None of the Regular Rules (20 page)

“What if I still
want
to do
n
umber
n
ine?” Ella asked with a coy smile. “Maybe I have a different crush to confess—in fact, I think I’ve just been wasting time waiting for the wrong guy. Because even if he is a weirdo who keeps a fake hamster in his locker, I’m sort of into Andy Eisenberg.” She beamed and looked over at Andy. “Hey, Andy—wait up. I’m gonna come with you guys, okay?”

Andy smiled. “Hop in.”

***

Just as the last car pulled out of my driveway, Johnny appeared beside me on the lawn. “Must have been a fun party,” he said, glancing at his wrist. He didn’t wear a watch. “It’s what…ten o’clock?”

“Change in venue,” I said. “I think people just wanted a chance to ride in the back of Trever German’s truck. There was a mattress back there—it actually looked sort of comfy.”

“That guy still hasn’t graduated, huh?” Johnny asked. “I think Trever was already a senior when I was a sophomore.”

“People pick different things to hold onto,” I mused. “You’ve got to think he’s
trying
not to graduate at this point.”

“Well, whatever happened with the party, I’m glad everyone’s gone,” Johnny said. “This way, we have our beach to ourselves.” He grabbed my hand, and together, we walked back toward the beach.

As we did, I forced myself to ask, “So, what is going on with Mackenzie?” I wished I didn’t need to know, but knew that I did. My hand in his was one thing—my lips on his, which
wa
s what I wanted so badly to come next, was yet another.

“We officially broke up the night before she left for school,” Johnny said, glancing at me. “The night of my last party, this fall, we decided it made the most sense for both of us to start fresh this year, so we ended things. I think we both knew our relationship wasn’t strong enough that it could withstand the time apart.” He chewed at his lip, and I realized it was the first time I’d seen him nervous about anything.

“But you said it was complicated,” I said, remembering the night we’d sat on his motorcycle and I’d wanted to kiss him more than anything. If I’d known Mackenzie was out of the picture then, what would have happened? And would he still have left?

“It
was
complicated,” Johnny said. “After we broke things off, Kenzie held on. She wanted me to come visit her, to call every day—it wasn’t a clean break. She had a hard time getting settled in at Madison, and we’d been together long enough that I was the easiest person for her to turn to.” We’d reached the edge of the lawn, near the pumpkin patch. Just that afternoon, I’d noticed little bits of green peeking up out of the soil. My squatters had come back, and so had Johnny.

Johnny stopped before we climbed down the steep embankment to get to the beach. He looked at me and rested his hands lightly on my shoulders. “Sophie, it would have been wrong for me to get involved with you when things were still so unfinished with her. It wouldn’t have been fair to you, and it wouldn’t have been fair to her. Honestly, I wasn’t in a good place with much of anything when you and I started hanging out.”

“You are now?” I asked hopefully.

“I am now,” he said certainly. “I hope you don’t think I’m a huge jerk for taking off the way I did. But I guess a part of me knew—or at least hoped—that what was happening between us wouldn’t go away while I was gone. I knew there was a chance I could lose you if I left, but I had to unplug for a while. Mackenzie came home at Christmas, and between her and my parents, it just seemed like everyone was trying to take over my life again. Then you came by on Christmas Eve, and when you told me I wasn’t worth it…well, it sort of hit me. I knew I had to get a grip on myself and Kenzie and my messed
-
up relationship with my parents, or I was going to destroy something good. This…” he said, taking a breath. “You.”

I smiled and he continued, “My parents want to control my future, my ex-girlfriend was trying to control my present, and I was a mess. I knew I was going to screw things up with you if I didn’t figure out how to live on my own terms.” He shrugged. “That’s the story.” He tilted his head and looked at me with those piercing eyes that now looked black in the moonlight. “Say something?”

Before he left, I’d told myself that I was willing to wait for him—that I had to wait until I knew he wasn’t in a relationship to act on anything. And that’s what had happened, that’s what the last few months had been about. But I still felt betrayed, somehow. I remembered the hollow feeling the day I’d gotten his text, the way it had felt like he’d just abandoned me, after I’d told him so much about myself. But those were my issues…he didn’t know his text came just as every other rug had been pulled out from under me. “Something?” I said finally, not sure how to process everything he was unloading on me. “There you go. Something.”

Johnny looked at me, and just started talking again, trying to make me feel comfortable and secure. “I wanted to kiss you that night after the planetarium, so bad,” he whispered. When I didn’t speak, he kept talking. “Then at Christmas, when you were in my house…”
H
e trailed off. “If it makes you feel better, Kenzie’s in a good place, and it’s definitely
over
over now. And the good news is, I got a couple of scholarships and made enough money this winter to pay my way at Madison next year.”

