Lee jumped, and there was an unmistakably guilty expression on his face. He looked at me with wide, bulging eyes for a moment and then coughed, waving his phone at me. “Oh, nothing. Just, uh, just the realtor. Canceling. They double-booked us.”
“And called you?”
“Mom gave them my number. Help organize things around the bucket list, you know?”
Huh. Well, I guessed that made sense.
“Now, don’t you have tables to serve, missy? Those fries aren’t gonna eat themselves.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Lee?”
He looked up, and so did I. It was quiet—a lull after the last of the late-lunchers left and before the early dinner-goers arrived, something that, a couple of weeks into summer and several shifts into working at Dunes, I was getting familiar with. I was putting away glasses under the bar.
“Yeah, May?”
“What are you doing?”
Lee and I exchanged a confused glance. He looked down at the mop in his hand and the bucket. I could see him thinking the same thing as me: Was this a trick question? “Uh…mopping?”
May gave a long sigh, crossing her arms. “You don’t work here. Stop mopping.”
“But the floor was sticky.”
May gave him a sharp look, a mom-type look that said, Don’t talk back to me, young man. He gave her a bright, winning smile, even pulling out the puppy-dog eyes. May threw her hands in the air, waving them in front of her like she was trying to wave away bad juju.
“That boy,” she told me with a sigh. She didn’t add anything else, but I guessed there was nothing else to say. I knew exactly what she meant and smiled at my best friend.
“Tell me about it.”
“Anyway,” she said, taking a breath. “Elle, I’ve got you working a double today, don’t forget, and I’ve put you down for those extra shifts you wanted next week.”
“Oh. O-okay. Thanks.”
She gave me an odd look. “Is that a problem?”
“No!” I blurted. “That’s great. Thanks, May, I appreciate it.”
She gave me a thumbs-up before going into the kitchen. Lee went back to mopping, humming to himself, his head bobbing as he cleaned.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. I’d asked for the extra shifts, so obviously I was happy to have them, and obviously it wasn’t a problem or I wouldn’t have asked for them in the first place.
I was trying to rack up as many hours as I could—more hours meant more money, and I could do with as much of that as possible right now. In the last couple of weeks, Lee and I had blown through a solid portion of the bucket list—from diving in one of those shark tanks to skydiving and taking a juggling class. The only one that hadn’t cost me money had been the blanket fort we’d built (which Rachel and Noah got really exasperated by because we wouldn’t let them in without a password and we’d stolen all the best snacks). Lee had footed the bill for a couple of them, which honestly only made me feel worse about the whole money situation.
We weren’t exactly struggling to get by, but we didn’t have the same kind of disposable income the Flynns did. The more money I could earn this summer, the better. I knew I’d need it once I got to college, and I’d rather not have to keep going to my dad to ask him for cash.
I definitely wanted the extra shifts.
But May reminding me about them just made me feel…kind of exhausted. It had only been a few weeks, but between all the bucket-list stuff, driving back and forth to help out with Brad…It was a lot.
And that wasn’t even mentioning all the work we’d been doing around the beach house. So far we’d tidied up the backyard and painted the porch, Rachel had deep-cleaned the kitchen, and Noah was working on fixing the pool filter using several YouTube tutorials. Next up on the list: steam-cleaning the couches and painting the ceiling, which sounded like the kind of job we’d need all hands on deck for.
Just thinking about it all made me want to sleep for like a week.
“You know,” Lee said, distracting me from myself. He’d set the mop down again and was leaning over the bar, the bucket list out once more. It was looking even more worse for wear than when we’d found it. Stained with red Slurpee, seawater, chocolate sauce from the giant sundae we’d dumped on an unsuspecting Noah, and covered in a bunch of different pens where we’d ticked things off or crossed them out after completing them.
Now Lee tapped the list. “You know, there’s one thing on here we won’t be able to do. Number twenty-two: Live together at Berkeley.”
Guilt prickled across my skin, same as any time Berkeley came up in conversation.
I knew he wasn’t trying to guilt-trip me now. Aside from our initial discussion about college, after I told him I’d be going to Harvard, Lee had been trying his best not to make me feel any worse than I already did about Berkeley. Even so, I still worried that whenever it came up, resentment was simmering just under the surface.
He just gave me a sad smile and said, “You think we should cross it off the list? It feels weird to leave something out.”
“Well…what if we didn’t have to? Maybe I could come up to Berkeley with you, help you, I don’t know, get set up or move in or something. Go up and check the place out? It’s not exactly what we had in mind, I know, but…we could make a weekend of it? Just us?”
Lee reached across to put his hand on mine. “It’s a deal. Hey, I’ll get some recommendations from Ashton for when we visit. See if there’s any places we should check out.”
“Ashton?”
“Yeah, Elle. Ashton? Came to our party? Yay high, blond hair, great taste in comic books?” He laughed, talking about some things Ashton had told him about Berkeley already, including some comic-book shop Lee thought sounded like a lot of fun. I was barely listening, though.
Ashton lived on Jon Fletcher’s street but went to a different school. Jon and a couple of the football guys had rented a place on the beach together for the summer after they’d seen us having such a great time at the Flynns’ beach house. Olivia had begged her parents to do the same for her and a couple of the girls.
(And here I was putting ten-dollar bills in a piggy bank I’d labeled “college fund.”)
So Ashton had been hanging around with the guys some days, and he and Lee had been talking. I knew that. I knew Ashton tagged Lee in funny posts on Instagram he thought he’d like.
But I kept managing to block it out of my mind. Ashton and Berkeley both.