The Throwback List Read online

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.” Waves and teaspoons crashed behind Deb. Her footsteps took her farther away from the noise. Jo imagined her mother stepping into the back room of her shop, the one recently converted to a prep kitchen. “You’re gonna bounce back in an instant. Right now, you need to take yourself out for some fun self-care. A mani-pedi or a nice lunch at that—”

  “It’s been a month,” Jo whispered. “Almost two.”

  “Oh,” her mom said, clearly injured and determined not to acknowledge the hurt. “You tell me what you need.”

  Jo had squeezed her eyes until she saw flashbulb swirls. “I need to store some stuff in your garage for a little while. Just. Everything I own.”

  “And do you think you’re gonna need to come with that stuff?”

  “Yeah,” she said. The finality of it crushed her. “I should probably come, too.”

  Tonight, after twelve hours of driving—but only six hours of crying—Jo arrived home to the same elaborate dinner her mom used to make for Jo’s birthday every year. Beef ribs, Grandma Freeman’s recipe for mac and cheese, and a two-tier German chocolate cake. And with the spread, a gift: a pineapple necklace with a card saying What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

  Like it was a party. Like her failure was worth a feast.

  When Jo recoiled at the spread without meaning to, her teenage sister beat their mom to a hug. Eden hugged Jo with loose arms like Jo was someone at a networking event with whom Eden would rather shake hands.

  “Mom and Dad closed the store for this,” Eden hissed in her ear, her loose curls scratching against Jo’s cheek. “Be nice, please.”

  A senior in high school now, Eden was too young to remember when Mr. and Mrs. Freeman had zero days off. For most of Jo’s life, they’d been too busy keeping their various businesses and side hustles afloat. For reasons beyond Jo’s understanding, the change from consignment store to art gallery to tea-and-surf shop seemed to be paying off for her parents.

  She had been younger than Eden when she wrote out the battle plan to GTFO. The map journal had homework assignments, shopping lists, and names for the paint-your-own-pottery place her parents had debated opening. She got lost in a pro/con list about whether or not to wear pants to homecoming—Is being subversive really just begging for my classmates to acknowledge my queerness? asked the con list. “Yes,” she told her younger self. “Do it anyway”—and relived the drama of deciding to drop out of the yearbook prank. How had life felt so big back then? How could anyone feel like Sandy Point was big enough to breathe in?

  The end of the journal and the end of the Malbec bottle occurred around the same time, which was enough like kismet that Jo decided she deserved another slice of leftover German chocolate cake.

  Chocolate and wine are perfect together, she thought. I’m basically a sommelier.

  Definitely a drunk thought. Drunk mission accomplished.

  The last page of the map journal was another list—longer than the others, reaching every corner of the page and continuing onto the endpapers.

  - TP Bianca’s house

  - Be in a play with Autumn Perform onstage

  - Get nose TONGUE eyebrow belly button pierced

  - Surf the Point

  - Host a dinner party

  - Plan Do Redo the yearbook prank

  - Have a paintball glitter fight

  - Eat the giant sundae at Frosty’s

  - Get a pet

  - Learn a whole dance routine

  - Smoke eat brownies Get stoned

  - Try everything on the menu at TGI Friday’s

  - Do a keg stand

  - Play hide-and-seek in public

  - Pose like a Suicide Girl pinup girl

  - Break a jack-o’-lantern something with a sledgehammer

  - Climb the giant anchor on the boardwalk (and survive!!)

  - Get a perfect high score at the boardwalk arcade

  - Host a bonfire party where everyone brings a picture to burn

  - Eat breakfast at sunrise midnight

  - Dig up the time capsule

  Something this messy would never have been allowed if there’d been a page left to rip out. The inks didn’t match, so Jo knew it was a first draft. Some items were written in blue, some with a glittery silver gel pen that wasn’t her handwriting at all, but Autumn Kelly’s.

  It was strange to be able to recognize the handwriting of someone she hadn’t seen in almost a decade. But could you ever really forget your old best friend, even when passed notes gave way to internet likes?

  The last item on the list sparked Jo’s memory. Dig up the time capsule.

