by Lara Avery
Sydney shuffled in at one point in long underwear and an oversized T-shirt that said OBEY.
She stood near the stove and stared openly at Carter. “Why is the hospital guy in our kitchen?” Sydney looked at Bryce, and then said, “Oh.”
“What?” Bryce asked. Was she blushing?
“You want to slice up some fruit?” Carter asked, and slid Sydney a bowl full of peaches. Bryce was about to make an excuse for Sydney, who usually only came down to get water, but Sydney just took the bowl and put it under running water.
“Sure,” she said. Bryce’s dad folded his newspaper over to look at his youngest daughter. Her mom looked up from the bacon in surprise.
“I like handling knives,” Sydney said to no one in particular, and turned back to slicing peaches with a quiet fury.
Twenty minutes later, Carter stood there, brooding, as the Grahams loaded their plates. “They taste like they could use a pinch of salt, but I can’t believe that. I measured it perfectly.”
Bryce’s dad snorted as he sat down on one of the high-backed chairs. “So sprinkle salt on ’em, what’s the big deal?”
“The recipe doesn’t call for more,” Carter countered, taking a seat next to Bryce.
Bryce’s dad reached for the salt in slow motion. Carter pursed his lips. Her dad tried to hold back laughter as he slowly tipped the salt toward Carter’s plate, raising his eyebrows as if bracing for an explosion. Carter took in a breath. The salt fell. The rest of the table burst into laughter, even Carter.
Bryce dug into her pancakes whole, not bothering to cut them into small pieces like her mom always told her to do. Just like she remembered, her dad rolled his pancake up and dipped it directly into the maple syrup.
“You know what?” Bryce said suddenly, realizing. “I haven’t had pancakes since I woke up.”
“Maybe that’s because you girls are never up before noon,” Bryce’s mom said pointedly, slicing her pancakes into little squares.
“It is possible to make pancakes after noon, Mom,” Sydney intoned. She looked at Bryce. “The fund-raiser last year at Hilwood was a pancake feed. The seniors put it together. The pancakes were kind of gross, though. And then they also had a bouncy castle, which was a bad, bad combination.…”
Bryce let out a puzzled laugh. The rest of the table looked at her. “I was just thinking how absurd it is that I literally slept through my senior year.” Sydney looked sorry she’d brought it up. “No, Syd, it really is funny. What if I was just too tired to go to school and I overslept? That’s basically what happened.”
Carter gave her an amused, thoughtful look. “You slept through a lot of things, then. For some reason it doesn’t seem so bad when you look at it that way.”
“Be grateful you slept through when I had braces,” Sydney said dryly. “It was not pretty.”
Bryce’s father chuckled. “You could even make a list.”
Carter squeezed Bryce’s knee under the table. She nudged him, trying to hold back a smile. She thought about the things she’d done since she woke up, the mental list she’d made more than a month ago. Sun, clothes, exercise. Bryce had done all right with those.
“I’m going to do that,” she said suddenly. “Check off items until it’s all done.”
“I do love checking things off lists,” Carter admitted.
Bryce giggled. “Yes, I know.”
Bryce had spent so much time longing for what she’d lost. She’d never thought of actually getting any of it back. But why not?
Bryce’s father cleared his throat. Carter and Bryce looked at him and sat up straighter in their chairs. They had their heads pretty close together.
Her dad folded his arms. “I noticed that you were talking closely with your gentleman caller at my breakfast table.”
Bryce braced herself for a lecture. Sometimes her dad got an old Southern streak in him.
“Gentleman caller?” Sydney asked with disbelief. “Really?”
He looked sternly at Carter. “Can the first item of said list be more pancakes?”
he first on Bryce’s list of things she’d missed was cheesy senior photos.
Bryce had always loved when the Hilwood yearbook came out. She and Gabby would lie on Gabby’s bed and make fun of the kids whose pictures looked like glamour shots from the mall, or who had taken shots with their hands placed lovingly on their pickup trucks. Some kids took pictures with their dogs. Everyone’s smile was forced, their turtlenecks or sweater vests picked out by their parents. The best part was that Bryce and Gabby and Greg were all supposed to have done the same thing. Bryce’s had been scheduled for right after the Trials—so she could give a thumbs-up while wearing an Olympic T-shirt.
