“Hey, son, come hold the ladder. I’m gonna check these gutters,” Matthew called down the hallway.
Lee looked up at Noah from his collection of Pokémon cards. “He means you.”
“Maybe I wanna play Pokémon.”
“Gloom used Petal Blizzard!” Lee exclaimed, slamming down a card at Noah’s feet.
“Man, if I had Psyduck…” Noah shook his head, already heading to the doorway but turning and waving his arms in sharp motions, eyes narrowing. “There’d be a mean Cross Chop coming your way, buddy.”
“Yeah, you wish.”
Once Noah was gone, Lee sighed, shaking his head and gathering the cards back up. “See what I mean? Everything’s different here. Imagine if the kids at school could see the infamous badass Noah Flynn, with his motorcycle and his cigarettes, the guy who got into all those fights, playing Pokémon. They can’t sell this place, Elle, they just can’t.”
I sighed, too, helping him to his feet before wrapping my arm around his side. “I know. But I think they’ve made up their minds, Lee. It’s not like we could buy this place ourselves or anything. It’s just…” I trailed off, having to swallow the lump in my throat. “Just another part of growing up, I guess.”
A part I definitely didn’t want to deal with either but that I’d take over picking a college right now.
Lee set down the pile of cards, his right arm coming up to hug me back, his left hand moving to the photo album we’d left out earlier. He flicked back to that Fourth of July photo I’d found and he sighed heavily, wearily, his head tilting sideways until it rested on mine. “I wish we could go back to this. When we were little kids and my parents weren’t trying to sell this place and talking about us moving away and getting jobs and…”
“Click your heels three times,” I joked, but we both did.
“I don’t want to believe this is our last summer here, that we’re not even going to get to enjoy it, you know? It feels like there’s so much we never got to do here. And now we’re never gonna get the chance.”
I wasn’t sure if it was Lee’s words, or the photo, or all these old memories resurfacing, but it hit me suddenly and I gasped. I scrambled away from Lee, moved an end table and some boxes of games out of the way, and pulled the closet door open wider.
“What’re you doing?”
“One…sec…”
My fingers danced along the floorboards, working on muscle memory as I looked for that one nick in the wood that…There! I bit my lip as I wedged my short nails around the edges of the floorboard until it sprang loose.
“Oh my God,” Lee whispered, and I knew he remembered, too.
Our secret hiding spot. We both crouched over the open floorboard as I reached in and pulled out an old tin lunch box, cradling it in my hands like it was the damn Holy Grail.
Which, to us, it really was.
I popped the lunch box open and placed it on the floor between us. There was the necklace Lee had bought me with his own allowance when we were seven. A tooth I’d lost (and was now totally grossed out by, and even more grossed out that we’d thought it was awesome enough to keep at some point). There was a euro that Lee had found and we had just thought was cool and mysterious at the time. A few other trinkets we’d collected over the summers here when we were little, and…
From the bottom of the lunch box, I pulled out a wrinkled piece of notepad paper and smoothed it out over my thigh. The very buried treasure I’d been looking for.
“Wait,” Lee breathed, his hand gripping my wrist. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yep,” I said, popping the p. “Lee and Elle’s Epic Summer Bucket List.”
“Whoa.”
We sat there in reverent silence, reading over the list. The paper felt soft in my hands, the ink was faded, and our writing looked childish. Lee’s looked messier and even more scrawled than it did now.
So many years ago—I couldn’t even remember how long ago it was now—Lee and I had spent time one summer putting together a list of all the crazy things we wanted to do when we were bigger, before we went to college. When we were teenagers and so grown up and knew everything about the world.
Never mind the toys, the games, the training bras, and the deflated beach balls. This fragile piece of paper right here, this was the thing that held all our childhood dreams and fantasies in one place.
Lee and Elle’s Epic Summer Bucket List
1. Pull off the Great Jewelry Heist
2. Dunk Noah in the pool!
3. Teach Brad to swim without floaties
4. Go dune-buggy racing (do not tell Mom and Dad)
5. Laser tag—STAR WARS STYLE! Elle calls dibs on Han Solo! (THEN LEE GETS TO BE PRINCESS LEIA!)
“Barbie rescue mission,” I read off the list, smirking at Lee. “I distinctly remember that being your idea.”
“Uh, duh. Cliff jumping was mine, too.”
“Race day.” Then I pointed at another one. “Dude! Helium karaoke!” I giggled at the memory of how much fun we’d had with the broken karaoke machine.
“Forget that,” Lee said, laughing as he pointed at a different one. “We’d totally get arrested for this one.”
We shared a grin.
“Damn, Shelly,” he said quietly, looking back down at the list, wonder in his eyes. “We put together a solid bucket list back in the day. We thought we were gonna kick ass and rule the world.”
I laughed, putting the list back on top of the lunch box. “Hey, maybe you’ve retired now you’ve graduated high school, but there’s still plenty of time for me to kick ass and rule the world.”
I said it with way more confidence than I really felt, and my stomach twisted again as I thought of my phone and the ignored reminder to call Berkeley back, but Lee didn’t seem to notice. He just kept smiling at me.
Chapter Seven
“So did you guys make much progress?” June asked with a skeptical look at the cardboard boxes bound for charity shops and the meager few trash bags.
Rachel avoided June’s sharp gaze, ducking her head and biting her lip. Noah scoffed, but Lee cut him off quickly. “Tons,” he cried.
June looked at me, arms folded, one eyebrow arching.
“Yep. Definitely tons.”
“Mmm-hmm.” She turned her unimpressed look on Noah. “And I thought you were supposed to be supervising.”