My mood lifted when I found Lee passed out on the couch with a Cheeto stuck to his forehead and cat whiskers drawn on his face. I could hear Rachel pottering around in their bathroom, and Noah was using our shower, so I crouched down near Lee’s head and called up an air-horn noise on YouTube on my phone, turned the volume right up, and blasted it in his ear.
He shot up so fast, limbs flailing, that he tumbled sideways. I backed away quickly as he fell onto the floor. The Cheeto was still stuck to him when he sat up, bleary-eyed, rubbing his face and pulling himself back onto the couch.
“What the hell, Shelly? Was the air horn really necessary?”
“Necessary? No. Fun? Absolutely.”
Lee groaned, lying back on the sofa and throwing his arm over his head. “What time is it?”
“Early,” I told him.
“You could’ve let me sleep in. On our, like, first official day of summer.”
I rolled my eyes, nudging him and poking at him until he sat up so I could squash myself onto the couch beside him. “I could’ve but, my good buddy, my pal, we’ve got a schedule to keep.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Well, while you and Noah spent your afternoon yesterday planning a party, I was creating a masterful plan for our bucket list. Starting with cliff jumping this afternoon. Well. Technically, starting with cleaning this place up, but that’s not on the bucket list, so…up, up, up! We have no time to waste!”
And honestly, between looking after Brad, the bucket list, and spending time with Noah, we really didn’t.
Chapter Twelve
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 theendof 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 alotof 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 hadsorelyunderestimated 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 ofthisis 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 couldtotallyhelp with that.”
I grumbled quietly, uncertainly, but let him carry on talking about this call for extras. I had to remind myself justwhyI was doing this. For Lee. For our friendship. Plus, he was right. Itwasgoing 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 feelright.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.