  After reading about the idea in a rainy-day activity book when they were eleven, she and Autumn filled a metal tackle box with pictures and toys and letters to their future selves. Having buried it behind the doghouse in the Kellys’ backyard, they agreed to dig it up again after they had done everything worth doing in Sandy Point.

  It wasn’t supposed to be a long list. Sandy Point wasn’t a big town and nothing much ever happened there. They consulted Autumn’s older brother for dumb townie traditions like climbing the anchor or surfing to the Point. They searched the internet for ideas like “glitter fight.”

  Throughout junior high and high school, they brainstormed the list whenever conversation dipped. And then suddenly it was nearly senior year and they hadn’t done a single thing.

  The list became official in the back of the map journal. It would be how she and Autumn would spend the end of high school, celebrating the end of childhood by doing every fun thing their town had to offer. Things they’d need to know how to do before college. Things they couldn’t get anywhere else.

  Senior year, Jo split her time between yearbook and working at her parents’ store while Autumn became fully enmeshed in Point High Theater—playing both Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Ado Annie in Oklahoma!

  They got distracted. They grew apart. They were childhood best friends and their childhood had already ended.

  Jo half tumbled down the stairs toward the beacon that was her Welcome Home from Your Real Life cake—inscription not included. She took the journal with her and reread the final list. She couldn’t tick off a single item. Thus far, her life had been void of pets, dinner parties, and sledgehammers.

  Seventeen-year-old me would think I was so boring.

  She tried not to be offended by the thought. After all, Present!Jo hated Teen!Jo’s bedding, hometown, and wardrobe. If any of Teen!Jo’s ruffled plaid shirts or colorful flip-flops were still around, Present!Jo would throw them into the ocean.

  And yet.

  The battle plan had been so clear about who Jo wanted to grow up to be. Someone who made 30 Under 30 lists. Independent, educated, physically fit, head-bitch-in-charge Jo Freeman.

  Now, unemployed with zero prospects, Jo had bounced all the way back to the starting line, and she couldn’t even live up to her younger self’s dream of doing a keg stand.

  She wasn’t even sure where kegs came from. Bars? Breweries?

  Peeling the foil away from her cake, Jo pulled off a bite with her thumb and forefinger, too glum to bother with a fork. The coconut frosting was an adrenaline burst of sugar and fat. She could have cut a piece and taken it back upstairs to her appointment with Second Bottle of Malbec, but something stopped her.

  At the end of the long galley kitchen, past the shelving covered in decades of forgotten juicers and George Foreman grills, was a window. It faced the front yard of the house next door.

  Bianca Boria’s house.

  Bianca Boria had been Jo’s pace car in high school. If Jo did well, Bianca did better. If Jo worked hard, Bianca worked harder.

  While Jo did everything with sweat in her eyes and the wind in her hair, Bianca glided past her with an easy smile. When people talked shit about her single mom and tattooed grandparents, she didn’t even flinch. She wore a bikini on social media and captioned it Fat Doesn’t Mean Ugly, single-handedly bringing body positivity to Poin
t High. She was president of the honor society and prom queen, a feat that rocked the core of their teen social hierarchy.

  It’s like living next door to a unicorn, Jo thought. Or a princess. Or a…princess unicorn? Nope. That’s the wine talking.

  Like any self-respecting marketing professional, Jo wasn’t unfamiliar with the art of internet stalking. She knew that Bianca still lived next door—although her mother had moved out—and she was married to a guy whose name Jo didn’t recognize from the yearbook. Jo had tried scrolling through their wedding album—Bianca had worn the poofiest Cinderella dress imaginable—but had been too weirded out when she saw Autumn Kelly as the maid of honor.

  Autumn and Bianca must have become friends in college. Basically anyone going to college after Point High went to Oregon State.

  Seeing Autumn weepily help Bianca into a wedding dress had flared an uncomfortably territorial feeling in the back of Jo’s mind. She hadn’t been able to enjoy peering into Bianca’s account since.

  But now, TP Bianca’s house was staring up at her from the top of the list. She took another pinch of cake. Popped it into her mouth. Mashed it into the roof of her mouth. Tried again. Chewed it like a sober girl.

