Her eyes widen slightly, the horror still palpable. “Now, that was gross.”
“I don’t even want to begin to picture that,” I
say, glancing over at my alarm clock, the bright red numbers blaring out 7:43.
I jolt, realizing how close it is to eight. My dad will be home from work soon. And I know for a fact he hasn’t eaten since pancakes this morning. I push myself up and head down the hallway, giving Kiera a wry smile as I tuck my long brown hair behind my ear.
“So. How’s ‘Nice Arms’ Todd doing?” I ask, eager to get the latest Misty Oasis gossip. Kiera has been nursing a crush on Todd Thomas since he came back to camp two summers ago redefining the words “glow up.”
“Emily. His nice arms got even nicer. I swear they quadrupled in size over the course of the school year. It is unreal how good he looks. And”—she glances behind her to make sure the coast is clear, her voice excited—“I found out his girlfriend broke up with him a month ago because she’s going to UCLA this fall.”
“No way.”
“Yes!”
“That’s amazing!” I say, stopping to quickly backtrack to the place where sympathy should’ve been instead of celebration. “I mean, like, poor Todd.”
“Oh, yeah, I mean… total dick move. Major bummer,” Kiera says, nodding in agreement as we both offer up a moment of silence.
“So…?” I say, grinning since I’ve clearly found the reason behind the phone call.
“So…,” Kiera says, smiling around the word. “We maybe made out after the bonfire last night!”
We both squeal, and I do a little excited dance as I make it to the kitchen. This has been two whole summers in the making.
“I can’t believe you actually kissed him!”
“Oh my gosh, I know,” Kiera says, swooning a little bit. “And let me tell you, it was WORTH the wait.”
I put the phone down on the counter just for a second, reaching up on my tippy-toes to grab a box of pasta out of the pantry.
I’m about to ask for more details when I hear her say, “So is there any—”
She cuts out, the image freezing suddenly, her voice coming out in garbled spurts.
“Kiera?” I say, watching as her face finally starts to move again, the glitching fading as the connection returns.
“Sorry,” she says with an eye roll. “I asked if there was any news on the Matt front.”
I groan internally. I was really hoping we’d get cut off before we got to this.
“No,” I say, shaking my head as I slam the pasta box onto the counter with more force than I intended, the bow ties rattling noisily around. I meet Kiera’s gaze. “I did see him, though. And everyone else. Two days ago at the bingo fundraiser.”
“You went? To play bingo? Are you… okay?” Kiera asks, a twinge of concern in her voice.
“Yeah! I mean, I’m fine,” I say quickly, grabbing a pot from inside the oven to fill with water. “And I didn’t really play. I played for my dad. I was forced to go because THE Johnny Carter moved back into town this week.”
“Oh my gosh! I totally forgot that was this week!” Kiera says, surprised. “He’s got a daughter, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I say, Blake and the list popping back into my head. “They came over to help us pack this weekend.”
“Is she cool?”
“Too cool,” I say, thinking of all the jaws that dropped Friday night. Growing up in Hawaii apparently instantly made you way cooler than growing up in Huckabee ever could. Though, I couldn’t help but feel like Blake’s chill demeanor was probably cool just about everywhere.
“She’s nice, too. And she’s in our grade. You’ll definitely like her.”
“Mmm,” Kiera says, her voice distracted. I watch the pot fill slowly with water, knowing she’s about to drag the conversation back to what I was hoping she’d forget about. “So you saw everyone? At the bingo fundraiser?”
I sigh, shutting the water off and lugging the pot over to the stove.
“Look, I know you both needed some space after it happened, but you gotta talk to him, Em! You said you would before I got back from camp, just like I said I would make a move on Todd if he was single. Which I did! You know as well as I do that you have to make things right before school starts, or it’s going to be super weird for all of us,” Kiera says. I know she’s right. If I make things right with Matt, it makes things right for all of us. Jake, and Ryan, and Olivia, and Kiera. No one will have to choose—though for everyone but Kiera it doesn’t seem to have been a hard choice.
“This is just like the other breakups. You’re psyching yourself out. Like last year, when you broke up with him because you thought he was being too clingy. Or the time before that, when you felt like you weren’t focusing on your schoolwork enough.” She rolls her eyes, and the reasons sound even thinner when she says them.
“This one is worse than any of the others,” I argue, turning the dial on the stove top up to boil the pasta water. “Like, way worse. I kissed someone else!”
I cringe as I think back to that night. Matt’s hand finding the small of my waist as he pulls me in for a long kiss, the countdown clock in my head ticking down the seconds until it is over. His voice in my ear, asking if I want to take things to the next level.
