Page 3 of The Getaway List
(To be clear, I only have this hilarious mental image thanks to my aunts’ retellings; my mom glosses over the details as if she’s worried I’m going to take notes.)
“Yeah,” says Jesse enthusiastically, pulling up the billowing sleeve of his graduation gown. “Look. This one’s a guitar, but its strings are crying.”
“Inspired,” says my mom wryly.
I pull her away before she can ask if the tat was Taylor Swift–related, which it absolutely was—his band’s punk-rock cover of “Cardigan” was voted as our school anthem as a write-in, which I may or may not have helped orchestrate (the school board was awfully upset for a group of adults who let the whole “earthworm” thing slide)—but we don’t have enough time in the world for Jesse to go down one of his glorious Swiftie rabbit holes. I want that McFlurry yesterday.
“Wait,” I realize. “My cap.”
I was so eager to toss it that I forgot about the retrieving part. Wow. Fully graduated now and even Labradors have more common sense.
My mom lets out a pfft noise. “Don’t you think we can live without that particular relic?”
“No, no, it’s important,” I say, panic seizing me. “I—”
Cut myself off abruptly, because my mom doesn’t actually know about the Getaway List. Most of the conflicts on my end were because of her schedule, which is mostly devoted to any hours she can get at the coffee shop she comanages between classes to support us—the last thing I want her to think is that I’m ungrateful for any of it.
“Well, I’m sure it’s around here somewhere,” says my mom, starting to sift through the abandoned caps on the floor. I don’t miss her quick glance at the clock on her phone. She moved her shift to be here. If we’re going to maintain our sacred McFlurry tradition, we’re already cutting it close.
My throat tightens. Maybe this is just it. The sendoff the Getaway List deserves. It really is over then; we’re moving onto the next chapter of our lives. There’s no TomandRiley, RileyandTom anymore, the way everyone in the neighborhood used to say our names when we were a whole lot of things, but chief among them a package deal. We’re just Tom and Riley now. Friends for life, but leading very different ones.
“My parents are over there,” says Jesse. I give him a quick one-armed hug and when he squeezes back he adds, “For real, hit me up if you’re in the city. I feel like you’re overdue for an adventure.”
“I will,” I say, but the words sound hollow even to my own ears.
He lets me go and I feel flimsy, like I’m going to cry. Like there’s suddenly this part of me that wants that adventure more than anything, but I’m too untethered to know where to begin. For all the ruckus in the gym, it feels unbearably quiet in my head right now. Like without all the noise of classes and extracurriculars and college applications there’s just this void staring back at me where my reflection should be.
The trouble is I wouldn’t even know what to look for—I haven’t really felt like myself in ages. The self that pulled one over on teachers who were mean to our friends, like when Mr. Zaff called Jesse a “baby” once for crying over a movie we saw in class, so Tom and I put baby safety locks on every drawer and cabinet in his classroom the next day. The self who pranked classmates at liberty, like when Tom hacked the school loudspeaker so I could put on my best teacher voice and ask if Ava and Josh would come to the front office (collectively there are twenty-three Avas and twenty-five Joshes enrolled, so that Friday afternoon quickly devolved into schoolwide chaos). The self that played what Tom dubbed the “sneaky elf game,” leaving random trinkets stuffed in friends’ lockers, and ran all over every corner of this town and asked enough questions to break any reasonable adult’s brain.
My mom wasn’t so much of a helicopter parent when I was a kid, but by high school Tom and I were getting up to enough mischief that she was practically deafening me with the propellers. After the incident that got me suspended she pushed me into so many extracurriculars on top of my part-time jobs that there wasn’t a split second I wasn’t accounted for—or, incidentally, a split second I could have any coherent thoughts other than “How do I make this boring thing less boring?”
Which is to say, I’ve mostly spent the past two or so years not-so-covertly reading fantasy books and my abandoned fanfics on my phone while all these boring things happened around me. This survival strategy was all well and good until this moment now, because it turns out I am not a royal burdened with ancient power or a knight infiltrating a distant realm with a dark secret, but just Riley. Powerless and ordinary and unsure of myself. Only now that I’m standing here on the other side of half living my own life do I realize just how unsure I really am.
Just when I’m blinking back the deeply inconvenient and unwelcome sting of tears, my phone buzzes in my pocket again. It’s a text from Tom. A photo of his own version of the Getaway List, written in his endearingly large handwriting. Only instead of the eight things we originally had on it, he’s added a ninth: Actually see each other in our corporeal forms.
I laugh, both out of relief and from the reference; as kids Tom and I were obsessed with Tides of Time, a time-travel book series with main characters who either traveled in their own bodies or as projections of themselves. As a result, “corporeal” was one of the biggest words our eight-year-old selves knew; I typed the word enough in the fics I used to write for the series that the letters are worn out on my keyboard.
The smile on my face only widens from there. Sharpens, even, into the shape of a smirk I haven’t worn in so long that it feels like I have to break it in.
Maybe this is the shake-up I need. The defibrillator to reset my psyche. The idea comes together so quickly that I’m practically blinking myself to New York before it can fully form—for the first time in literal years, I have the weekend free. I could take a bus up so easily. I could be squeezing the life out of Tom with one of our trademark ridiculous hugs by nightfall. We could even knock some things off the Getaway List. What better way to reconnect to my old self than by doing all the things she wanted to do, with someone who’s known me almost as long as I’ve known myself?
Maybe reconnecting will inspire me to write again, since it was Tom who encouraged me to post my stuff in the first place. Maybe I’ll wrestle out of Tom why he’s been so quiet these past few months, so I’ll have my partner in crime back. Maybe I’ll stop feeling like this boring version of myself who doesn’t clown around for my friends’ sake like I used to, but because being the class jokester was the only way to pass the time when I was overscheduled to the max.
And then maybe I can start to figure out my new self, get a sense for what I actually want now that high school is finally in the rearview mirror.
My heart is thrumming under my ribs like an overly caffeinated bird.
I’m booking the afternoon bus to NYC, I text back.
Tom sends back a string of laughing emojis. I’m not entirely sure if I’m joking, and judging from Tom’s response, he isn’t either. That’s its own kind of relief. That the old version of me still lives in Tom’s head—the daring, intentional, fun me.
Maybe if I find my way back to Tom, I can find her, too.
I find my mom squinting under a row of folded-up chairs, along with Jesse’s parents, who have joined in the search in their matching Walking JED shirts. I make a mental note to demand where I can buy one of my own when I touch my mom’s shoulder, suddenly giddy. “It’s okay,” I tell them. I don’t need my list if Tom has his. “It’s fine. Someone will probably find it. Let’s go.”
Admittedly I have access to McFlurries near every day of my human existence, but McFlurries are sacred happenings. At least they are for me and my mom. My mom got me one every time I got a shot as a little kid, and I drag her to get them every time she finishes up another semester of community college, and at some point getting a McFlurry just came hand in hand with accomplishing anything that seemed scary or tough.
“Oreos or M&M’s?” my mom asks when we pile into her deeply unreliable but ridiculously adorable old Honda, which we decorated with flower stickers all around the bumper a few years back.
