One Last Time

by Beth Reekles

  No. No, this was a good thing. If I was ditching Lee to give up on our joint dream of Berkeley to go to Harvard instead, it was good that Lee had found someone he’d know at Berkeley. This was a good thing. A brilliant thing. I was excited for him to make a new friend.

  (Was this how Lee felt when I told him about Harvard?)

  The door opened again, commotion outside, and it was a welcome distraction.

  Oliver, Cam, Dixon, and Warren all piled indoors, laughing at some joke. They spotted me instantly, shouting my name. Cam pulled me into a hug and Warren proffered a bottle of wine.

  “Compliments of my big sister,” he said.

  “Ooh! Classy! Thank you.”

  I moved to take it but he pulled it back. “No, no. It’s not for you.” He thought for a second, already working to get it open. “Okay, Evans. You can share it. But only because I like you. And because I need you to open it for me.”

  “So generous,” I told him, taking the wine and twisting the cap off.

  Dixon cuffed Warren on the head. “Stop being a dick. And, uh, Elle, message from Levi—he couldn’t get someone to take his shift at work, so he’s not gonna make it.”

  I groaned, mouth twisting in a frown. I’d been looking forward to seeing Levi, given that we hadn’t hung out in a few days—not since graduation, really. It hadn’t even occurred to me that this last-minute party might clash with his work schedule. I’d have to remember to text him later, or tomorrow. Maybe he could come out to the beach house later this week to hang out…if he and Noah were still okay with the idea of being in the same room.

  Quickly, I put my best party-hostess smile back on. “Well, at least you guys made it!”

  “It’s a Flynn party,” Olly laughed. “We couldn’t miss it. Plus, no parents around to come barging in and breaking it up! I still can’t believe you guys have this place to yourselves all summer.”

  “And you and Noah are living together,” Cam added with a disbelieving look. “Like actual, proper grown-ups. Talk about getting serious. How crazy is that?”

  “Not,” Warren declared, “half as crazy as this party. COME ON!” He threw one arm around me, the other around Olly, and herded us to where the rest of the party was happening.

  Standing just by the doors to the pool with Ashton, Lee raised his can and yelled to the crowd both inside and out, “To our last summer at the beach house!”

  Cam was glugging from the bottle of wine, and I took it off him to join the toast.

  “Hey, Elle?” I turned around to find Jon Fletcher pointing a thumb over his shoulder and cringing. “You, uh…you might wanna…Um, Noah’s kinda getting into it with some dude?”

  I started to ask what exactly that meant, but someone called Jon’s name and he turned around, grinning, for one of those slap-on-the-back guy-hugs, leaving me to brace myself and hurry outside by the pool, the guys following me eagerly.

  We found Noah and some guy I vaguely recognized from a rival high school football team squaring off against each other. Noah’s hands were scrunched tightly into fists, and a small group was hollering, jeering, egging them on. Through all the noise, I could just about hear them snapping at each other—and, unless I was hearing them wrong, it was about me.

  “…told everyone at that party senior year she was off-limits, what, just so you didn’t have any competition?” the other guy jeered at Noah. “Bro, you know how pathetic that sounds? The only way you can get a girl is to threaten to beat up any guy that makes a move on her?”

  “Or maybe,” Noah growled back, “I just didn’t want her having to put up with assholes like you. How many girls did you bring as your date to that homecoming game? Four?”

  “Oh, man, I love it when Flynn loses his shit,” Warren said near my ear, grabbing the wine off me to take a swig. He shoved the bottle at me to cup his hands around his mouth and yell, “Someone throw a punch already!”

  The other dude tried to shove Noah, and Noah knocked his arm away and threw a punch—which was, predictably, met by a chorus of cheers. They both dived forward. A fist clipped Noah’s jaw; his elbow caught the guy’s shoulder.

  I guessed I shouldn’t have been so surprised, but I stepped forward, grabbed the back of Noah’s shirt, and snapped, “Hey, meatheads, break it up!”

