“I kind of love that he didn’t even ask me why I wanted to TP his friend’s house.”
“Hey, I have a question. Why do you want to TP his friend’s house?” Carina asked flatly. She had taken a handful of M&Ms and was popping them into her mouth one by one. She and my dad would have definitely hit it off. “Why is that an item on this all-important list? No, actually, I don’t want to know. What I do want to know is why you started this list in the first place. Why call it a bucket list?”
I took a breath and put down the piping bag. Carina had already helped me cross off two of the biggest items on my list, so really, she was already a part of this. Plus, if I wanted to finish it off before tomorrow night, I could use her help. If she was up for it.
“You know how some people make new year’s resolutions?” I began.
“Ugh, I hate that tradition. If you want to change something about your life, just change it. Why do you have to wait for an arbitrary holiday to do it?”
I smiled. “Exactly.”
And then I told her the whole story.
* * *
• • •
Damon’s buddy, Chase, lived on a quiet street on a hill, a small house on a large piece of property with trees dotting the front yard. Mature trees, my mother would have called them. Which made the place perfect for toilet paper. Lauren, Carina, and I had bought a few packages on our way over, making our Uber driver stop at the little drugstore in town. But Damon had gone all out. He’d shown up with a trunk full of discount toilet paper and a half dozen friends who were super excited for the task. So while some people were inside doing the normal party stuff, and others were hanging out on the front porch watching, Carina, Damon, and I, along with his rando friends, were going to town with the TP.
“This is completely ridiculous,” Carina said, pulling her arm back with a full roll of toilet paper in her hand. “And I love it!”
“I don’t know why I haven’t been doing this my entire life!” I shouted, tossing streamers over low-hanging branches all around me. I held a long string of paper above my head, executed a very ungraceful spin move, and flung it. It fluttered and floated and landed on top of the mailbox. Inside the house, music pumped and somebody screeched, then laughed. Clearly the party was as fun on the inside as it was on the outside.
“Probably because you’d get arrested.” Lauren, who was sitting on the front porch under several blankets and sipping from a red Solo cup, kept offering sarcastic commentary. She had chosen not to participate, and instead to film the entire thing on her phone. Tarek had to work tonight, so she was flying solo, which had made her a bit more subdued. She leaned over toward the girl sitting next to her and explained, “We live in a very lame suburban town.”
“Well, they’d arrest you here, too,” Damon offered from above, “if we didn’t have the homeowner’s permission.”
I looked up into the high branches of the biggest oak tree on the lawn. Damon had strapped an entire twenty-four-pack of two-ply onto his back and was now sitting up there, looking quite comfortable, TP-ing the tree from the inside out.
“I like your technique,” I told him.
“Thank you. I thought it was rather genius myself.” He smiled and tossed another roll toward the ground. “Plus I like the view from up here. I can see all the stars.”
I tipped my head back even farther. It was a gorgeous, clear night and the deep purple of the night sky was completely blanketed in pinpricks of light. You could never see stars like this where I was from. Chalk up a point in the “pro” column for Vermont.
“Do we have the homeowner’s permission?” Carina asked, stepping out from behind the tree’s trunk. “Because if I get arrested, my father will murder me. Or maybe buy me a puppy.” She looked me in the eye. “He has a rather unpredictable parenting style.”
I laughed, making a huge cloud of steam with my breath, and flung more toilet paper.
Damon lifted his shoulders. “Well, technically the homeowners are away, but we have their son’s permission.”
Carina and I exchanged a look. “Good enough for me,” I said, and she giggled.
“Let’s go deal with that little shrub over there,” she suggested, pointing. “It looks lonely and bare.”
“I’m in.”
We tromped across the front lawn, the frost-covered grass crunching under our boots. There had been no natural snow in these parts for days—all the snow on the ski trails was manmade—but it was plenty cold. I had my hat pulled down all the way over my ears and forehead, and my fingers were frigid even inside my gloves. I wasn’t going to last out here much longer.
“You take that side and I’ll take this side,” Carina suggested.
I complied, and then we launched our toilet paper, but the shrub was so small, Carina’s roll hit me dead in the face.
“Oops! Sorry!” she said, cracking up.
I picked up the roll. “No problem!” I said, and launched it right back at her. It pinged off her shoulder and went flying, and then I was suddenly embroiled in an epic toilet paper fight. I ran to gather more rolls, Carina enlisted backup, and before long a couple of guys had joined her team and I found myself wrapped up like a toilet paper mummy and begging for a truce.
“Okay, okay. Let her go, men,” Carina said, waving off the pair of Damon’s friends who had joined her team. I busted out of the toilet paper wrap rather easily, and we stood back toward the street to check out our handiwork.
“Not bad,” I said, taking off the gloves so I could blow warm air into my hands.
“This is basically the most normal thing I’ve ever done for fun,” Carina told me. “Well, this and the gingerbread house making.”
“Wait, seriously?” I said. “Why? What do you normally do for fun?”
“I don’t know…I travel a lot, so whatever’s going on where I am. I played roller hockey basketball a couple of weeks ago, if you can imagine that. And I had a hot pepper–eating contest with a WWE wrestler. Oh, and for my birthday we went to Bali, and my best friend and I got matching butt tattoos.”
Okay. I was basically the lamest person ever. Here I was, trying to get outside my comfort zone and do something crazy, and my crazy thing was the tamest thing Carina had ever done. I mean, butt tattoos? Seriously?
“I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I totally regret the tattoo.”
“Not at all what I was thinking,” I said, my insides burning with thinly veiled humiliation. God, she must have thought I was such a loser. I looked around at the entirely toilet-papered front yard, of which I’d been so proud just moments ago, and kind of wanted to set fire to the whole thing.