But this time around the photos would be even cheesier, Bryce decided. The cheesiest version of everyone’s worst pictures.
“Are you sure?” Carter had asked as they checked out a nice camera from Vanderbilt’s media department. “Don’t you want to look back on these?”
“I’d be betraying my high school self if I took this seriously. Trust me,” Bryce replied.
They went to Percy Lake, and Bryce basked on the rocks in her best clothes, holding her head at weird angles while Carter told her to look natural. They had already done the obligatory “wheat picture” that no Tennessee girl could do without, where Bryce stood in shoulder-high grasses in her letter jacket, pretending to push the yellow blades aside with a mystical look on her face.
The last one was of Bryce surrounded by her diving trophies. Every single trophy or medal they could dig out, they used. It turned out to be about thirty-five. Carter complained he could barely see Bryce behind all the trophies, yet there she was, putting her fist under her chin with a gigantic grin on her face.
The pictures had turned out cheesily excellent. Bryce had even asked Carter to Photoshop them to have a cloudy outline like the mall glamour shots, with the words Bryce Forever engraved in shiny letters in the corner.
The second item on the list was the homecoming football game.
Bryce loved football games. She loved being in the middle of the crowd. She loved how everyone in the stadium stood up when Hilwood was about to score a touchdown. She loved the pep band’s terrible rendition of “YMCA,” and that no one paid attention to the pep band in the first place.
“How are we going to do this in the summertime?” Carter asked as they sat on the walking bridge over Highway 12, swinging their legs. “Football doesn’t start till September.”
A truck carrying lumber zoomed underneath them. Bryce’s Popsicle dripped, hitting the pavement where the truck had just been. “Wait, what day is it?”
“Wednesday.”
“The…”
“Twenty-second.”
She stuck the remains of the popsicle in her teeth and stood up on the bridge. “Let’s go!”
Bryce and Carter sat in the empty bleachers of the third practice of the Hilwood Raiders’ season, wearing T-shirts with scowling cartoon pirates on them, sweating in the August heat. They cheered loudly whenever the team executed a drill correctly. They stood up whenever anyone got close to the end zone, including Coach Farmer, Bryce’s old geography teacher.
When they decided it was “halftime,” they drank cold Cokes, and Carter brought out his iPod speakers to play all the songs on ESPN Jock Jams. When “Hey!” came on—the song where everyone was supposed to shout “Hey!” every three notes—the assistant coach had to ask Bryce and Carter to leave, as they were a distraction to the team.
“Bye, Coach Farmer!” Bryce called as they left the stadium. “Have a good practice, guys!”
The third item on the list was laundry, but it was a late addition. Bryce’s mother had caught them on their way out one day, with Bryce’s hamper in her hand.
“You seem to have missed learning how to do this, too,” her mother had said.
The fourth item was graduation.
The morning she was going to pretend to graduate, Bryce felt oddly formal. She had to pull s
ome strings at Hilwood by e-mailing Mr. Schefly, but they were able to get into the auditorium on Thursday morning. They swung by Gabby’s house on the way, to borrow her cap and gown, and Carter had replicated Hilwood’s diploma and printed it with Bryce’s name in curly script.
He sat in the audience while Mr. Schefly stood at the podium in his usual sweater-vest and combover. Bryce stood backstage in a short sundress under the gown, and her Converse. “Pomp and Circumstance” played from the tiny speakers Carter had hooked up to his iPod.
“Bryce Cornelia Graham,” echoed through the auditorium. Bryce strode across the stage, gave Mr. Schefly a firm handshake, and waved at an imaginary crowd of classmates and family. She’d suggested to Carter that they get cardboard cutouts of everyone in the yearbook and put them in the seats, but Carter thought that would be overdoing it.