  They stopped almost immediately, stepping back and settling for glaring at each other.

  “I’m sorry, who invited you?” I asked the guy.

  He mumbled, but got the message, cussing at Noah and marching out.

  Noah looked at me uncomfortably, saying quietly, “Elle…”

  “Save it, you big jerk. Just try not to beat anybody else up, huh? I’m your girlfriend, not your babysitter.”

  He flushed, and I made my way back inside. I so did not want to deal with his attitude right now—or an apology that was too little, too late. I really thought that going to college had made him grow out of that kinda stuff.

  I heard a smash from the rumpus room and cringed. This could be a long night.

  Or…

  I took another gulp of wine.

  I could worry about the state of the beach house, or I could make that tomorrow’s problem, join in the fun, and be a real part of this “housewarming” party. Didn’t I have enough on my plate already this week? Didn’t I deserve one night of letting my hair down before everything got serious and stressful again?

  It wasn’t a difficult decision.

  Although, honestly, when I dragged myself out of bed the next morning and picked my way through plastic cups and empty cans and bottles to the lounge and kitchen and saw what a disaster the place was, I kind of regretted not doing a little more to keep things under control.

  (Maybe our parents were right. Maybe we really were growing up.)

  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 the end of 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 a lot of 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 had sorely underestimated 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 of this is 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 could totally help with that.”

  I grumbled quietly, uncertainly, but let him carry on talking about this call for extras. I had to remind myself just why I was doing this. For Lee. For our friendship. Plus, he was right. It was going 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 feel right. 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.

  Was it too late to change my mind?

  (I could only imagine how Donna Washington at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Berkeley would take it if I called her up to say I wanted to take back the turning down of my offer.)

  There were student loans I could take out to cover college, just like everyone else did, financial aid, provided Linda from the office didn’t suddenly move in with us. But I didn’t think I could get any kind of loan to cover “completing my childhood bucket list with my best friend.”

  “Lee…,” I said apprehensively, biting my lip and looking up from the Facebook page for the place that hired out dune buggies on the beach. “I think we might have a problem.”

  “Don’t tell me they closed shop and sold up like Mom and Dad are doing,” he huffed, reaching to take my phone off me.

  “No. No, it’s…Lee, I know I promised you we were going to do everything on this list, and don’t get me wrong, I’d love to, but I’m just thinking…we might…we might have to maybe scrap a couple of things. Just a couple. I can’t afford to do all of this. I’ll go broke before we get to number ten,” I told him, only half joking.

  Lee looked genuinely confused, and for once, I honestly felt jealous of him, that he never had to worry about this kind of stuff. Growing up, it had always been completely obvious that the Flynns had more money than us. I mean, they had a pool. They had fancy cars. June’s clothes always looked like they cost more than our grocery bills.

  But we were all so close, it had never mattered. It was definitely never a point of contention.

  Until, I guess, now.

  “I can ask my parents to cover it,” he said, like it was that easy. “It’s no big deal.”

  It was a huge deal, I wanted to tell him, but he was already on my phone and looking at the dune-buggy page, enthusiastically saying we could get a better deal if we hired for a group and got some of the guys involved, too. Warren and Dixon would be all over it, he said.

  It was a huge deal, because it didn’t feel right for me to ask my dad for the money, so how could I ask June and Matthew? I got that money wasn’t really an object for Lee, for his family, like it was for us, but…

  My stomach in knots, I looked at the huge smile on his face, the way his blue eyes sparkled in the sunshine, his hair still damp from our jump into the sea. He looked so freaking happy.

  I couldn’t let him down.

  Maybe just this once, I thought, it wouldn’t hurt.

  * * *

  • • •

  On our way back to the beach house from our afternoon cliff jumping, Lee and I had the job of picking up something for dinner—which, of course, meant Dunes.

