13. Cliff jumping!
14. Be extras on a TV show!
15. Get arrested (LEE WE ARE NOT GETTING ARRESTED) come on, shelly (I’M SERIOUS) fiiiiinnnnneee no getting arrested
15. Break a world record. Like, for REAL. Get the medal and everything.
After we went cliff jumping, Lee and I sat on the beach with our faded, treasured bucket list between us, trying to plan out the next few activities. There were so many to choose from, and the planning was a whole task in itself. I mean, we couldn’t leave too many of the best ones until the end of summer, because it’d be here before we knew it; equally, we didn’t want to do too many of them too quickly in the next couple of weeks and not have anything left to look forward to.
Plus, some of them (mainly race day) were going to require a lot of work. The costumes alone were probably going to take hours to organize.
The further along we got in figuring out which items on the list we’d do when and what we might need to prepare, the more I was starting to realize just what a massive undertaking this was going to be.
I had sorely underestimated this when I’d proposed the bucket list to Lee.
“We’ll have to make sure none of this gets in the way of all the stuff your mom and dad want us to do,” I warned him, seeing the manic, delighted look on his face as he found an ad on his phone for a TV show looking for extras not too far away. “Your mom said she was going to email us all a list of her own, and it might be even worse than ours.”
“You say that like any of this is going to be work”—he laughed, gesturing at the bucket list—“and not the absolute most fun you’ve ever had or ever will have in your entire life.”
“I’m serious! Did you see the pictures she sent us of what she wants the backyard to look like? All the weeds and shrubs we’ll have to get rid of, power-washing the backyard and the driveway…That might take us a whole weekend. And I promised I’d still be around to help look after Brad—”
“Shelly, I promise you, we will do all that stuff. Well, maybe not so much the power-washing, but definitely the babysitting. Besides, Noah and Rachel could totally help with that.”
I grumbled quietly, uncertainly, but let him carry on talking about this call for extras. I had to remind myself just why I was doing this. For Lee. For our friendship. Plus, he was right. It was going to be fun.
Fun, however, was going to come at a very steep price.
The more we talked about stuff on the list, the more I realized how much money this was going to cost. Even just renting the dune buggies was going to put a considerable dent in my savings account….
I could ask Dad for the money. He’d pull a face and probably give me a small lecture on being responsible about spending it, but he’d help out. It just…didn’t feel right. Not when I was going off to Harvard now, on the other side of the country, instead of a short drive to the Bay Area, to Berkeley. I already had no idea how I was going to cover my tuition fees—now, suddenly, I was tallying up the cost of a plane ticket to get there, and adding luggage to the flight, and then coming home for Thanksgiving, Christmas…
Oh man.
Maybe I hadn’t thought this through. Maybe I’d gotten too excited, too carried away. And maybe Dad had, too.
Was it too late to change my mind?
(I could only imagine how Donna Washington at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Berkeley would take it if I called her up to say I wanted to take back the turning down of my offer.)
There were student loans I could take out to cover college, just like everyone else did, financial aid, provided Linda from the office didn’t suddenly move in with us. But I didn’t think I could get any kind of loan to cover “completing my childhood bucket list with my best friend.”
“Lee…,” I said apprehensively, biting my lip and looking up from the Facebook page for the place that hired out dune buggies on the beach. “I think we might have a problem.”
“Don’t tell me they closed shop and sold up like Mom and Dad are doing,” he huffed, reaching to take my phone off me.
“No. No, it’s…Lee, I know I promised you we were going to do everything on this list, and don’t get me wrong, I’d love to, but I’m just thinking…we might…we might have to maybe scrap a couple of things. Just a couple. I can’t afford to do all of this. I’ll go broke before we get to number ten,” I told him, only half joking.
Lee looked genuinely confused, and for once, I honestly felt jealous of him, that he never had to worry about this kind of stuff. Growing up, it had always been completely obvious that the Flynns had more money than us. I mean, they had a pool. They had fancy cars. June’s clothes always looked like they cost more than our grocery bills.
But we were all so close, it had never mattered. It was definitely never a point of contention.
Until, I guess, now.
“I can ask my parents to cover it,” he said, like it was that easy. “It’s no big deal.”
It was a huge deal, I wanted to tell him, but he was already on my phone and looking at the dune-buggy page, enthusiastically saying we could get a better deal if we hired for a group and got some of the guys involved, too. Warren and Dixon would be all over it, he said.
It was a huge deal, because it didn’t feel right for me to ask my dad for the money, so how could I ask June and Matthew? I got that money wasn’t really an object for Lee, for his family, like it was for us, but…
My stomach in knots, I looked at the huge smile on his face, the way his blue eyes sparkled in the sunshine, his hair still damp from our jump into the sea. He looked so freaking happy.
I couldn’t let him down.
Maybe just this once, I thought, it wouldn’t hurt.
* * *
• • •
On our way back to the beach house from our afternoon cliff jumping, Lee and I had the job of picking up something for dinner—which, of course, meant Dunes.
Dunes was a permanent fixture of our summers at the beach house. It had always been there, as long as I could remember, and we were frequent visitors. A cute white building set just off the sand with a faded blue roof, it was a pretty typical family-friendly restaurant.
They did the best fries.
Lee and I were practically drooling just talking about the fries as we parked and walked in—and I stopped dead in my tracks. Lee didn’t notice and let the door go; it swung back and smacked me on the arm.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry. What’s up?” Lee turned to look at me, following my gaze. “What’re you staring at?”