I move to pull the list out of my pocket, to tell her about it.
“Yeah,” she says, cutting me off and letting out a short laugh. “Yeah, sure you will.”
I wince, her words stinging a little as they silence my excitement from my crazy afternoon at Snyder’s Orchard. My excitement about the list I was on the verge of telling her about.
I thought she’d be excited too.
“I just mean from chickening out on our tattoos, to refusing to even try a night of camping with me at Huckabee State Park, you’re not exactly Miss Adventure anymore. At least not with me.”
Wow. I guess Matt isn’t the only one missing the old Emily.
“Sorry,” she says, her dark brown eyes instantly crinkling with guilt. “That wasn’t cool.”
“It’s okay,” I say, shrugging. Then the both of us fall silent.
“How’s packing going?” Kiera asks, trying to change the subject.
“Fine,” I say. It’s almost the truth, though I did have to hide my mom’s favorite mug in my dresser this morning before my dad could throw it into a donation box to drop off on his way to work.
He’s still on a rampage. It’s like he’s trying to completely erase her from not only this house but also from wherever we’ll end up. Like he doesn’t even care that she used that polka-dot mug every single day, sipping coffee from it while she leaned against our kitchen counter and checked my homework. I wonder what other pieces of her life are gone that I haven’t noticed.
It’s a miracle I found the list before he could incinerate it.
I’ve been avoiding finishing up her closet because I don’t want to know what he’ll force me to throw out.
Kiera’s phone alarm pings loudly through the speaker, her hand reaching quickly up to swipe it away. “Oh, shoot. Ten minutes until my phone goes back in The Locker. I gotta go! I told Paul I’d call him with an update.” She gives me a big grin, leaning forward. “Gotta tell him the big news!”
I smile back at her, knowing how big this is for her. “Your first boyfriend, Kiera! This is so exciting.”
“I know, I know!” she sings. “Todd. Who’d have thought.” She freezes suddenly, her face going from an expression of absolute bliss to deathly serious in a fraction of a second. “I’m sorry, again. About what I said.”
I nod, waving my hand like it’s nothing. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t even worry about it.” She doesn’t look convinced, so I double down with the most blindingly enormous smile I can muster. “I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”
“Okay! Bye, Em!” I barely have time to wave before the call ends, her face disappearing and my phone screen going dark, my reflection staring back at me as I let out a big sigh.
Did Mom and Nina ever fight? Ever struggle to see eye to eye?
I lean back against the couch, my hand sliding into my jeans pocket to pull out the list. I wish I had told her. But her “yeah, sure” keeps ringing in my head.
Carefully, I unfold the list, my finger tracing the small green check next to “10. Steal an apple from the First Tree at Snyder’s Orchard.”
I’ll prove it to her. She’s not the only one who’s going to come back different.
Two down, ten to go.
In fourteen days they’ll all be checked off. And Kiera and Matt will have the old me back.
13
I sit on the steps of my house, shifting my legs back and forth as the warm concrete makes my skin prickle. I know absolutely nothing about cliff jumping, but I would assume today is the perfect day for it, just because today is the perfect day for just about anything. There isn’t a single cloud in the sky. The sun is hot, but not unbearable, and the trees rustle gently from a cool, relieving breeze that blows through just as you get a little too warm.
At exactly two o’clock Blake’s truck chugs to a stop in front of my house, her tan arm slung casually out of the rolled-down window. I push myself up off the steps, grabbing my backpack, and walk down the path to her truck.
“You ready?” she calls to me as I get closer.
I swallow hard on my nerves.
“Uh, I think so?” I say, wrapping my fingers around the lucky quarter, tucked once more into the pocket of my jean shorts.
“That’s the kind of confidence I was going for,” she says, laughing as I pull open the door, the hinges squeaking noisily.
I buckle my seat belt as she plugs the state park into her phone’s GPS, the automated voice telling her to drive down the street and turn right.
We talk about Huckabee High for the entire drive, and I give her a crash course on the ins and outs of the school. I cover all the different social groups, how the cool people are basically her coworkers at the pool, how our rivals are the Seymour Squids, how only one girl on the school cheerleading squad can do something other than a cartwheel.
“Our football team is trash,” I say, serving up some brutal honesty, in case she, like the rest of our town, really cares about stuff like that. “In fact, two of the guys who chased us at Snyder’s Orchard were starting varsity last year, if that’s any indication. But the stands are still packed every Friday.”
“That sounds cool actually,” Blake says when I tell her about the actual parade our town threw after we won our first game in five years. “My school was pretty small, so we didn’t even have a football team.”
“I don’t know if that’s better or worse than having a crappy one.”
Blake laughs, reaching up to push some of her sun-streaked hair behind her ear. “Where do you fit into all of that? What’s your deal at Huckabee High?”
I want to ask: Before or after junior prom?
But what slips out is more honest than I