  She went searching for toilet paper.

  There was a roll hidden behind eight cans of baked beans from the hall-closet emergency kit and then three rolls from the bathroom that she and Eden now shared upstairs. Jo grabbed her phone and ran out the front door.

  Freezing in the pitch-dark, she loped across the sandy driveway toward the yellow glow of Bianca Boria’s porch light. Unlike the Freemans’ house with its dehydrated wood shingles responsible for a million childhood splinters, Bianca’s house was bright white with a pastel-blue door and a yard full of matching hydrangea plants.

  Right in front, nearest to Jo’s house, there was the biggest tree in the neighborhood. An Oregon maple.

  Supplies set down in the grass, Jo threw a roll of toilet paper at the tree. It bounced off a branch and fell to the ground, dribbling back toward her across the perfectly trimmed grass.

  “Oh. Fuck,” she said out loud, genuinely surprised.

  She hadn’t come out here to fail at TP-ing. It wasn’t a par game. It was a skill test. She squared her shoulders. Picking up the failed throw, she quickly unwrapped as much of the paper as she could while having a decent handful left on the roll to hold on to. She tossed it again. The little tail flapped between branches while the rest fell to the ground.

  Success was a rush even better than a tipsy mouthful of German chocolate cake.

  She launched more toilet-paper rolls, delighting in the way they floated in the darkness like ghosts. Soon she didn’t feel the cold. Bianca’s lawn rinsed the sand from her feet.

  If she’d still been wearing a Q-Co tracker—rather than leaving all of them in a toilet at HQ after cleaning out her desk—it would have shown her pulse rate up in the heart-eyes emoji range.

  Behind the warm glow of exertion and wine, she imagined TP-ing becoming the next fitness craze. All-black athleisure, ski masks, the pseudo-nemesis of your choosing’s house, a coach in your earpiece screaming something motivational.

  Until losing her Gym Class app, Jo never realized how much she would miss the aggressive affirmations. How did people get out of bed without being called a sweat goddess at five thirty every morning?

  With the tree covered, Jo reached for her phone and took a few pictures of her work. The shot would have been better with her camera and tripod, but they were in boxes in the garage. The picture was just a souvenir, proof to her younger self that she was capable of hitting a goal. Even a stupid one.

  Through her phone lens, she saw that a single roll of toilet paper had fallen to the ground between two tree roots. Determined to leave no roll behind, she scooped it up. Looking for the perfect place to launch it, she ran around the tree, smiling as beatifically as Bianca Boria crushing her GPA. Running the student council. Getting married at twenty-five with the only best friend Jo had ever had by her side…

  “Johanna?”

  Bianca Boria stood directly beneath the porch light. For a moment, Jo was positive that Bianca was wearing a long-sleeved evening gown, red-carpet-ready in the middle of the night, but as her eyes adjusted, she realized it was a large plush bathrobe. Bianca’s dark hair was pulled up in a high, elegant bun that had never known frizz. Her skin was clear.

  Jo looked at the last roll weighing down her right hand. She threw it.

  It bonked Bianca in the nose.

  Jo ran home and didn’t look back.

  TP Bianca’s house

  “Jo Freeman TP’d my tree,” Bee said on speakerphone.

  “You’re joking!” Dripping on the bath mat and half in the shower, Autumn hopped on one foot toward the sink. Blotting the towel into her eyes to better see the screen, she saw that it wasn’t even six in the morning—too early to be a goof. “Jo doesn’t even live here. She lives in California.”

  “When I caught her, she beaned me in the face with a roll of toilet paper,” Bee said. She took a loud slurp of coffee. “At midnight! I’d already taken off my eyebrows.”

  Autumn’s brain whirled through a dizzying number of images and questions and old rotten hurts. She sat down too fast on the toilet seat and slid sideways on her wet skin. “That’s just so too weird, Bee.”

  “Thank you! I needed to hear it from you since she’s your—”

  “Estranged bestie?”

  “Oh good. I was afraid you were going to be dramatic about this,” Bee said drolly. “You’re not estranged. That’s for families.”

