Celia dropped me off and headed to a friend’s house. I climbed on my bed and dug The List out of my beat-up scripture tote. It was yellowing a little at the edges, and the purple gel pen I wrote it in was fading, but wear and tear aside, the content looked exactly like it did the night I made it. The List was born six years ago as an act of rebellion on my eighteenth birthday.
When the last candle flickered out on the cake that night, my older sister Leila had joked, “Good for you, Smashley. Now you’re officially old enough to get married without needing Mom or Dad to sign the license.”
That had gotten a good laugh from the rest of my family. As the third of four kids with my only brother after me, I’d watched both of my sisters marry and start popping out kids by the time they were twenty. Everyone assumed I would follow the Barrett family tradition of settling down young. My mom had done it, encouraged both of my sisters to do it, and now their sights were set on me. Too bad I had other plans.
“Good one, Leila,” I said. “But I’m not getting married.”
My mother’s smile had died a quick death.
“I mean I’m not getting married right away,” I had clarified. “I’m going to graduate from college and have some life experiences first.” I didn’t add that Leila’s epic battles with her husband for the past three years and Juliana dropping out of college at twenty when her twins were born had helped fuel my determination. That night, I sat eating the excess frosting off the cake board and brainstorming my list.
Some of the items I blame on a sugar-induced stupor (Learn to tango? Really?), but I’ve never changed or altered it, checking each item off one by one. It’s not a deep list, but there’s a strange, convoluted logic to it. If it sounded fun and I thought it would be impossible to do with a family to worry about, it went on The List. Funny how a half-hour brainstorm has dictated the last six years of my life.
Celia nagged me into letting her see it after I took over half her room. She had all kinds of questions. “Read a Russian classic?” she asked in puzzlement. “First, why would you want to? And second, why can’t you do that after you’re married? Are you not allowed to read anymore?” But I know the idea of finding time for a little Dostoevsky would make my sisters laugh hard enough to shoot the chocolate milk they filch from their kids out of their noses. Celia’s lack of understanding was exactly why almost no one saw The List.
Anyway, there’s stuff that you just can’t logistically do with a kid, like a service project in a developing nation. How was I supposed to dig freshwater wells with a toddler clinging to my legs? And hello, the sports car thing? It’s not like the backseats are made for baby carriers. Not to mention the things I wanted to try that would be stupid to risk once I have kids, like snowboarding on a black diamond trail. Chasing after babies in a full body cast seems like an awful lot of trouble. And then there’s all the stuff that falls under the vague category of overcoming my fears, like skydiving or learning to surf. Or singing karaoke. My pathological aversion to singing in public made wading through The Brothers Karamazov seem easy by comparison.
In hindsight, I did put some stupid things down. I might have also read too many chick lit novels as a teenager with their ideas about what cool girls should do, be, and have. Own a pair of Louboutins? I worked two or even three jobs all summer long, every summer, so I could pay for school. I would never blow a whole semester’s tuition on a pair of shoes, but patience and crafty bidding scored me a killer pair of red stilettos on eBay. Saving like a maniac and compulsive bargain hunting took care of some of my other high-ticket items too, like the sports car. I bought a Miata at a police auction. (The List didn’t specify that it had to be a cool sports car.) The police had seized the car in a drug case, and I got it for a song. But I sold it after a year for two reasons: First, a Miata is a very bad idea in a Utah blizzard, and second, I had a recurring nightmare that one day I’d get pulled over and the officer would let Killer, the drug-sniffing police dog, check out my car. It ended with me busted for a cache of drugs undiscovered in a wheel well before the car went to the auction. I ended up switching the Miata for a Jeep Wrangler with a few miles on it and no obvious history of drug dealer ownership. I still got to cross it off, though. Bye-bye, number sixteen.
Some of the items on my list I thought would be impossible, but they turned into easy cross-offs with creative planning. I worked three jobs the summer before my junior year of college, waiting tables at a fancy mountain resort at night, doing an early morning call center shift for an appliance store, and working as a part-time manager at a bookstore during the day so I could afford a semester abroad in the winter. The hard work led to three fabulous months in Spain where I polished my beginning Spanish skills and studied the Moorish influence in their country for my senior project paper. I traveled with other university students for short trips to the surrounding countries, too, and got to see other parts of Europe. Study abroad, travel Europe, and learn a foreign language . . . Done!
