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 skydivingandtaking 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.
I figured I didn’t need the reminder of how I was letting my best friend down.
My second shift was just starting when Lee’s phone rang. “Rach. She’s outside. Guess that’s my cue to go home.”
“Save some dinner for me?”
“Not likely.”
I knew he would.
“See ya tomorrow, May!” Lee called, tossing me his apron.
“No, you won’t!” came her reply, even though I think she knew that nothing she said would stop Lee coming by to hang out here, working for free. He hadn’t said it exactly, but I got the feeling he was trying to make up for the time we’d lose now we wouldn’t be at college together.
There was a handful of other people who worked at Dunes. A nerdy guy from the grade below me at school whose name I now knew was Melvin. A woman who’d been here about as long as May. An old guy who’d come out of retirement and mostly just made up drinks or helped prep food in the kitchen. A few college-aged kids I didn’t really know but got on well enough with. They were all a little confused about why Lee was here so much, although none of them really said anything.
Right now, Melvin and one of the college girls were just arriving. They passed Lee at the door, saying hi to him and then to me.
