The Throwback List Page 4

  “It’s not for anyone!” Autumn called as she passed them. “Everybody go back to the cafeteria!”

  Cries of protest followed her around the corner, where a tripod topped with a white umbrella was set up next to the wrought-iron memorial bench. Eden Freeman was seated stiffly on the edge of the bench in front of her sister’s huge camera.

  Jo really was in Sandy Point. Wearing all black, with straight hair and heavy mascara.

  Neither sister noticed Autumn until she stamped her foot. “Excuse me!”

  Unlike the Kelly siblings, Jo and Eden were very visibly related. Both were gangly limbed and jumped like yanked marionettes at the sound of Autumn’s voice.

  “Autumn! Hey! How cool is it that you’re the drama teacher?” Jo said, taking a step in front of her sister. She started going in for a hug before she caught sight of Autumn’s face.

  With a student present, Autumn wasn’t allowed to say: Oh yeah, Johanna Jordan Freeman. That’s right. I am fucking pissed right now and I remember your middle name. So she let her glare say it. As a naturally friendly-looking person, Autumn had spent years practicing mean faces in the mirror. A great actor had full control over their expressions.

  Jo dropped her hug arms. Good.

  Autumn turned the glare on the younger Freeman. “Eden, you are excused. Go tell everyone that there is no photo shoot.”

  “But, Miss Kelly!” Eden said. “If Jo takes everyone’s headshots, then we don’t have to use selfies for the Senior Showcase program! And we’d have headshots to use for college, too. We’d look so much more professional!”

  “That might have been cool,” Autumn said, annoyance slipping into her tone. “If we had signed permission slips. Or if we’d talked about how you choose the right outfit for headshots. It would be super professional if Jo had a visitor’s pass! If you had done all the steps that it requires to bring a stranger on campus to take pictures of minors, it could have been really cool!”

  “She’s not a stranger!” Eden protested. “She’s your best friend!”

  Autumn couldn’t bring herself to look at Jo. The denial there would be needlessly hurtful.

  “I’m not signing any fourth-period tardies,” Autumn said tightly. “Tell everyone the photo shoot is off and clear them out.”

  With a frustrated growl and a heel spin—she was a drama kid, after all—Eden stormed away. Autumn watched her leave, wishing she had been able to play the cool teacher that rewarded out-of-the-box thinking. Not the kind of teacher who parroted Mrs. Markey. She wanted to be Miss Honey, not the Trunchbull.

  “Sorry. Last night, she found me hunting for my comforter and saw the box with all my photography stuff in it,” Jo said, sitting down on the bench and packing her camera in a bulky zippered bag. She was wearing black slacks and a black silk top, as though dressed for a very slinky funeral. “To be fair, I was not sober when she asked me to do headshots and was way too hungover to disappoint her six reminder texts this morning. I can take headshots. I used to take yours.”

  Autumn couldn’t stop herself from remembering running around the boardwalk looking for the best lighting or the strangest props to pose with. Jo used a kazoo to make her laugh when she started to get too posed in the photos. All so Autumn could audition for Seussical in McMinnville—a whole hour and a half away. What goofs they had been.

  No. She had to fight the nostalgia.

  Think of the laughing emoji! she coached herself. Vague! Impersonal!

  “You should have asked me if it was okay.” Autumn crossed her arms and brought her voice down to a whisper. Teaching had conditioned her to bring all of her anger down to a volume that couldn’t be eavesdropped on. “God, Jo, do you have any clue how stupid this makes me look? I work here, if you hadn’t noticed. You don’t see me busting into your fancy office and redoing projects, do you?”

  Jo’s hands stilled inside her camera bag as she grimaced at the ground.

  “What?” Autumn asked too sharply. “Are you still hungover?”

  She had never seen Jo get drunk. Not really. Florencio had given them a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade for senior skip day, but they only managed to get giggly before the malt-liquor headaches set in.

  “Just a little dehydrated,” Jo said, looking up blithely. “But I’m back in town for a while, if you do need my help with anything. I could come back and take pictures once there are permission slips. Or run a social media campaign for your next show. Start a hashtag. I’ve got hashtag experience.”

