Chapter Seven

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Sneaking into Georgina’s childhood bedroom was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Harder than breaking and entering at the pool. Harder than any of the wild items on Georgina’s bucket list.

The incredible guilt, the feeling of invading her privacy and her past overwhelmed me. Not to mention the fear of being busted sneaking around by Tom. I almost gave up and walked away. When she found out what I’d done, would she find it romantic? Or be angry that I’d intruded somewhere so personal without permission? Romantic gestures sucked like that. They were never as simple as they seemed in the movies.

But I was determined. A list brought Georgina into my life, and maybe a list could bring her back to me. Or if I couldn’t win her back, maybe I could bring her some joy with what was on that older, more innocent list. Fill her with good memories of our time together to bury any pain she wanted to forget. That would be worth it.

I stared around at her room, filled with a huge collection of plastic ponies and stuffed animals, and shelves crammed with everything from coloring books to young adult vampire romances. The bedspread was printed with rainbows and fluffy pink clouds, and a teddy bear with a light-up heart still rested on the pillow.

Her dad hadn’t changed a thing. I’d heard him mention once he kept meaning to turn the space into a walk-in pantry but didn’t want the hassle of renovating. I think he kept it that way to remind himself of the girl Georgina used to be.

I sat on the small bed and opened the neon pink and rhinestone-decorated shoebox I’d found in back of the closet.

I wished I could tell Georgina how I had felt when I pulled the lid off and found her wig.

It was a lifeless, limp mess of brownish-red strands with a tiny bit of curl on the ends, nothing like her real hair which was dark and wild. I picked it up and held it. It smelled like dust and salt. Like tears and heartache.

I got lucky—under the wig was a journal, covered in sequins with one of those flimsy locks that had been broken open long ago. There was also a bottle of prescription-strength pain pills. A note had been stuffed inside, and through the orange plastic I read, ‘You can get through this. Only take what you need.’

I stared at that for a long time, because the handwriting wasn’t Georgina’s, and the pills weren’t hers either. They had belonged to her mother.

She had lost her mom, then had been fighting the same disease that had taken her mom away from her, when she was just a kid. How bad had it been for Georgina? I knew that it had put her through a lot physically. I could guess it had wrecked her self-esteem too.

And having to go through all of that while in high school … High school was easy for me. I was a big guy, good at sports, and was dating the hottest girl in school, who was already getting interest from record labels. What would it have been like if I had been sick, suffering from pain and exhaustion, and dealing with the loss of my mother?

I should give Ma a call tomorrow.

I’d been happy to leave Pa behind, and the rest of England, and all the hard memories of what happened there. I’d needed to start fresh and a new country was as fresh as I could get. But Ma was Ma. She was a good woman, and I missed her. I should have told her that more often, and that I loved her. Life was too short and unpredictable.

Seyvia’s was short, too short, but there was something almost inevitable about her death. I had felt her leaving me, slipping farther away every day. The more famous she got, the more distant from me she grew. For a while I’d just thought she was going to break up with me. She’d slipped far enough out of my grasp that I’d lost any influence over her, so when things got dire, when the partying and drugs got out of control, she wouldn’t even accept my help.

I’d beat myself up over that for years. There must have been something else I could have done, something I could have said to wake her up to what she was doing to herself before it was too late. I’d never know. It had happened. And there was no coming back from death for a second chance.

That was why I needed this second chance now, with Georgina. I only had this life, and I was going to make it count.

Even if getting that second chance meant doing something terrible, like looking in her diary.

With a deep breath, I opened the journal. Inside was cute and incredibly girly, with little hearts drawn on most of the pages.

No reading. Just flick through. A list should be obvious.

It was hard not to read. Individual words would catch my eye as the pages flashed past under my thumb. Words like kiss, or stood-up, or hurt. Words stained with teardrops.

I almost gave up, then near the end I found a separate sheet of purple paper, folded neatly and tucked inside.

I closed the diary and carefully unfolded the loose page. I found it.

Her childhood list made me laugh and scratch my head. It was full of whimsy and childlike ideas of romance. Underneath all the list items she’d written, ‘Make amazing memories that last forever’. This was her Forever List, and the pressure of making it perfect hit me.

How am I going to do these things?

It seemed impossible at worst, and at best, extremely embarrassing.

If past me knew that one day I would be dancing across a cafeteria to a song I never liked to get a date with a girl who’d already told me she wasn’t interested, I would have thought I’d gone nuts. If it had been any other girl I would have let her go, but Georgina wasn’t just another girl. She was the girl, and I knew it.

Now that she’d finally worked out I had her list, it was obvious she was worried, but curious. She honestly couldn’t remember what she’d written on it. That made things even more interesting. It was going to be a lot of fun playing it out.

After taking her for a ride on her new bike, I wanted to kiss Georgina and drag her back to bed with me, but she pushed me away. She’d said last night was our last time together, and she was sticking to that decision, for now. She was still refusing a romantic relationship, or being friends with benefits, or whatever it was that we said we were in the past.

But I planned to turn us into something more. We’d never really dated, and her childhood list was the perfect way to take her on perfect dates. To really get to know each other. To make happy, forever memories.

We would complete this list together, and maybe she would change her mind. Maybe she would let go of the insecurities or whatever was stopping her from letting me in.

If it turned out that after this we just became friends, I’d be okay with that too. I just needed her in my life, one way or another. She made me better.

Still, I wanted her. Badly. Real badly. She clung to me on the back of her bike, her thighs pressed around me as we flew along rolling roads, and I could have stopped the bike and thrown her over the seat and had my way with her then and there.

I had sent Georgina on her way for the next thing on the list. I offered to go with her, but after I explained what it was, she said she wanted help from some other friends. And I had my own work to do, preparing for tonight.

I was more nervous about this one than the dance in the cafeteria. Not only what I had to actually do, but with the nature of this item, it was going to be really hard keeping things platonic.