I turn around and, though we are a few feet off from it, see the tip of what looks like a mason jar sticking out of the dirt, barely glinting in the moonlight.
I go over to it and kneel. I push the dirt away with my hands. Then I use my fingernails to scrape more of the dirt off. I scrabble frantically until finally I’ve unburied enough of the jar so that I can grip my fingertips around the lid and yank it free. I tumble onto my backside, wide-eyed and clutching the jar.
Inside are three scraps of paper, each with rusty bloodstains on it.
“The wishes,” I say. “They’re actually here.” I stare at them, disbelieving. How long have they been here? A month? Or maybe they’ve been here all along, for years. I’ll never know.
Ringo moves closer.
I bring the jar up to my nose and peer inside, like I’m examining insect specimens.
“I’m scared,” I say.
“Of what?” Ringo’s voice is low and quiet.
“I don’t know exactly.” I shake the jar ever so slightly so that the scraps dance inside. All along Ringo and my parents have been warning me that I’ve been holding too tightly to the idea of the wishes. They told me that grief would make me attach importance to things that really weren’t important. I’d told myself that Will thought the wishes were important and that’s why I had to too. That was reason enough.
I don’t think that now. They were right all along, except for one thing. I think the journey—following the clues, searching for three wishes in a jar—made space for Matt and me where before we’d been trapped by resentment, by ourselves, by a history that had been clogged by the end date of my eighteenth birthday.
Ringo rubs the center of my back and gives me a pat and I know that I will want to kiss him very soon. “We’ve come this far,” he says.
I unscrew the top and empty the three scraps out into my hand. I jiggle them until I can make out each of my friends’ handwriting without seeing the full message. I know there are parts of my friends that they had purposefully kept buried from me, but at least these parts they’d wanted me to uncover. I select Will’s first.
Gingerly, I pull back the edges and read what is written there, like it’s a fortune cookie. “‘I wish to never turn out like,’” I murmur. “It’s crossed out,” I say. “‘I wish to be a hero.’” Followed by a smaller, later scribble that I don’t read aloud. It says, Unlike my dad. I dig my teeth into my bottom lip. Of course this was Will’s wish. It informed everything about him. The grand romantic gestures, the constant effort to be the perfect boyfriend—but at what cost? I wonder how much more quickly he might have moved on to Penny if he hadn’t written down this particular wish. I wonder if he would have felt more himself if he wasn’t letting someone else define him before he even had a chance to become who he truly was. I drop the wish back into the jar and open up Penny’s.
“‘I wish to be loved, as much as I love.’” There are red thumbprints crisscrossing the words. Penny’s blood. I can imagine fifteen-year-old Penny earnestly scribbling this sentiment. She was so open to the world, in constant danger of taking on enough love to sink her. But Penny loved balance, and whether she knew it or not, the world loved her right back, just as much. Even Will.
Finally, it’s my turn. I’ve been trying to recall what I’d written down on my wish scrap. So much has happened between then and now that whatever is contained of myself in this miniature time capsule I can’t touch with memory. So I open it up and I read my own writing. “‘I wish for the three of us to be friends. Always,’” I say. I turn my wish over, hoping there is something written on the back. There isn’t. I stare at it, blinking.
“Is everything clearer now?” Ringo asks.
I wait. Then I curl up the piece of paper in my fist and drop it into the jar with the other two. “I—I think so….”
I turned eighteen today. I don’t think there’ll be a party.
Instead, my ankles dangle off of a rock where I’m leaning back, weight on my hands. The day’s sun has baked the surface so that my palms are warm against it. Pink, purple, and orange spool from the sinking gold as it dips lower and lower, painting the ocean’s horizon with rich streaks of dappled amber.
It’s taken me 6,570 days and two lives to get to the place where I could watch the sunset on the day of my eighteenth birthday, the choice of a lifetime behind me.
There’s a spot in my chest too deep to reach that aches with a longing so sharp that there are seconds during which I’m not sure I’ll survive. But each time it passes and I know the next stab won’t be lethal. With any luck, it’ll start to hurt less both with time and repetition.
I know for sure now that I’ll be haunted by beautiful days. Still, I drink in the one stretched out before me anyway.
I hear footsteps behind me but don’t turn. A set of cool hands covers my eyes from behind. “Guess who?” I don’t have to. He smells like pine trees with a touch of vanilla. I hold his fingers and tug them down away from my eyes. I tilt my head back and stare up at Ringo’s mismatched, work-of-art face. “Happy birthday,” he says and pulls two long-stemmed white roses out of his back pocket.
I bite my lip and gently take the stems from him. “Thank you,” I say. “These are perfect.” I smell each of the roses, then climb off the rock.
Ringo watches me closely. His hand is protective as it guides my elbow and hips. I’ll be wearing my cast for another couple of weeks. I’m anxious to get it off, since it itches like a dozen mosquitoes have crawled up inside it.
“Are you all right?” Ringo asks. He doesn’t try to hide the concern that shines through in the crinkles forming at the corners of his eyes.
I called Penny’s parents this morning and then Will’s mom and told them what I planned to do. They all cried, but that’s okay. They’re only at the beginning of their journey. Maybe they’ll go to therapy. Maybe I will too. What I hope is that Tessa and Ms. Bryan will be friends again, perhaps even best friends. And while I know that won’t make them whole again, neither would bringing back only one of their dead children.
“I will be,” I say.
At the edge of the cliff I’ve put together two side-by-side pyramids of rocks that each support crosses made of driftwood and twine. The scavenger hunt is over, but this is where it really ends.
I can hear Will’s voice in his last message that led me to the wishes. There probably would have been a present at the end. It doesn’t bother me that I’ll never know what it was. I kneel in front of the crosses that I’ve built at the cliff we used to jump from. There, I rest a rose beside each, then stand and clasp Ringo’s hand in my own.