Get a short, stylish haircut ✓
Ski a black diamond slope ✓
Eat sushi
Sitting in the back seat of Loretta’s car, I wished I could just go back home right then. I needed this trip to be over. But all that was waiting for me back home was a house without Dad. I wondered how much would look and feel different without him there. Had he taken all his old movie posters out of the basement? Would we still have the pasta bowls he always bragged he’d bought on sale when he was a bachelor? I was certain he’d taken his favorite backyard BBQ apron. The one that read “Sauce Me” on the front. I never really knew why that was funny, but he always loved it.
Loretta and Lauren were chatting about Lauren’s travel plans for next year—Loretta listening for once instead of constantly shooting down all of Lauren’s ideas. I took out my phone and put it faceup in my lap. Part of me felt like a loser for continuing to try. Especially after last night’s message from Christopher and the fact that he hadn’t replied to the picture of me Lauren had sent him. But I had to let him know that the whole list experiment had crashed and burned. It was over. I felt like he somehow deserved to know.
I snapped a pic of the unfinished list and sent it to him, followed by a message.
Epic fail. Couldn’t get #5 and #10 done. Had a good run, though. Turns out I’m allergic to sushi. Who knew? And #5, well…I think that one is just not my style.
I stopped typing and blinked back tears, holding my breath. Should I tell him? It might break my heart if I told him and he didn’t reply. Again. But if I didn’t tell him, I was pretty sure I’d always regret it. I let the breath go, and just went for it.
I like you Christopher. And I’m sorry if I did anything to hurt you. I just thought you should know that before New Year’s. Thanks for inspiring me. I may not have finished the list, but I wouldn’t have done any of it without you.
I hit Send, then turned my phone off and leaned back in the seat, closing my eyes until we got back to Evergreen Lodge.
* * *
• • •
That night, I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling while Lauren got ready for the New Year’s Eve party. I felt like such a failure. Maybe it had been too much to take on—ten things I’d never done before in five days. Maybe I should have come up with five. But come on, it wasn’t like I’d added “travel around the world” to the list, or put “have a baby” on there, or even “skydiving.”
Skydiving. My heart gave a pang. I looked at my phone, which I’d tossed on the desk when I’d come in earlier. But I refused to turn it on. I didn’t want to know for sure that he hadn’t texted me back. I wasn’t sure I could take that kind of disappointment right now.
The bathroom door opened, startling me, and steam poured out. Lauren, wrapped in a towel, stared at me.
“You’re not getting dressed?”
“I’m not going,” I told her, flopping down flat again.
“You can’t not go,” she told me. “It’s New Year’s Eve!”
“It’s just another night,” I told her, which made her groan. “Besides, I don’t have anything to wear. The nicest thing I brought with me are my black jeans.”
“Wear something of mine!” she said. She strode across the room, flung open the closet, pulled out three dresses—she’d hung something up?—and laid them across her unmade bed. There was one purple halter dress, one red dress with a plunging back, and a black strapless thing I could never even imagine wearing.
“You would look amazing in this,” she said, holding up the black dress. “With your new haircut?” Her eyes shone as she walked over to my side of the room. “Stand up.”
“Lauren,” I whined.
“Stand. Up.”
I knew that when she got in this mood there was no denying her, and I had no energy to argue. I pushed myself up and let her hold the dress up in front of me. Her smile widened.
“You don’t even need heels! You can wear your black ballet flats and you’ll look gorgeous.”
She shoved the dress at me so that I had to take it. I wrapped one arm around it and let it fold over, the hanger dangling toward the floor.
“I don’t do strapless,” I told my sister in a flat voice.
“Great! It’ll be one more thing you’ve never done before that you can get in before the new year!”
Lauren brushed past me, pulled my list out of my bag, grabbed my Sharpie, and crossed out “Eat Sushi” before I could stop her. I gasped as she wrote next to it, “Wear a strapless dress to a party.”
“Lauren! You can’t just edit the list!”
“Huh. That’s funny. Cuz I just did.” She popped the cap back on the pen like a punctuation mark, then tossed it on the desk and walked back into the bathroom. “Put that on and then I’ll do your makeup.”
She slammed the bathroom door.
I stared down at the list. All that laminated perfection. All my perfect little check marks in a row. And now she’d gone and scribbled all over it. But then again, it was never going to be actually perfect. It was never going to have ten check marks. My genetics had made sure of that. Maybe this should be one more bucket list item—stop obsessing about perfect to-do lists. Start being a little more flexible.
I walked over to the full-length mirror on the back of the hotel room door and held the dress up against my body. The flouncy skirt would hit just above my knee. I was sure the bodice wouldn’t fit—my sister was much curvier than I was—but if we could figure out a way to pin it…
“Fine,” I grumbled to myself.
Nine items down. One to go. And even in my grumpy mood, and even though it wasn’t perfect, the thought made me smile.
* * *
• • •
“This isn’t half bad for a, quote, teen party!” Carina shouted in my ear as we danced in the middle of a crowd of sweaty people.
“I know, right?” I replied, executing a twirl so the skirt on my borrowed dress flared out. I couldn’t believe how crowded it was. I hadn’t seen this many kids my age around the lodge all week. Where had they come from? Whoever they were, I’d caught a few of them glancing at my hair or doing double-takes as I walked by, which meant I’d been blushing half the night. I felt pretty. I felt like I was being seen for the first time.