One Last Time Read online

  “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’d probably 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.

  “Sickly sweet.”

  Hmm, maybe a little.

  Rachel wiggled the handle back into place and opened the cabinet. There was a stack of books inside and she pulled some out, putting them in the middle of our group. I picked one off the top, quickly realizing it was a photo album.

  So, okay, maybe it was my fault we ended up making so little progress in the rumpus room, because I was the one who started combing through the photo albums. The boys didn’t need any persuading to procrastinate by joining me, all of us sharing the best photos we came across and regaling each other with stories of how we remembered the moment. Rachel seemed to be having just as much fun listening to us and looking at the photos, too.

  I paused when I came across a photo from when we were all really small. We were maybe eight or nine, the three of us standing on the beach. Lee was missing a tooth. My hair was short and wild, fluffy and sticking out at all kinds of angles. Noah wasn’t much bigger than us in the photo, and his hair was cut short, too, shorter than I ever remembered it being. He was holding a hot dog, and Lee was waving a little paper flag. I stood in the middle of them, my arms slung over both of their shoulders, eyes narrowed to a squint with how big I was smiling at the camera. The photo quality wasn’t the best, but you could make out the colorful blur of fireworks in the background.

  “Look at this,” I said, scooting closer to Noah so our thighs pressed together, pushing the photo album halfway onto his lap. Lee bent over to look at the photo. I pointed to the writing beneath it I had just noticed. “Fourth of July. Ten years ago. Look how little we all were.”

  “It’s weird how that doesn’t even feel that long ago, huh?” Lee said, looking at both of us with a sad smile, eyes full and one corner of his mouth tilting upward. He pointed at the bright pink dungarees I was wearing in the picture. “I remember those. You wore them all summer.”

  “I think it was the girliest thing you wore for years,” Noah agreed.

  They probably weren’t wrong, I thought, letting out a breath of laughter. I traced a finger over the picture. Me and my boys. Right where I belonged.

  My phone buzzed. My eyes drifted a few feet away to where I’d left it on the floor before I snatched it up to shut off the reminder I’d set yesterday: CALL BERKELEY.

  “Somewhere to be?” Rachel joked.

  “Gotta take my pill,” I lied, jumping up and going back to where I’d left my purse near the front door, grateful they couldn’t see me and that none of them had questioned me or followed me out. I stared at my phone for another few seconds before shoving it into my purse.

  Out of sight, out of mind.

  Right?

  * * *

  • • •

  We made the mistake of opening the closet in the corner. The first game we pulled out was Hungry Hungry Hippos, which, of course, meant that we needed a winner-takes-all tournament, playing one-on-one. I lost to Rachel, and Lee lost to Noah; then Noah and Rachel played a fierce game for the final, with Rachel ultimately winning. Lee and I whooped at the top of our lungs, jumping up to do a victory dance—neither of us could remember the last time Noah had lost at that game, despite us not playing for years.

  And Noah, unless I was very much mistaken, was pouting.

  I ruffled his hair and wrapped my arms around his shoulders as he groaned in defeat, and I kissed the side of his head. “Aw, don’t be a sore loser. She’s a tough cookie. A worthy opponent.”

  “I think we should have a rematch. I’m just rusty, that’s all.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Rachel scoffed, grinning.

  “Your prize, O Hungriest of Hippos,” Lee announced. He reached into the closet and pulled out a comically huge pair of pink heart-shaped glasses and a feather boa. Rachel laughed, letting him put them on her. She wore them for at least an hour—she still had them on when June and Matthew yelled that they’d ordered some pizzas for our lunch.

  We found the pirate accessories and toys Lee and I had loved so much one summer. A pogo stick that I was shockingly okay at, but Lee fell off almost instantly. An old gaming console of Noah’s, which he immediately set up, loaded a game into, and became utterly enraptured by, picking up right where he’d left off for a good twenty minutes until we dragged him away from it.

  We found tennis rackets and balls for different games, a couple of footballs, and a brand-new baseball mitt that even my hand was too big for now. I put it in my keep pile, thinking Brad might like it. A sash covered in Boy Scouts badges that belonged to Noah, prompting us to tease him over each one. Lee found a box of magic tricks and we spent a while trying to understand how they worked and one-up each other with our showmanship skills until Rachel uncovered a crappy old karaoke machine that had been my mom’s.

  I’d thought Lee was bad at going through his dresser, but he was way worse when it came to our old toys; it was damn near impossible for any of us to persuade him to part with something when he discovered it, having not thought about it for maybe five years or more. He and Noah argued over a few things, until Noah sat on him while I took the pogo stick out to one of the donation boxes in the lounge. Rachel gently talked Lee into parting with a broken Nerf gun. Using the old pirate swords, I challenged him to a duel over the magic set, and eventually wrestled him to the floor and wrenched his sword away when I saw he wasn’t going to give up.

  It was rough, and he definitely kept sneaking things back into the keep pile. It kept mysteriously growing. I saw the magic set there again now, even though I’d already moved it to the donation pile at least three times already.