  “Best friends should count as family. I spent way more time with Jo than I ever did with any of my cousins. They’re all gun-toting skiers in Bend.” Autumn grabbed her pajama shirt from the floor and used it to dry sections of her long red-brown hair. Upside down, she twisted her face toward the phone. “How else should I think of Jo? She was the Elphaba to my Glinda for ten years and then she just stopped talking to me, which I guess still makes us Act Two Elphie and Glinda—”

  “I understand how much you like Wicked, but I really don’t like you comparing a Black woman to a green one.”

  “Note taken!” Autumn said. She flipped her hair up and, grabbing a brush from the counter, tore through the tangles. “I haven’t seen Jo in years and years. She basically stopped coming home after college. Are you sure it was her?”

  “I’m pretty sure I can recognize my own neighbors. I’ve only lived next door to the Freemans since the second grade,” Bee said, over the sound of running water and dishware clinking. “Of course, I don’t think I’ve actually talked to Jo since college. I ran into her in Fred Meyer around Christmastime. I remember because she said ‘Merry Christmas, Bianca’ and I wasn’t really listening because I was looking at wreaths. So what came out of my mouth was Yerp-yup!”

  “Yerp-yup?” Autumn laughed. “What were you trying to say?”

  “No idea. It haunts me. Once every six months, I just wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself, Yerp-yup. Anyway.” Autumn pictured her friend recentering herself by smoothing the air in a long swipe. Bee was a hand talker, which seemed like a dangerous quality in someone who wielded needles for a living. “Last night, I was two seconds away from finally falling asleep when Lita comes to the bottom of the stairs, screaming about a burglar. Birdy slept through the whole thing—”

  “Comforting!”

  “I know, right? But it wasn’t a burglar. It was Johanna Freeman. So now I’m trying to solve the case of why did my tree get TP’d.”

  “Definitely not a Nancy Drew I’d read,” Autumn said. She wound dental tape between her fingers so she could floss her veneers—a good luck in Hollywood present from her parents, facilitated by Bee’s now-husband, Dr. Bobby Birdy, one of Sandy Point’s two orthodontists. “Does the toilet paper have yerp-yup written on it?”

  “Ha-ha,” Bee said, not entertained. “Could you be slightly more helpful? You know Jo better than I ever did. She
and I aren’t even social media mutuals. You guys were best friends for a decade. She dated your boss!”

  “Wren isn’t my boss,” Autumn said. “I go days without seeing her. She’s normally too busy to even eat lunch with me. I’ve started playing sudoku like a real loner.”

  “Isn’t her sister one of your students?”

  The dental tape squeaked between her molars. “Wren only has brothers.”

  “No. Jo!”

  Eden Freeman was one of the seniors in Point High’s drama program. Going into her first year of teaching, Autumn had been worried that it would be awkward having Jo’s sister in her class—Eden had been the first baby Autumn ever held. But Eden never talked about her older sister. And Autumn never mentioned Eden being in diapers. A fair trade.

  “Eden was little when we all graduated,” Autumn said. “I don’t think she and her sister ever had a chance to get super close. As far as I know, Jo has been living in California for almost a decade. When I moved to LA, I asked if she was close enough to get coffee. But she was hours up north, which is still miles from here.” She flung the dental tape into the wastebasket and heard the expectant silence on the other end of the phone. Sometimes Bianca was a dog with a bone. Autumn sighed, taking a moment to arrange her scraps of knowledge into a picture of a friend lost. “Jo kind of always hated Sandy Point. She literally counted down the days until she could move away, starting the first day of senior year.”

  “What? Like a Christmas paper chain?”

  “No, she wrote it on the whiteboard wall over her bed. But that’s how much she would never be in Oregon in the middle of a Monday night. Normally she’s getting tagged in pictures in, like, a wine bar with people all older than her or at someone’s wedding reception. And she’s wearing black or gray, never a color, and keeps pretending to be surprised when people tell her she looks like Meghan Markle but also never cuts her hair so that she looks less like Meghan Markle.”

  Jo’s resemblance to Meghan Markle was undeniable. In fact, the last time Autumn had tried reaching out to Jo was around the time Prince Harry and Meghan moved to the United States.