The basic Spanish I learned was enough to get me sent on a mission to Ecuador—number seven. When I got home, my stake president asked me to chaperone and translate on a youth conference trip doing a home-building project for a poor village in Mexico. That took care of number fifteen. When that ended, I pretty much hit the ground running. I finished my bachelor’s in liberal studies and called my aunt and uncle for a place to stay. Now I had a whole summer in Huntington Beach to tackle surfing. Oh, and Matt Gibson.
This was the summer to focus on list items still undone before the stress of grad school put a cramp in my style. Which of course meant it was time to bust out my Bible. Number four was taking too long and I blamed the Old Testament.
* * *
A light flicked on and woke me up. I lifted my head from the crinkled page in Numbers that had defeated me. I think Numbers was so named because of the countless times I had tried and failed to make it through. I blinked my eyes, trying to clear my vision. The blob in front of me materialized into my cousin Dave sporting the Huntington Beach Sabbath uniform of white shirt, chinos, and flip-flops. Celia’s bedside clock revealed I’d been asleep for at least an hour.
“You’ve got a little drool on your chin,” he said.
“It’s a natural moisturizer,” I retorted but wiped it away.
“I don’t have to work tomorrow. You want to hit the waves in the morning?”
“You mean, like when they’re actually good?” I asked.
“Yeah. Maybe you’ll stand up this time,” he said.
“I’m in. What time?”
“Seven-ish. I’m not coming to wake you up so if you’re not ready when I leave, I’m going on my own.”
“I’ll be ready,” I promised.
“Cool.” He turned to leave.
“Dave?” I waited until he turned around. Mustering my most syrupy voice, I cooed, “Thanks for making my dreams come true.”
He snorted and flipped the switch off again as he left. After fumbling my way over to the switch and flipping it back on, I pulled out my iPhone and clicked on my calendar. I had thirteen weeks of summer to figure out. I am a compulsive planner, as if The List weren’t proof enough. Celia got me a job at Hannigan’s, the steak house where she’s a hostess, and based on my table tips for the last two weeks, if I worked about twenty-five hours a week I could earn enough to cover my summer expenses and my fall tuition. I already had a teaching assistant job lined up for the school year as a glorified paper grader in the Intro to Art History class, so I wouldn’t need to worry about my monthly expenses when the semester started.
If I budgeted my time creatively, my work schedule still left me plenty of play time. List time. Time to figure out how to pull off something like skydiving. Or sushi classes. I didn’t even know if there was such a thing as sushi classes, so I did what any college graduate with a research-driven degree would do: I pulled out my laptop and fired up Google.
Prior research had already netted me the names of some local casting agencies so I could investigate the movie-extra thing. Another hour and a few detours on time-sucker Google Earth later, I discovered which local joints had karaoke nights and where to get skydiving lessons. I also stumbled onto a couple of LDS dating sites. I might already have my summer fling victim identified, but I figured I should start lining up a handsome and sympathetic Prince Charming for the fall when I needed the occasional distraction from my textbooks. I had to finish number twenty-four,, anyway.
So far, the most promising site was called LDS Lookup. It reminded me less of cruising the cultural hall at a dance for fresh meat and more of hanging out in the halls at church and striking up a conversation with a stranger. Low threat, laid-back vibe. I took the free site tour, checking out profiles of different people, making sure they were normal and would be allowed to hang out at my house. Still, I hesitated to set up a profile. I might have thought Internet dating sounded good at eighteen, but . . .
How was I supposed to fit this in on top of everything else? I glanced at The List again. The whole point of this summer was to get stuff out of the way since I expected grad school to be crazy busy.
With a sigh, I filled out the profile prompts on my preferences, favorites, and criteria for a match. Now anyone who cared to look could find out that I have a chocolate addiction, listen to alternative rock, compulsively watch Gilmore Girls reruns, and squeeze in the occasional snowboarding, plus a dozen other pieces of random information. Nosy things, these dating profile questionnaires.
With that done, I tucked The List back inside my scripture tote and turned with a sigh to the Old Testament. Yanking it toward me, I found my place in Numbers again and began reading for the twelfth time.