  “We don’t need your help, Jo.” Autumn’s jaw locked. She was positive that she was now going to cry. That was going to make her look like such a baby. She had really enjoyed having the upper hand for once. “Why would you think you could just forget about people and then show up out of nowhere?”

  A wrinkle cut across Jo’s forehead. “I didn’t forget about you—”

  “You don’t call or text or answer Snapchat messages—”

  “No one really uses Snapchat anymore,” Jo said, missing the point.

  “I don’t care about what’s cool in social media!” Autumn interrupted. “Why don’t you go home and help my actual best friend, Bianca, who called me this morning begging to know why you vandalized her house.”

  Jo’s chin tucked back into her neck. She was a lot less duchess-like when she was miffed. “Vandalized? It’s toilet paper, Autumn. I didn’t key her car.”

  “You littered, violently!” Autumn said in a whisper-scream. “Just from an environmental point of view, it sucks! You should be cleaning it up! Right now! You should clean up all the trash on your street as penance!”

  “I thought I was doing a nice thing by coming here,” Jo said. “For my sister. For you.”

  “Well, you were wrong!” Autumn said. “What you do here matters. People can see you. People have to deal with you. You aren’t invisible. When you ghost people, they know.”

  Jo swallowed, the muscles in her neck flexing against the silver chain around her throat. Autumn noticed the necklace for the first time. It was a silver pineapple with a diamond in its crown.

  When Autumn was in the second grade, her best friend, Johanna, had eaten a slice of Mrs. Kelly’s famous pineapple upside-down cake, not knowing that she was allergic. Jo’s throat closed instantly. When the ambulance pulled up, her cheeks were starting to turn gray-blue. Huge brown eyes searched for Autumn, wild and scared. Autumn had thought she looked like Bambi’s mom as she smoothed Jo’s frizzy hair and whispered promises to her.

  “If you live, Jo, I’ll give you all my birthday presents.”

  “If you live, Jo, we can wear matching Carmen Sandiego Halloween costumes like you wanted.”

  “If you live, Jo, I’ll make sure you never, ever have to touch that stupid evil fruit ever again for the rest of your life.”

  And now there it was, dangling below Jo’s collarbone.

  Damn it, Autumn, act like you don’t care. Act like an educator and not a little kid. Act like none of this matters.

  But the part of her that was still Jo Freeman’s best friend forever just wanted to cry.

  “You can’t be on campus without a visitor’s badge,” she told Jo in a strangled voice. “There are a million signs about it in the main building.” She stared up at the sky, hoping to keep the beading tears inside her eyes. “Go home, Jo.”

  At least once a month, Bianca had a nightmare that the doorknob to the downstairs bedroom broke off in her hand. Or there was a dead bolt she didn’t have the key for. Or a fire she was powerless to put out. Regardless of the fantastical emergency, trapped inside the room were her mom, Tito, and Lita, making lists of things that only she could take care of while she tried to claw her way through the wood grain on the door.

  It would kill her grandmother to know that Bianca had regular nightmares about her. So, before she knocked on Lita’s door, Bee pasted on the pleasant smile she used to practice in the mirror before Sandy Point High pep rallies. No teeth, eyebrows up. What Autumn referred to as her “comm
ercial headshot” face.

  Bianca thought of it as “faking.”

  She knocked on the door and sang in nonthreatening singsong, “Lita, buenas tardes. ¿Está bien?”

  Since Tito died, Bianca used her scant Spanish like a desperate breath on cooling embers.

  “No, no.” There was a ruffle of blankets that sounded like sails caught in a breeze. A grunt. “Too early. I just lay down.”

  Bee tapped the face of her smartwatch: 11:47. She was already two minutes behind schedule. Persistence was key. Lita was at her most agitated when being woken up from a nap. Bee dropped the singsong but kept the smile. Lita would sense a frown and Bianca would lose. “Lita, it’s time for lunch. Can I come in?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Bee opened the door before Lita changed her mind. Despite having the entire living room at her disposal, Lita had the large flat-screen TV mounted above her dresser on, playing a recorded Santana concert.

  “Lunchtime,” she said aloud with forced brightness, before Lita could open her mouth to complain about her touching the remote control.