  Rachel had gone back to the lounge with a pile of our toys for donation, and she hadn’t come back yet. I guessed June had roped her into helping with something else or another cup of weird floral tea.

  “Hey, son, come hold the ladder. I’m gonna check these gutters,” Matthew called down the hallway.

  Lee looked up at Noah from his collection of Pokémon cards. “He means you.”

  “Maybe I wanna play Pokémon.”

  “Gloom used Petal Blizzard!” Lee exclaimed, slamming down a card at Noah’s feet.

  “Man, if I had Psyduck…” Noah shook his head, already heading to the doorway but turning and waving his arms in sharp motions, eyes narrowing. “There’d be a mean Cross Chop coming your way, buddy.”

  “Yeah, you wish.”

  Once Noah was gone, Lee sighed, shaking his head and gathering the cards back up. “See what I mean? Everything’s different here. Imagine if the kids at school could see the infamous badass Noah Flynn, with his motorcycle and his cigarettes, the guy who got into all those fights, playing Pokémon. They can’t sell this place, Elle, they just can’t.”

  I sighed, too, helping him to his feet before wrapping my arm around his side. “I know. But I think they’ve made up their minds, Lee. It’s not like we could buy this place ourselves or anything. It’s just…” I trailed off, having to swallow the lump in my throat. “Just another part of growing up, I guess.”

  A part I definitely didn’t want to deal with either but that I’d take over picking a college right now.

  Lee set down the pile
of cards, his right arm coming up to hug me back, his left hand moving to the photo album we’d left out earlier. He flicked back to that Fourth of July photo I’d found and he sighed heavily, wearily, his head tilting sideways until it rested on mine. “I wish we could go back to this. When we were little kids and my parents weren’t trying to sell this place and talking about us moving away and getting jobs and…”

  “Click your heels three times,” I joked, but we both did.

  “I don’t want to believe this is our last summer here, that we’re not even going to get to enjoy it, you know? It feels like there’s so much we never got to do here. And now we’re never gonna get the chance.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was Lee’s words, or the photo, or all these old memories resurfacing, but it hit me suddenly and I gasped. I scrambled away from Lee, moved an end table and some boxes of games out of the way, and pulled the closet door open wider.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “One…sec…”

  My fingers danced along the floorboards, working on muscle memory as I looked for that one nick in the wood that…There! I bit my lip as I wedged my short nails around the edges of the floorboard until it sprang loose.

  “Oh my God,” Lee whispered, and I knew he remembered, too.

  Our secret hiding spot. We both crouched over the open floorboard as I reached in and pulled out an old tin lunch box, cradling it in my hands like it was the damn Holy Grail.

  Which, to us, it really was.

  I popped the lunch box open and placed it on the floor between us. There was the necklace Lee had bought me with his own allowance when we were seven. A tooth I’d lost (and was now totally grossed out by, and even more grossed out that we’d thought it was awesome enough to keep at some point). There was a euro that Lee had found and we had just thought was cool and mysterious at the time. A few other trinkets we’d collected over the summers here when we were little, and…

  From the bottom of the lunch box, I pulled out a wrinkled piece of notepad paper and smoothed it out over my thigh. The very buried treasure I’d been looking for.

  “Wait,” Lee breathed, his hand gripping my wrist. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yep,” I said, popping the p. “Lee and Elle’s Epic Summer Bucket List.”

  “Whoa.”

  We sat there in reverent silence, reading over the list. The paper felt soft in my hands, the ink was faded, and our writing looked childish. Lee’s looked messier and even more scrawled than it did now.

  So many years ago—I couldn’t even remember how long ago it was now—Lee and I had spent time one summer putting together a list of all the crazy things we wanted to do when we were bigger, before we went to college. When we were teenagers and so grown up and knew everything about the world.

  Never mind the toys, the games, the training bras, and the deflated beach balls. This fragile piece of paper right here, this was the thing that held all our childhood dreams and fantasies in one place.

  Lee and Elle’s Epic Summer Bucket List

  1. Pull off the Great Jewelry Heist

  2. Dunk Noah in the pool!

  3. Teach Brad to swim without floaties

  4. Go dune-buggy racing (do not tell Mom and Dad)

  5. Laser tag—STAR WARS STYLE! Elle calls dibs on Han Solo! (THEN LEE GETS TO BE PRINCESS LEIA!)

  “Barbie rescue mission,” I read off the list, smirking at Lee. “I distinctly remember that being your idea.”

  “Uh, duh. Cliff jumping was mine, too.”

  “Race day.” Then I pointed at another one. “Dude! Helium karaoke!” I giggled at the memory of how much fun we’d had with the broken karaoke machine.

  “Forget that,” Lee said, laughing as he pointed at a different one. “We’d totally get arrested for this one.”

  We shared a grin.

  “Damn, Shelly,” he said quietly, looking back down at the list, wonder in his eyes. “We put together a solid bucket list back in the day. We thought we were gonna kick ass and rule the world.”

  I laughed, putting the list back on top of the lunch box. “Hey, maybe you’ve retired now you’ve graduated high school, but there’s still plenty of time for me to kick ass and rule the world.”