“That’s great,” I said, really, truly happy for him. I wasn’t sure why I was still feeling tentative. What it was that was keeping me from letting myself fall into him. To trust that the time away had been a good thing. To believe that we could still be something…

“And hey,” he said, trailing his hand down to squeeze my fingers again. “I have a surprise for you.”

“You do?”

“I do. It’s a stroke of brilliance, I believe.” He pulled me down the embankment toward the beach, and we
clambered
over the rocks that separated my side of the beach from his. “I’ve been thinking about you and your list all winter. And I’ve been trying to figure one thing out ever since that night after the planetarium.”

I swallowed, unsure of where this was going. Then I saw that he’d laid a blanket in the center of one of the beautiful, huge rocks that jutted up and out over the lake. It was a giant boulder streaked with colors and crystals that shone in the moonlight. On the blanket, there was a short, tilting pile of pumpkins. “Pumpkins?” I asked, curious.

“Go with me here,” Johnny said excitedly, pulling me toward the blanket. “I took a little creative license. Pumpkins are sort of our thing, right?”

“Okay…” I said tentatively, thinking that pumpkins were a better thing than some cheesy love song. Slightly better, anyway.

“Well, I made a water tower out of pumpkins,” Johnny said, with a wave of his hand. “Ta da! See, here, these two little pumpkins are the bottom of the water tower, and then this other pumpkin stacked on top, it’s sort of bigger…” He spun the pumpkin water tower around and showed me that he’d carved the name of our town into the orange flesh. A ladder made out of toothpicks climbed up one side.

He kept talking, even when I didn’t say anything. “I know how you really wanted to finish everything on your aunt’s list of dares. I figured you wouldn’t have much trouble with most of the stuff—including Hanging Rock.” He nodded at me. “We will get you to jump, eventually. It’s really not that scary. But knowing about how Suzy died, I knew there was no way we were ever going to get you to climb up to the top of the
actual
water tower. So…I brought the water tower to you.” Johnny reached between two rocks near the waterline and pulled out a bag. Inside the bag was a giant piece of pumpkin cheesecake. He put the cheesecake on a Christmas-themed paper plate that he stacked on top of the larger pumpkin. “Presenting…” He drummed his hands on his knees. “Dessert on top of the water tower!”

I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or cry. He’d made me a water tower carved out of pumpkins, just so I could knock the most intimidating dare off my list. I also knew now that he’d been thinking about me while he was away. That meant more than I thought it would. “Thank you,” I said, picking off a corner of the cheesecake to take a taste. “I happen to love pumpkin cheesecake.”

“So what do you think? Does this count?” He was so hopeful, staring at me over his pumpkin water tower. It was an engineering feat, what he’d done. “I’m sorry it’s so overwhelmingly pumpkin-y. Too much?” He laughed. “No. It’s perfect, right? Take a bite, and check it off that list.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say it’s brilliant,” he suggested. “And maybe you could say you’re glad I’m back?”

I grinned. “I am. I’m glad you’re back.”

“Are you?” He looked at me expectantly, like he didn’t quite believe it. I nodded again. “So…is this it? The last thing on the list?”

I shook my head. “Almost, but not quite. There are a few more things.”

He clapped happily. “I’m glad I didn’t miss the rest. So? What do we have to do next?”

“Well—these tattoos fulfill the tattooing or piercing one
.
” I held out my arm and flexed to show off the ridiculous and garish parrot tattoo Ella had affixed to the inside of my bicep before the party. “And we did host the party, even if it wasn’t exactly perfect—but not a bad first try. Then I’ve still got to do Hanging Rock, someday…but you’re right, that one will happen.” I ticked off things on the list. “I think being here, with you, might make people envy me.”

Johnny nodded seriously. “That is probably true.” He smiled. “I am enviable.”

“Obviously.” I shrugged. “So if you don’t count Hanging Rock, there’s just one thing left.”

“And that is…?”

“Kiss X,” I said, licking a bit of cheesecake off my finger.

“Kiss X, eh?” Johnny swept my hand up in his, then pulled my finger to his own mouth and kissed it. “I wonder if maybe there’s some way I can help you with that one?”

He kissed each of my fingers, then my wrist, then let his hand trail up my arm until it wrapped around the back of my neck. I leaned into it, nuzzling against his fingers as they wound up into my hair. “I’m not sure finger
-
kissing counts,” I whispered. “Kissing seems pretty cut-and-dry. There are rules, you know?”

“Cut and dry?” Johnny said, pulling me closer. His face was just a few inches from mine. “Rules? Like, you think there are rules about kissing? Only a certain way it can be done, or it doesn’t count?”

I shrugged.

“Oh, Sophie, now I think we both know that’s not true. But maybe we should double
-
check?”

I nodded.