His parents were out of town and I was spending the night at his place. Even I could see it made sense. Which was probably why I couldn’t figure out how to tell him no. Since that would’ve meant explaining why my stomach had just sunk to my feet, which… I couldn’t.
So I didn’t say anything. I just stumbled over to Jake, my red dress getting tighter by the second, the Huckabee High gym feeling more and more claustrophobic. I remember sneaking a big drink from his silver flask, the burning taste in my mouth, and Kiera grabbing my hand to pull me into a big group of people. And then the room spinning, a blur of arms and legs, streamers hanging limply from the walls and around the basketball hoops, Matt weaving through the crowd to get to me.
I needed a way out.
My eyes locked with this sophomore guy I’d seen a few times in the hallway, somewhat familiar blue eyes and a buzz cut. I didn’t even stop to think, didn’t even know his name. I just walked right up to him and planted a kiss right on his mouth.
I thought it would be freeing. Doing something I couldn’t take back. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. As soon as I came up for air, I knew I’d ruined everything.
“You were drunk!” Kiera exclaims, bringing me back to the aftermath. “Everyone got drunk on that shit that Jake brought to prom. It was his uncle’s homemade apple pie moonshine. You could probably start a car with that stuff.”
“That’s not an excuse, Kiera,” I say, watching the small bubbles appear at the bottom of the pot. As much as I’ve tried to sell myself on that, it isn’t. Alcohol wasn’t what fueled it. And lying isn’t the route I want to take to fix this.
“It sounds like you’re trying to keep everyone mad at you. And you’re always talking about how perfect Matt is, so it just… doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know, okay? Can you just stop bugging me about it!” I blurt without thinking, the frustration I’ve kept pent up from hearing this question asked over and over again in different ways suddenly spilling out.
She just stares at me, her dark eyes serious. “Listen. You’re my best friend, and you know I’ve always got your back, but I’m going to be real with you. If we have to spend senior year smack in the middle of this drama between you and Matt, it’s going to suck. I mean, just think about it. I’ll have to alternate lunch tables! And don’t even get me started on Senior Skip Day. How will we do that without the whole crew together? If we can’t have an awesome Senior Skip Day with our friends, with Jake making his crappy jokes, and Olivia staring at Ryan like the sun comes out of his ass, I’m going to hold a grudge so big, your great-grandchildren are going to feel it.” She pauses, raising her eyebrows at me.
When I don’t say anything, she lets out a long sigh. “Em, I am here to help you, but you are the only one who can fix this.”
“I know. I’m working on it,” I say, thinking of the list. But I don’t want
to get her hopes up yet. And I don’t know how to tell her this pressure is not helping. Like… at all.
We’re both silent for a long moment, then Kiera finally clears her throat to break the tension.
“Well, I gotta call my mom before my phone goes back in The Locker,” she says, nodding behind her to a closet covered in National Park stickers. “Talk next week?”
I nod. “Yeah. For sure.” Things still feel prickly between us, so I give her a small smile. “Can’t wait to hear about what happens this week with Todd.”
She returns it, but it’s not her usual smile. “I’ll keep you updated. Love you.”
“Love you,” I echo, the screen going dark, the call ending.
Sighing, I lean against the counter.
I hate this feeling.
Everything about this moment feels awful and unfamiliar. I can’t believe I snapped at her. If Kiera were here in Huckabee, and not all the way at Misty Oasis with a time limit on phone usage, I’d ride my bike over to her place to shake off the weirdness.
I turn my head and watch the pasta water instead, the small bubbles growing and growing, slowly turning into a rolling boil. I add the entire pasta box to the pot. Far more than two people can eat in one sitting, but whatever. I can refrigerate it for my dad to take for lunch for the next couple of days.
My phone vibrates, and I grab it, hoping to see Kiera’s name, a final text to say things are fine even though they don’t feel it. But to my surprise, it’s from Blake.
I tap on the notification, and a text bubble appears.
What are you doing tomorrow?
Why? I type back automatically, the response I’ve conditioned myself to ask before I accidentally open myself up to something I might not want to do.
I hesitate before deleting it and trying again. I work in the afternoon, but I’m free before that.
She replies right away. I was going to head to the pool to see if they’re still hiring lifeguards. You want to come?
I groan, tossing my phone onto the counter. The pool. Of course she’s going to get a job there. It’s only the mecca of Huckabee High summer employment, staffed by Jake, Matt, Ryan, and everyone who knows exactly what went down between us.
The Lucky List Page 6