  I said it with way more confidence than I really felt, and my stomach twisted again as I thought of my phone and the ignored reminder to call Berkeley back, but Lee didn’t seem to notice. He just kept smiling at me.

  Chapter Seven

  “So did you guys make much progress?” June asked with a skeptical look at the cardboard boxes bound for charity shops and the meager few trash bags.

  Rachel avoided June’s sharp gaze, ducking her head and biting her lip. Noah scoffed, but Lee cut him off quickly. “Tons,” he cried.

  June looked at me, arms folded, one eyebrow arching.

  “Yep. Definitely tons.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She turned her unimpressed look on Noah. “And I thought you were supposed to be supervising.”

  “I was busy supervising a ladder for Dad while he inspected the gutters and pretended he knew what he was looking at.”

  “Hey, watch it,” Matthew warned, shaking a finger jokingly at his son.

  Noah rolled his eyes, casting a quick smile our way. “You put them in a room full of toys, Mom. What did you expect? When have you ever known these two to turn down a pogo stick?”

  Matthew laughed. “Boy’s got a point, honey.”

  “Kids, look,” said June. “I know this is difficult, and I know you’re going to find all these nice childhood memories and toys, but I really need you to pull together and come through for me on this, okay? We really need to get this place sorted.”

  I exchanged a look with Lee, both of us feeling just a little bit guilty under this wave of parental disappointment. Especially when June looked so tired. I had to wonder if it was the weight of selling the beach house or if it was being busy all day.

  “How long does it usually take to sell a house out here?” Rachel asked, clearly making an effort to defuse the tension.

  It didn’t really work.

  “We’ve still got to put it on the market,” Matthew said, “but we’ve already had a few inquiries. By the time we pack up and get it on the market…”

  June added, “Surveys, paperwork…”

  “Probably two or three months.” He nodded, sharing a small smile with his wife. “It’s gonna be a real pain coming back out here all the time, though.”

  “Wait, what?” Lee asked, a frown tugging at his face.

  “Well, we’ve gotta meet with the appraisers, surveyors, and contractors, obviously,” his dad explained. “Plus we were gonna get a few things fixed around here, just in case.”

  Lee began to huff at the mere idea of it, but my brain had already kicked into gear.

  A couple of months to sell the place…and we definitely weren’t gonna get packed up in just one or two afternoons, judging by how today had gone.

  And neither me, Lee, nor Noah were anywhere near ready to say goodbye to this place just yet.

  I elbowed Lee to get him to look at me. After a second, he cottoned on. I saw his eyes brighten and we shared a moment of being absolutely in sync with each other—like when we’d decided to run the kissing booth at the school’s Spring Carnival last year, where I’d first kissed Noah.

  Because what better way to spend our last summer before college?

  What better way to spend our last summer with the beach house?

  “Wow,” I said loudly, turning back to Lee’s parents. “That sure does sound like a real pain.”

  “Especially with all the roadwork going on this summer,” Lee added.

  “And all that cleaning is gonna be rough.”

  “Gonna have to get at all those weeds…”

  I saw Noah looking
at us like we’d gone mad (which was a look he gave us relatively frequently, in fairness) before it dawned on him, too.

  “Gonna have to patch up the driveway, too,” Noah pitched in, giving his parents a probably-too-serious look and nodding when they turned to him.

  “Constantly having to drive out here all the time, to check up on all that work.” Lee sighed, brow furrowing. “Right, Rach?”

  “Right,” she said quickly. “Right. Totally. It’s gonna take up a whole lot of time over the next two or three months. That’s a lot of work.”

  “So much work,” I added.

  June and Matthew looked at each other for a long moment, half confused and half amused. She pursed her lips, obviously trying to hold back a smile; he gave a helpless shrug.

  “All right,” June said, clapping her hands and twisting to face us again, looking at each of us in turn for a long moment with a piercing mom stare. “Spill it. What are you kids getting at?”

  Lee took the lead, declaring with a grand voice, “So glad you asked, Mother Dearest! Since this is going to be our final summer in the beach house, what with your hearts shrinking ten sizes and shriveling in your greed and old age, and since you’ve decided to destroy my delicate childhood memories, it seems to me you guys could use someone—or someones—here to help coordinate stuff….”

  “And we’d be happy to stay here for the summer and take care of things for you guys,” Noah said, taking over. “We can do a bunch of the work, too. Except the gutters, obviously, since Dad’s already done such a stellar job of those.”

  I could’ve smacked my hands over both their mouths. Lee calling his parents greedy and old, Noah making fun of his dad’s DIY abilities…Yeah, I thought. Way to sell it, boys.

  “WOW, Noah!” I interrupted as Lee drew breath, putting on my best infomercial voice. “That sounds like a win-win for everybody! This summer, ladies and gents, for one summer only, a one-time exclusive offer! Get your beloved family beach house cleaned up for sale and have live-in supervisors to help manage the sale! Just call one-eight-hundred-US-GUYS to make sure you don’t miss out!”