  Somehow even minimally invasive brain surgery couldn’t make Lita less observant. Her eyes narrowed at Bee as she swung her legs heavily over the side of her bed. Lita preferred to have something else to keep her attention while getting dressed. Bee preferred Lita’s attention on one of the few conversations she would have that day not with the TV.

  “What would you like for lunch?” Bee asked, taking both of Lita’s hands and helping her to her feet. The mermaid waving the Puerto Rican flag on Lita’s forearm did the smiling for both of them. The mermaid looked exactly like Rosie Perez, but predated the actor by at least five years. “I was thinking about putting together a spinach salad for myself. We have some nice strawberries.”

  Lita let go of her hands and took a pained step toward the dresser. “Is Birdy having pizza bagels?”

  Bee wanted to lie, but also knew that they would pass the oven she had preheated per Birdy’s request.

  Lita took her silence as an answer.

  “Then I want pizza bagels.”

  Bee checked the smoothie cup on the nightstand. There were some flecks of spinach clinging to the plastic sides, but, for once, Lita might have consumed the entire thing. Or she had decided it was worth the energy to dump the blueberry protein goo in the toilet, which would require her using her bedroom walker. Either way, she’d done more before lunch than normal. It wouldn’t hurt to have a treat. Even if that treat had zero nutritional value.

  “Fine,” Bee acquiesced. “Pajama time is over, though.”

  When Bianca and her mom decided to move Lita back into the house, the doctors helped plan her daily routine down to the minute. Since she spent most of her time inside, they were firm about her changing from pajamas to real clothes every day. No question. Now, when she looked down, she could tell whether it was day or night depending on her outfit.

  It did require Bee’s mom keeping a key to the house so that she could be on nighttime duty if Bee needed to be at the shop past seven. It was a small price to pay to keep Lita calm. Autumn often told Bee that she would never let her mother have a key to her house, but Autumn had been raised with an inflated sense of privacy.

  Besides, Bee’s mom couldn’t be more of a cock block than Lita, who had stood at the bottom of the stairs screaming, “Burglar!” at midnight—far past her bedtime—and all because of a noise that ended up being Jo Freeman TP-ing the maple tree.

  With a wave of dread, Bee recalled the toilet paper swaying in the tree. The morning had been lost to sorting out the tattoo shop’s new digital appointment book. Bee had forgotten to clean up the yard. That was bound to steal twenty minutes of her lunchtime.

  Today would have been a perfect time for that magic wand she spent her whole life hounding Santa for to finally show up.

  While it would have been much easier to dress Lita in adaptive senior clothing, she refused to give up her old wardrobe. And since Bee was the ungrateful brat who moved Lita out of her apartment over the Salty Dog tattoo parlor, Bee didn’t argue much. Lita picked out one of Tito’s old Harley-Davidson T-shirts and a pair of pajama jeans she’d gotten for Christmas from Autumn.

  “The front door at the shop is flaking,” Bee said casually, topping off Lita’s outfit with the Velcro house slippers that had replaced her fall-risk chanclas. “It needs a touch-up. I found a great match. It’s called Rusty Anchor Red, isn’t that perfect?”

  Lita’s foot went limp. Bee didn’t have to look up to feel the disapproval aimed at the victory rolls she had painstakingly pinned from 6:20 to 6:27 this morning.

  “Muñeca, what am I going to say?”

  Bee stood up. “Lita.”

  “What am I going to say?”

  “You’re going to say ‘Don’t be fancy,’ but—”

  Lita wasn’t listening. She was listing. “Don’t be fancy! No glitter. No sparkles. No permanent-makeup artists. No new paint.”

  Tito was gone, but his many catchphrases echoed on behind him forever. Don’t be fancy had been his most frequently offered advice. Bianca had never once found it helpful.

  “I would argue none of those things are particularly fancy, but new paint especially—”

  “Soon you’ll want the artists to deliver their pieces in thirty minutes or less,” Lita grumbled. “This isn’t your square pizza.”

  In college, Bianca had managed a chain storefront called Square Slice Pizza. It wasn’t a cool job. For three and a half years she wore a baseball cap to work and all of her bras smelled like marinara, but the job gave her full benefits for the first time in her life and enough money to not have four roommates.