“Let’s see,” Johnny said, stretching his body over the pumpkin water tower. “There’s this…” He touched his lips gently to mine. It was just a tiny flutter-touch of a kiss, and then he pulled back. “And this…” His lips met m
ine again, and they held on
, until I was breathless and a little dizzy.
We fit together perfectly.
“Or this…” He whispered. This time, as his mouth explored mine, his hands wrapped up into my hair and
he
pulled me in even closer, until we were breathing the same air and I almost couldn’t tell where he ended and I began. I could smell him and the lake and the sugary pumpkin sweetness that clung to both of our mouths. Finally, he pulled away just a fraction of an inch and muttered, “Do you think one of those counts? Can we cross it off?”

I shook my head slowly and leaned into him again.
I closed my eyes and relished in the taste of his lips, the way they melted into mine.
The pumpkin water tower fell away, rolling into the waves, and then it was just us and the lake and the blanketed rock beneath us. “Hmm,” I muttered, winding my fingers up into his mess of perfect hair. “Just to be safe, maybe we should try a few more? See if we can break a few rules?”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

“Are you wearing sunblock?” My mom whispered this in my ear as she tucked back a piece of wayward hair that peeked out from under my graduation cap. She’d been pretending to sneak in one more postcommencement kiss, but really, she just wanted one more chance to issue advice before I went off on my own.

There was something magical about graduation day. One minute you’re looking at Brennan Donnelly’s head mole for the last time, rejoicing that Trever German finally made it to “the end,” and listening to your best friend give a speech about the beauty of the past—a past you’ve grown into and lived through with her—and the promise of everyone’s futures. The next minute, you’re kissing your parents good
-
bye and walking away, wings of your graduation robe flapping in the wind, waiting for you to take off and fly. My mom lowered her voice to say, “Do you need to bring a life jacket?”

“Mom,” I said, laughing. “I’m good. I promise.” I pulled away from her and hugged my dad. He’d been strangely silent all day, enough so that I could tell he was a little choked up. His voice usually boomed and echoed in settings like this. “We’re just going swimming. A little party up at Hanging Rock, to celebrate graduation. Nothing crazy. Just fun.”

She hugged me one more time, squeezing me close enough that I could smell the last traces of morning coffee on her breath—that she’d spilled a bit on the shoulder of her dress didn’t help. “I’m proud of you, Sophie.” She nodded, her eyes glistening. “Really proud of the woman you’ve become.”

“Thanks,” I said. Through the sap, I knew she meant it. She and I had talked a lot in the weeks after I’d reunited with my friends, after the party. I’d made it clear to my parents that I’d felt stifled by their overprotectiveness and frustrated that I’d never been given the freedom to fail. I reminded them that I would need room to mess up, to fall, or I’d never find my true potential. I’d also told them, frankly, that I was frustrated that they’d kept me shelt
ered from the truth about Suzy.

My mom had said she unde
rstood. B
ut in the months since we’d started talking about it, I had also come to realize that I wasn’t going to change her—or erase her instincts to try to protect me. From now on, I’d decided, I was just going to have to figure out how to live my life without letting someone else’s shadow slip over everything. Now I was on my own to screw up. But I was ready for the challenge, eager to try to find my way.

As angry as I’d been with my parents for hiding Suzy’s suicide from me as long as they had, I was also a little bit grateful. After all, I was the only person who’d been allowed to hold tight to the memories I had of my aunt and not have them sullied by her final act. By keeping the truth about Suzy’s last days from me, my family had—in their own, messed
-
up way—saved me. They’d allowed my memory of her to live on, without the festering disappointment the rest of them had been clinging to for all those years. The reality was, none of the memories I had of her were any different now that I knew. It was just the ending that had changed.

If I’d known the truth about how she’d died all along, I never would have pursued the things on her list of dares. I wouldn’t have gotten to know Johnny. I would never have realized all that I was missing. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have gotten to know myself—or my friends—the way I had this year.

Now I’d made a promise to myself that I would focus on changing my family’s perception of Suzy, so we could all move on with her back in our lives. I would be forever grateful to my aunt for changing my life in so many ways, both when she was alive and now—when a piece of her spirit lived on in me. I was just sorry she’d given up on herself.

“I love you,
M
om,” I said, holding her close again for one final hug.

“Sophie?”
m
y mom croaked as I turned to join Ella and Grace, who were waiting for me at the edge of the parking lot. “I just want you to know that—” I looked at her, wondering what more there was to say. I still didn’t know if she totally got where I was coming from all the time, but I’d come to terms with that. She continued, “I know you’re not always going to be the person you might think I want you to be. And I don’t expect that you’ll always succeed…
but I promise that we’ll always be here for you to fall back on. If you need us.”

“I know.” I nodded and smiled. One more silver lining. “Thanks, Mom.” With a final glance back at my parents, I ran across the lawn to join my friends.

