Page 15 of One Last Time


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“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 undermyroof, 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 wouldneverdo 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 howthey’dcope 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 justknewthe 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.

Rachel wandered over to a cabinet and pulled one of the doors open. The handle broke off in her hand and she looked at us in alarm before Lee laughed, reaching for the handle. It was some tacky glass knob, smudged from years of use, that had probably been super modern at one point, the kind of thing everyone wanted. He polished it almost to a shine on his shirt before holding it up.

“Don’t worry, Rach. It’s been like that for years. Elle, remember we used to pretend it was a diamond?”

I grinned. “And we’d break in and steal it.”

“The great jewel heist.” Lee sighed, looking every bit as nostalgic as I felt. In all fairness,we’dprobably been the ones to break the handle off the cabinet door just for an excuse to use it in our make-believe heist.

Good times.

Lee turned back to Rachel and placed the glass knob between her fingers like a ring. She giggled, blushing, and leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek.

I looked at Noah, who fake-vomited like Lee had just done a little while ago at us, but more quietly. I nudged him with my elbow. “I think it’s sweet,” I whispered.