“But then there’d be no one left to bring me back.” I jut out my lower lip. “I think that’d sort of defeat the whole birthday-surprise hoopla.”
“Then I guess I’d better not tell you.” He tickles the bottom of my feet. I cringe and curl my legs more tightly around him. Penny, Will, and I all have summer birthdays—Penny thinks that’s part of why we all get along so well, and as much as I scoff at her stargazing horoscope babble, she may be on to something, because all three of us could basically live on the beach, and that’s one of my favorite things about us. I mean, I’d die if Penny made us go hang out at the mall or something.
The two of them have both turned eighteen already—their birthdays are only a week apart, with Penny being the older one. Their closeness in age is why their moms are best friends. Neither Penny nor Will used their resurrections on anyone. There are rumors that a few kids in our class might be using their resurrection choices this year. Penny thinks her aunt resurrected somebody back when she and Penny’s mom were teenagers—back before the Pickering Regulations passed to control population growth by only allowing one resurrection choice on a person’s eighteenth birthday—but none of us know if it’s true or not. I don’t think I personally know anyone who’s used their choice. The thought makes my stomach clamp down on itself like a steel trap.
Because there it is. The countdown. Ticking away in the back of my brain. Just over three more weeks until my eighteenth birthday, and then…
“How about a hint?” I ask, because I want to focus on the good part of my birthday, the part where I get to spend it with my two favorite people in the world. Nothing else.
“So greedy.”
“Come on, a pre-pre-birthday present.”
Will pauses. He spits some seawater from his mouth. “Your wish is my command.” And then he just stops. I feel the grin in his cheeks.
“Yes…and…?” I prod.
“That’s your hint.”
I splash him in the face but manage to get myself in the nose just as much as I get him. The salt burns. “That’s not a hint, you cheater.”
He shrugs and readjusts my weight on his back. “Guess you’ll just have to finish the hunt to find out.”
I groan. This is so Will. “What kind of hunt?” I whine. “Are we talking treasure, Easter egg…deer?”
He laughs. “Deer? And risk the wrath of Penny?”
The sinking sun spreads golden fingers of light up to the beach. The water grows shallower and I can feel Will bouncing along on his toes to keep our heads above water. I dip a toe down, but it’s still too deep for me to stand, so I lay my cheek on Will’s warm, sunburned shoulder and close my eyes. “You know you’re not as charming as you think you are, Will Bryan,” I say with a sigh.
But really all this talk about my great, big, epically magnificent, cowabunga awesome birthday surprise has done is get me thinking of my birthday and what it means. How I’ll have to sit alone among strangers in the waiting room, scan my fingerprints, fill out my paperwork for the resurrection, arrange for the body to be brought to the resurrection site, wring my hands while that body lies on a cold metal gurney and is injected by faceless doctors with the lifeblood, then try to breathe while the vitalis process restores the dead cells until they’re completely undamaged. I’ve run through the steps in my mind a thousand times.
And none of this is Will’s fault. He doesn’t know what I’m planning to do on my eighteenth birthday.
One resurrection, one choice, one person, and unlike Will’s and Penny’s, mine is already spoken for.
I unfurl my arms from around Will and together we crawl up to shore. Penny reversed the Jeep so that the wheels are backed up to the sand. She honks the horn and sticks her hand out of the roof, waving us in. Penny has the kind of Jeep without doors or a roof and instead just a roll bar on top. During the summer we practically live in this car, like a band of sand-crusted beach bums.
Will and I trudge up the rest of the shore and climb into the Jeep, sandy feet and all. I take shotgun next to Penny, and Will scoots to the center seat in back so he can poke his head through. Penny wouldn’t mind if I sat in back with Will, and I know we’re lucky for that. She’s not the type of friend to tell us to get a room or to lay off the public displays of affection even though there’ve been girls at school who’ve made sidebar remarks to me about how it must be annoying for Will and me to have to cart around a “third wheel” all the time, comments that I’m sure Penny’s heard before too. And that’s exactly why none of them are my best friends.
Penny has never once made me choose between time with her and time with him. Not that I could possibly. The three of us are like our own little self-sustaining island. We once spent an afternoon negotiating a fake custody arrangement for Penny in case Will and I ever broke up, and I only won primary custody by a hair. The whole exercise made us laugh until Penny peed a little in her shorts and had to run to the bathroom. I mean, Will and I are an institution.
“I can’t believe you chickened out.” I gently shove Penny’s shoulder from my spot in the passenger seat. This is nicer, I decide, than saying I can totally believe you chickened out, you big chicken, since Penny’s skittish about spiders, global warming, the potential of contracting a deadly virus, and basically anything else I can think of, which is funny since what she doesn’t find frightening is sporting fashions that have never been in style, well, ever, or making impassioned pleas to save the whales to a roomful of her peers while they are playing Minecraft on their phones. I prefer to let my actions do the talking—it’s way simpler.
Penny flicks her gaze to the rearview mirror and slides her unpainted nails down the base of the steering wheel. “I’m like a fine bottle of wine, Lake, I’ll be ready in my own time.”
I reach over and begin to flip through the radio stations.
“What do you think’s going to happen exactly?” I ask. “I mean, you watch us jump. Do you think you’re just going to spontaneously combust in midair?”
From the backseat, Will puts his toes up on the console between me and Penny. Penny wrinkles her nose and pushes them back onto the floorboard, then sighs, putting the Jeep into drive and pulling out of the small beach-access road onto a rarely trafficked two-lane highway. “I don’t know. I’m scared I’m going to spaz out or not jump far enough, and then I’ll just plummet straight down the side of the cliff and, yeah, die. That’s the scenario. I’m going to die a gruesome, bloody death. That’s what I see every time I step up to the edge,” she says, sliding a pair of cat-eye sunglasses over her nose. “Now is that really so far-fetched?”
“Yes,” Will and I both answer in unison.