  Dunes was a permanent fixture of our summers at the beach house. It had always been there, as long as I could remember, and we were frequent visitors. A cute white building set just off the sand with a faded blue roof, it was a pretty typical family-friendly restaurant.

  They did the best fries.

  Lee and I were practically drooling just talking about the fries as we parked and walked in—and I stopped dead in my tracks. Lee didn’t notice and let the door go; it swung back and smacked me on the arm.

  “Ouch!”

  “Sorry. What’s up?” Lee turned to look at me, following my gaze. “What’re you staring at?”

  Speechless, my mouth suddenly dry, all I could do was point at the sign in the window with huge red lettering that read help wanted.

  This had to be—like, literally—a sign.

  All that worrying about how I’d pay for the bucket list or wanting to put a little money aside for college? This was meant to be. Right?

  We’d be at the beach house all summer. And, sure, we were helping fix it up for sale, but how much time would that take, really? And I’d be able to work shifts around any commitments with Brad….

  And I’d totally still have time to spend with Noah and do the bucket-list stuff with Lee.

  Totally.

  “Be with you in just a sec,” a lady in a green apron said, walking past us in the entryway. She placed some empty glasses on the bar and then turned to greet us. A smile lit up her face. “Elle! Lee! Well, hey! I didn’t expect to see you guys up here so soon.”

  “Hi, May.”

  May was maybe a little younger than my dad. Her hair was dyed an orange shade of red, same as it had been every summer we’d been here. She hardly ever seemed to age.

  “Where’s the rest of the clan?”

  Lee told her, “My parents are planning to sell the beach house, so us kids are up here to, you know, fix it up and stuff.”

  “They are?” she exclaimed in dismay, her face falling. She clicked her tongue, crossing her arms. “That’s such a shame. Seems everyone’s starting to sell now they’re redeveloping. It’s just not gonna be the same around here. But, hey, I guess we’ll be seeing more of you kids this summer, huh? I’ll have to make sure we’ve got an endless supply of fries.”

  Lee and I exchanged a glance, grinning. May had always given us extra portions of fries.

  It was definitely part of w
hat made them taste so good.

  “So, what can I do you for? You guys want a table for dinner?”

  “Hoping to get something to take out, if that’s okay, May,” Lee said, already wandering over to the serving station to pick up a menu, someone’s notebook, and a pen. “I’ll just pass the order straight over to Gary.”

  “Oh, honey, Gary retired last Christmas. It’s Kenny on shift today anyway.”

  May looked ready to admonish Lee then, tell him that he couldn’t just swan around like he owned the place, but she only rolled her eyes and let him carry on.

  Before she could walk off, I blurted, “May?”

  “Yeah, sweetie?”

  “Can I, um…” I frowned, letting out a wobbly breath. My palms were sweating. Come on, Elle, you can do this. “I wanted to ask you about the job. The help wanted sign.”

  May let out a startled noise and blinked, mouth forming a small circle. “You want to apply?”

  Immediately, I launched into a sales pitch of Why She Should Hire Elle Evans, despite my absolute lack of experience in any kind of job but least of all the service industry, despite me not having a résumé with me, despite knowing nothing about what the job actually was.

  “…and I’m really responsible, and I’ll work so hard, May, I promise, and I could start as soon as you need, and—”

  “Okay, okay.” She laughed, raising her hands. “Slow down, kiddo. Look, honestly, the help wanted sign—it was for someone in the kitchen, and we filled that position yesterday.”

  My heart sank. So much for it being a (literal) sign.

  I felt like a total idiot.

  May drew a breath. “But…”

  But! There was a but!

  “I guess I could use an extra pair of hands around here. We always seem to get so rushed off our feet this time of year. And I know you,” she added with a wink. “I can trust you. So, all right, little Elle Evans. You’ve got yourself a job.”

  She stuck out her hand as I jumped, squealing, to punch the air before quickly composing myself to shake her hand solemnly. She kept her face straight for about a second longer before breaking into an affectionate smile.