“Cornelia, huh?” Carter said after Mr. Schefly left.
“It’s my mom’s middle name, too,” Bryce said, flopping on the seat next to him.
“Elizabeth Cornelia,” Carter said thoughtfully, flipping open the diploma he’d made. Then he snapped it shut. “My mom’s was…Carrie Ann, I believe.”
Bryce felt her forehead tense. “Was?”
“Was.” Carter said firmly. “She was in the car with my brother.”
Bryce couldn’t believe she’d never asked about it before.
“Wish she were still here,” he said, gazing at the floor. “It’d be nice to have someone else to visit Sam besides me. Share the load.” He looked up and smiled sadly at Bryce. “And she would have liked you.”
“What about your dad?” Bryce asked.
“He thinks paying the bill is enough,” Carter said, shaking his head.
Bryce had thought she knew loss. She had felt like her family had drifted. Like they had become strangers, irrevocably changed. But…Carter knew what it felt like to really lose his family. “Have you asked him to visit?” she asked tentatively.
Carter let out a bitter laugh, putting a leg up on the chair in front of him. “Come on. I shouldn’t have to ask my own dad to visit his son.”
“Everyone needs a wake-up call sometimes.”
Carter looked up and gave her a winning smile. He put his hands around his mouth and gave a fake shout. “Ladies and gentlemen, your graduating class!”
On cue, Bryce threw up her cap. It landed a few rows away. Then she stood up abruptly, making her hinged seat bounce. “I want to do it for real.”
“What, graduate?”
“Yeah,” Bryce said, moving through the rows to retrieve Gabby’s cap.
“You could probably do your senior year again, no problem,” Carter said, following her.
“Ugh, I don’t want to go back.” Bryce had had enough of the past. She wanted to move forward. “I want to graduate so I can go to college,” she clarified. It was strange to say it aloud.
“I like that plan,” Carter said. His tone became playful. “You have a bright future ahead of you, Bryce Cornelia Graham, Hilwood High graduate.”
She threw off her gown and pushed open the doors to the Hilwood courtyard, feeling his eyes on her legs under her short dress.
When they got inside the Honda, Carter paused, looking at her. He reached over his seat to put a hand through her hair, and leaned his face into her lips.
“No distractions from the future!” she cried. He groaned, leaning back into the driver’s seat. “To the bookstore for a GED prep book!”
Carter started the engine. Bryce scooted near him to tease him a little more, whispering throatily in his ear. “And then to the library to study it…”
“Who knew the future could be so sexy?” Carter muttered, smiling.
Bryce laughed and sat back in her seat. A comfortable silence settled between them. Bryce’s thoughts drifted elsewhere as Carter turned up the Beatles singing “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” on the radio. She would find something she loved to study, like Carter had, and she would walk the steps every day to Vanderbilt’s red brick buildings and listen to lectures. She would pore over books while she ate, and study all night for tests.
Bryce glanced over at Carter and unbuttoned the top button of his Oxford shirt. There was something else that came next, too. The more time she and Carter spent together, the more she thought about having sex with him. Or at least what she imagined sex would be like. She and Greg had never gotten that far. Another milestone Bryce had missed.
Carter glanced back at her and turned the music down, as if he wanted to say something.
“Yes?” Bryce said.
“I was just thinking…” Carter began, pondering. “The Jetsons.”
“What?”
“The clothes they wear in The Jetsons. That’s also kind of a sexy version of the future.”
Bryce narrowed her eyes at Carter over a half smile. “Seriously?”
“What?” he said, shrugging. “Don’t judge me. That was what I was thinking about. What were you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” Bryce sighed, smiling broadly out the window. “Nothing at all.”
ryce turned the camera on her parents. She selected the black-and-white feature from the photo options and told them to put their arms around each other. They rolled their eyes like two teenagers, but fell comfortably against one another, her father already in his gray sweatpanted pajamas, her mother still in jeans and a camel-hair blazer.
“No, like the picture!” Bryce said. “The one that used to be on the mantel.”
“What was it—” Bryce’s father adjusted his arm.
