The List

The list fell out of a library book, which was the most Jonah way for it to come back into his life, because Jonah was the only senior at Eastfield who still actually checked out library books, and he knew it, and he had made his peace with it. He was returning a stack of them on a Tuesday in April with seven weeks of high school left, and the librarian, Ms. Okafor, was doing the thing where she checked each one for damage, and out of the third book down — a battered paperback about deep-sea creatures that Jonah had taken out, the date stamp said, when he was fourteen — slid a folded square of notebook paper. Cara got to it first. Cara always got to things first; it was practically her defining trait, that and the fact that she had been Jonah's best friend since the fourth grade and therefore considered his belongings a kind of shared territory. "What's this," she said, already unfolding it. "Probably nothing. Give it." "It's got your handwriting on it. Your bad handwriting. Your *young* bad handwriting." She held it away from him with the easy cruelty of someone who has known you long enough to be completely unafraid of you. "Oh my god, Jonah." "Cara." "It's a list." Her face was doing something he didn't like. It was lighting up. Cara's face lighting up had, historically, preceded most of the genuinely alarming events of Jonah's adolescence. "It's a *bucket list*. 'Things to do before I'm grown up, by Jonah Reyes, age fourteen.'" She looked at him over the top of the paper, delighted, merciless. "You made a bucket list." Jonah remembered it now, in the way you suddenly remember a dream — all at once, and slightly embarrassed to have been carrying it. Fourteen-year-old Jonah, the summer before high school, deciding very seriously that he was going to become the kind of person who Did Things. He'd written the list, and folded it into a library book so his mom wouldn't find it, and then — because he was Jonah — he had returned the library book on time and never thought about the list again. Four years. The list had been sitting in the deep-sea creatures book in the Eastfield library for four years, waiting. "There are eight things on it," Cara said. She had gone quiet, which was worse than her being loud. "Jonah. There are eight things and you have seven weeks of high school left and I have decided something." "Don't." "I've decided we're doing them. All eight. Before graduation." "Cara, I was fourteen. Fourteen-year-olds are idiots. The list is going to say like 'meet a shark' or—" "Number four is 'meet a shark,'" Cara admitted. "We'll figure out number four. But Jonah." She came around the returns desk and put the paper in his hand, and made him hold it, made him actually look. "Read number one." He didn't want to. He could feel, the way you can feel weather coming, that number one was going to be the one that mattered, because fourteen-year-old Jonah had clearly thought about the order, and a kid who thinks about the order puts the thing he's most scared of first, to get it over with, and then never does it. He read number one. It was four words, in his own small careful fourteen-year-old handwriting, and reading them did something to Jonah's chest that he was not at all prepared for in the middle of a Tuesday in the school library with seven weeks left and Cara watching his face. *Tell her. Just once.* "I don't," Jonah started, and stopped, because Cara was his best friend since the fourth grade and she could hear a lie from him the way a dog hears a truck. "Tell who," Cara said. Quietly. Not delighted anymore. Just asking. And Jonah stood there holding four years of his own unfinished courage, and discovered that the list was not going to let him off as easily as the library had.