Back in the bedroom, the piles of stuff I’d set aside drove the air from my lungs. Lee had even managed to separate out a couple of piles, although his keep pile was still pretty large. Wordlessly, I set down the new trash bag and then moved to the closet we shared.
A blown-up beach ball fell out, hitting me in the face and then collapsing on the floor with a wheeze, deflating slightly into a misshapen lump.
I kicked it to one side and Lee immediately piped up, fixing me with an accusatory look. “Hey, make sure you don’t put that in the trash. That’s a good ball.”
“You want me to donate it?”
“No. Keep.”
Well…I mean, it was a good ball….It had been our most faithful volleyball and soccer ball, as required, for several summers—we’d had to switch out a real ball for this inflated one after everyone realized that whenever I tried to join in a game, I mostly just got hit by the ball instead.
But, nope, we had to be ruthless. I nudged it onto the trash pile, hoping Lee didn’t notice and try to keep it.
I had more stuff than Lee in the closet. We both had windbreakers in there—and another one each right at the back of the closet, a clichéd pink and blue pair, which, judging by the tags, we’d gotten when we were ten. After rummaging through some of the clothes—everything going into the donation pile except for the jeans Lee had left here last summer that he thought he’d lost and a jacket of mine I’d forgotten all about that miraculously still fit—I went on my tiptoes to scout out the top shelf.
“Hey, Mr. Sentimental, come give me a boost. Put those football muscles to good use.”
Lee sighed loudly, muttering about how I was interrupting his flow (he’d been looking at a bunch of receipts he’d just found and there was zero flow going on), but he didn’t hesitate to crouch down as I stood on the bed. I climbed up onto his shoulders and he carried me the few steps back to the closet. Lee had spent last summer working out and beefing up a little, and after being on the football team throughout senior year, he’d built up some serious muscles—which were definitely coming in handy right now.
“Don’t you dare drop me.”
He swayed, and I smacked the top of his head, making him laugh.
“Anything good?”
“Um…” My face scrunched up at the layer of dust on the shelf—and how did sand even get all the way up here? I pulled out an old beach bag, another towel, a collapsed neon-green rubber ring, and some old floaties. I tossed them all onto the floor near the trash bag.
“Oh my God!” I cried, leaning forward and reaching in with both hands for a stuffed bear, gray with a tartan bow tie…and still fluffy! I gently brushed some of the dust off before nuzzling the bear against my face and then holding it down in front of Lee’s. “Look! It’s Bubba! I thought I’d lost him years ago.”
Mom and Dad had gotten me Bubba when they’d brought Brad home from the hospital after he was born.
“He’s gonna look great in your fancy-schmancy dorm room at Berkeley,” Lee told me.
“Ha-ha. Right. Yeah.”
Why was it suddenly so hard to picture the dorm room at Berkeley that I’d been dreaming of for years?
“So…” He took Bubba, his other hand gripping my knee to make sure I didn’t fall. “Toss, right? Trash bag, meet Bubba. Bubba, meet trash bag.”
“No, Lee!”
I made a grab for Bubba and Lee laughed as he held him just out of my reach. As I bent down, arms flailing for the bear, Lee started moving about the room. I shrieked, grabbing at his hair. “Put me down! Put me dowwwwn!”
Lee bent forward and tossed me onto the bed, my stomach flipping as I fell. He gasped for breath between laughs. I grabbed the nearest thing—a floatie I’d just tossed out of the closet—to throw at him, but he just collapsed to the floor, laughing harder, holding his stomach.
“Looks like you two are working hard,” a voice drawled from the doorway. I stopped mock-glaring at Lee to see Noah leaning against the door frame, his arms crossed, smirking at me.
“You two had better not be making sexy eyes at each other,” Lee said, still breathless from laughing. He’d thrown one arm across his eyes, the other hand still on his stomach. “Not under my roof, no sir.”
“Sexy? Me?” Noah scoffed, clutching a hand to his chest and then winking at me. “Always.”
Lee faked a vomiting noise.
“Mom wants you guys to come help in the rumpus room when you’re done in here. Which means she thinks you should be done in here by now.”
The three of us looked at the piles of stuff—mostly Lee’s, although we’d just trampled my donation pile and I was lying on my keep pile.
“Give us five minutes,” Lee said. He got to his feet, shoved a bunch of stuff back in his dresser and the rest in a trash bag, and then looked at me. “Jeez, Shelly, it’s like a clothes bomb went off over here. Keep your side of the room clean, huh?”
Chapter Six
Once we’d gotten our room cleaned up, hauled the trash bags to the front of the house, and added our donation items to a cardboard box Matthew had left out for us in the lounge, we took a break to sit outside. A can of Pepsi Max sweated in my hand, fresh from the refrigerator.
Lee’s parents spent a good ten minutes trying to get us back inside.
Matthew eventually grabbed an old water gun he’d found somewhere, filling it at the pool and squirting us in the faces with it until we caved, shrieking and laughing and shouting in protest as we fled back inside.
“See.” Lee sighed as we wiped our faces on our shirts and arms on the way to the rumpus room. “This is why it’s so great here. Dad would never do something like that at home. We all need this place.”
He was right. This place brought out the best in all of us. I didn’t think June or Matthew had really thought about how they’d cope without the beach house.
We didn’t make a lot of progress in the rumpus room, a spare room at the back of the house we’d mainly treated as a playroom through the years.
There was a cabinet against one wall housing a bunch of Matthew’s old vinyls and a record player. Lee made a beeline for it before we did anything else, setting up a Beach Boys album to play. A sagging sofa took up another wall, an ancient armchair beside it and a couple of beanbags that had lost any kind of comfort, like, a decade ago. I just knew the closet in the corner would be full of old toys and games. An outdated TV was on a stand near the windows.
How many rainy days had we spent playing Monopoly or Guess Who? or Battleship or a kid-friendly version of Trivial Pursuit? How many games had we played in here? And then there were the evenings Mr. and Mrs. Flynn just wanted some quiet time and would set the three of us up here with a movie and some popcorn.