“Ready, Freddy?” Ella asked, snapping a picture of me as I jimmied the lock on the passenger
-
side door of my car. Grace popped into the front seat and reached over to unlock my door for me.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. I peeled the stiff, boxy hat off my head and tousled my hair, rolling down the windows to let the warm summer breeze wash over us. “Graduates,” I mused, as I turned out of the school parking lot for the last time. “We are freaking graduates!”

We all whooped and cheered, and my car screamed along with us as we turned right to head out toward Hanging Rock. “Grace, your speech rocked.” I patted her knee.

“Thanks,” she said, blushing. “I had to do that thing where I pictured you all naked under your robes,” she said, giggling. “It helped with the nerves.”

I pulled the bottom of my robe up and revealed a bare thigh. “It wasn’t much of a stretch with me.”

Ella peered through the space between the two front seats. “Are you nudie?” she gasped.

“Maybe…” I said. “It’s something I’ve always thought might be fun, so I did it.”

“You’ve had a lifelong goal to go butt-nekkid under your commencement robe?” Ella asked. “That’s unexpected.”

“I can’t say it’s been a
life
long goal, but it’s something I always sort of wanted to do,” I said with a shrug. “Why not go for it? I have to admit, though, that I spent much of Mr. Friedman’s motivational speech considering exactly how many people have probably sweat inside this robe before me. If all my skin peels off and I perish, can you tell the doctors I died because of skin-on-robe contact?”

“They wash the robes before we wear them, don’t they?” Grace asked, obviously grossed out.

“I think you’ll be okay, Soph,” Ella laughed. “But yes, I’ll let them know what happened, if it comes to that. If I’m still in the US of A, of course.” She beamed, as she always did when she talked about leaving. Ella would only be around for the next few weeks, then she was shipping off to Austria to start as an au pair for a family with two young girls. Grace and I were smothering her, stealing every minute that we could, since we knew it would be at least a year before she’d be home again. Her mom and sisters were so excited about her adventure that they’d already planned a trip to visit her in Europe at Christmas. Sandy had surprised us all with her support and enthusiasm, once Ella finally told her what she wanted and showed her that she had taken steps to get it.

I pulled my car into an open space in the lot at Hanging Rock and turned off the ignition. “Before we hit the beach,” Grace said, pulling a piece of paper and a pink pen out of her bag. “The list. We need to finish it up.”

“Pass it back,” Ella instructed, reaching over the seat to pull the paper out of Grace’s hands. She scanned it quickly, then tossed it back to Grace. “I got all my stuff on there. I’ll have you know, I didn’t take Andy’s suggestion to include any dares that involve keeping a fake pet or a months-old salami sandwich in your locker.”

“Wise choice,” Grace said. “Mine are all on there, too. Soph, anything else you want to add before we pack it up and send it off?”

We’d been working on a list of our own—a collection of dares, so to speak—for the past few months. Some of the things on our list we’d copied over from Suzy’s list, but we’d each added a few of our own, too. And we’d spent the last weeks before graduation making sure we did everything on our high school bucket lists ourselves
. L
iving, without regret.

The only thing I hadn’t yet done was jump off Hanging Rock. That was one of the dares that had made it onto both lists—Suzy’s original list, and now the new one my best friends and I had written together—and I had every intention of making sure I finished everything on both. I was so close. “Can you jot down ‘Go naked under your graduation robe’ for me? Then I’m all set.”

“You got it,” Grace said happily. She added it to the bottom of our list. Then she rolled the paper, tucked it inside a reusable stainless
-
steel water bottle, and screwed on the cap. “And that, as they say, is a wrap.”

***

Ten minutes later, I stood on top of the precipice overlooking the swimming hole at Hanging Rock. Below, my friends and classmates splashed and swam and celebrated. Johnny was there, too, smiling, ready to wrap me up in his arms after I jumped. He didn’t yet know what I was wearing under my graduation robe, and I was looking forward to the moment when he figured it out.

Grace and Ella flanked me at the top of the rock, all of us still in our robes. We’d released the list-in-a-bottle at the edge of the Hanging Rock swimming hole, letting it roll down the rocky falls at the edge of the pond, and watched as it bobbed through the current heading downstream toward the lake. In time, someone would find it. Maybe, I thought, it would mean something to someone. Perhaps it would make a difference to another girl or a group of friends, somewhere, someday. Because sometimes, I’d discovered, a few dares can change lives.

Now my best friends and I held hands, staring out into the open air in front of us. The wind whipped at our robes, and I heard Johnny whoop when a gust pulled the wings of my robe up to reveal my bare upper thighs. I took a deep breath, then glanced at Ella and Grace. I squeezed their hands, and they both squeezed back. Then I whispered, “Three, two, one,” and we all jumped. Our robes fluttered around us as we leap
ed
off solid ground, hands linked, into the unknown. We were fearless, because we had each other, and none of us was letting go.