“We hold hands,” her mom reminded.
They found the pose from their prom picture: the two of them in profile, facing each other, their hands awkwardly entwined in front of them. Elizabeth Gergich and Mike Graham had been high school sweethearts in their small town. She was a shy church girl. He was a star swimmer. They both grew up on farms. Bryce snapped the photo.
“Did you get it?” Bryce’s mom left the pose to see the picture. She found the display. “Bryce, honey! You didn’t have to do black-and-white. They had color photography back then.”
“You guys look great,” Bryce said, admiring her handiwork.
Her mother muttered, “My hair could use some volume, but that’ll do. We don’t need another one. What do you think, Mike?”
“You’re the boss,” he said.
“Bryce’s turn again.” Her mom hustled Bryce against the dark wooden door.
“No,” Bryce said, adjusting her wrist corsage. “Wait for Carter.”
Senior prom was the final item on her list because Carter had told her to save it for last.
“Get a dress and a corsage, leave the rest to me,” he had said.
So there she was on a Saturday night, draped in a long, gold dress, her hair in a French twist, waiting for him like Christmas morning. Her parents had played their parts nicely. Her mom worried about the lily on her wrist matching Carter’s tie, and asked for his phone number so she could know exactly where they were going and when they were getting home. Her dad tried to hide his wet eyes under the guise of “allergies” when he saw her come into the hall for the first time.
Finally, a knock sounded on the door.
Carter stood in her doorway in a fitted black suit with a thin black tie. He had combed a part in his dark hair. When he saw Bryce, he took a sharp breath through his nose.
“You are breathtaking,” he said.
“So are you,” Bryce said. “You look like a secret agent.” It was true: he reminded her of a 1960s James Bond. Nothing got Bryce like men from old action movies. She bit her lip.
“Let him in, baby!” She heard her mother’s voice behind her.
Bryce opened the door farther and Carter stepped in. Snap! The pictures began. He took his place next to her, putting an arm around her silky waist. Snap. Bryce took his boutonniere from the mantel and attached the lily to his lapel with its pearl-topped pin. Snap. Bryce had to stop herself from snatching the camera from her mother, but she supposed if she
wanted this to be a real senior prom, then having her mom take way too many pictures was entirely necessary.
After what seemed like a lifetime of frozen smiles, Carter said, “Well, we should take our leave.”
Bryce’s mother put down the camera. “One. One a.m. sharp.” She set her pale pink lips in a thin line. “I’m serious.”
“Mom—”
“No, I’m trying to get better at this. I need to practice.”
“Yes, Mother,” Bryce said with mock obedience.
“That’s better.” She took Bryce and Carter in her arms. With Bryce in heels, her mother only came up to their shoulders. “Have a good time.”
Bryce breathed a sigh of relief as they left the house, her heels clicking down the sidewalk. She took in the smooth night air and shivered with excitement. Carter’s tiny old Honda hummed at the curb.
“I wish we had more luxurious transportation, but limos are surprisingly expensive.”
Bryce smiled at the idea of her gown on the busted leather of Carter’s seats. “It’s perfect.”
“But watch this,” Carter said, holding her elbow. “Ahem!” He clapped twice.
A chubby guy in a rumpled button-down shirt came around the car, bowing slightly to Bryce.
“This is Jeffrey. He’s in my anatomy class. He will be our driver for the evening.”
Jeffrey straightened, then said out of the corner of his mouth, “You’re still giving me fifty bucks, right?”
“Not in front of the lady, Jeffrey!” Carter said, winking at Bryce. “To the restaurant!”
Jeffrey rolled his eyes and opened the squeaky back door for the two of them. Carter had laid down a soft sheet over the patchy backseat, and in the center was a bucket full of ice surrounding a bottle of sparkling grape juice.
The Honda rolled forward. Carter had pinned up another sheet as a divider between them and the driver. He leaned over the bucket to give Bryce a soft kiss, just centimeters from her mouth, teasing her. “I don’t want to ruin your lipstick,” he said.