  Every single day she regretted telling her family about it.

  The front door closed with a thunk that rattled the windows of Lita’s bedroom. “Honeys, I’m home!” Birdy called. It had only been a couple hours since he left for work, but the sound of his voice was immediately welcome to Bee.

  Even if it did mean that it was noon already. Shit.

  “We’re back here!” she cried. “Be right out!”

  Bianca didn’t ask if Lita wanted to walk to the living room because yes, she wanted to, but her tiny steps telegraphed that her knees were bothering her more than usual. Bee hoped that didn’t mean there was rain coming. That would turn the TP tree into a mess that would take more time to clean than she had to spare.

  She motioned for Lita to take a seat on her four-wheeled walker. Too distracted by the horror that was the idea of new paint, Lita forgot to argue and plopped herself down.

  “My husband, your grandfather,” she said, starting with Tito’s official title. “Picked that particular shade of red by comparing it to the ink on his first tattoo.”

  “The rose he got for you, his Rosa, so he could think of you when he was with the navy.”

  “The rose he got for me!” Lita said, both agreeing with Bee and correcting her. “Now that he’s gone, the rose is gone. The paint stays.”

  “I could literally take a picture on an app and get an exact—”

  “Apps are definitely too fancy, Bianca.”

  Bee put her tongue between her molars and bit down hard so that she wouldn’t blurt out that apps already controlled the Salty Dog’s appointments, reviews, and most of the artists’ designs.

  One hundred and eleven days until I’m finally on my honeymoon. One hundred and eleven days until I take my first vacation with zero family members ever.

  It would be just her and Birdy in a Hawaiian cabana for an entire week. Bee had purchased a different bathing suit for every day and zero sarongs.

  One hundred and eleven days until it’s us, the warm surf, and endless blended drinks.

  She parked Lita in front of the dining room table, facing the TV, and kissed her cheek. “Okay, Lita. The shop is your baby. I’m just the nanny.”

  Lita patted her cheek, kissing her back and swatting her away. “Puerto Ricans don’t have nannies. We have family.”

&
nbsp; “Tell that to J.Lo.”

  “I would. I have words for that Miss Jennifer.” She sucked her teeth. “Who leaves Marc Anthony?”

  “Someone who found a Yankee,” Bee said.

  “Mano!” Lita shouted to Birdy. “Come help me with her! She’s being wrong again!”

  Birdy walked into the dining room, wearing his Monday-through-Friday button-down-shirt-and-tie combo and holding a can of diet ginger ale. Six-two and heavyset, Birdy looked more like a football player than an orthodontist. It continually struck Bee as odd to see his large frame in her decidedly small house. He was twice the size of her late Tito, the only other man who had ever lived there.

  “Sorry, Lita.” Birdy shrugged. “I’m more of an Enrique guy.”

  Lita recoiled and stuck out her tongue. “Go get my pizza bagels.”

  “Hey,” Birdy said, teasingly pointing at her. “We have to share those pizza bagels.”

  Lita sniffed. “Bianca can go get more with all the time she’ll save not redecorating my tattoo parlor.”

  Birdy watched Bee with apologetic eyes as she squeezed by on her way to make herself a lunch plate.

  “How about some music?” Birdy asked Lita. “What’re you in the mood for? Springsteen? Bowie?”

  “Fleetwood Mac,” Lita said. “Something early. None of that Rumours shit.”

  “Something Stevie-less. I’m on it.”

  Bee pulled out a cookie sheet and lined up frozen discs that really didn’t bear much resemblance to pizza or bagels. The living room filled with the familiar lunchtime patter. Lita told Birdy how much nicer her music would sound on vinyl. Birdy agreed but pointed out that the house didn’t have the square footage to store every album in her encyclopedic memory, which was why they used the TV’s Spotify app.

  Lita never told Birdy that he was being too fancy, no matter how many apps he introduced. He got to be her bro, her mano.

  With the music settled and pizza bagels bubbling, Birdy loudly announced his intention to get Lita a chocolate coconut water. As he came around the corner, he noticed the timer on the oven already ticking.