Anything but Ordinary(48)
Bryce’s dad snorted as he sat down on one of the high-backed chairs. “So sprinkle salt on ’em, what’s the big deal?”
“The recipe doesn’t call for more,” Carter countered, taking a seat next to Bryce.
Bryce’s dad reached for the salt in slow motion. Carter pursed his lips. Her dad tried to hold back laughter as he slowly tipped the salt toward Carter’s plate, raising his eyebrows as if bracing for an explosion. Carter took in a breath. The salt fell. The rest of the table burst into laughter, even Carter.
Bryce dug into her pancakes whole, not bothering to cut them into small pieces like her mom always told her to do. Just like she remembered, her dad rolled his pancake up and dipped it directly into the maple syrup.
“You know what?” Bryce said suddenly, realizing. “I haven’t had pancakes since I woke up.”
“Maybe that’s because you girls are never up before noon,” Bryce’s mom said pointedly, slicing her pancakes into little squares.
“It is possible to make pancakes after noon, Mom,” Sydney intoned. She looked at Bryce. “The fund-raiser last year at Hilwood was a pancake feed. The seniors put it together. The pancakes were kind of gross, though. And then they also had a bouncy castle, which was a bad, bad combination.…”
Bryce let out a puzzled laugh. The rest of the table looked at her. “I was just thinking how absurd it is that I literally slept through my senior year.” Sydney looked sorry she’d brought it up. “No, Syd, it really is funny. What if I was just too tired to go to school and I overslept? That’s basically what happened.”
Carter gave her an amused, thoughtful look. “You slept through a lot of things, then. For some reason it doesn’t seem so bad when you look at it that way.”
“Be grateful you slept through when I had braces,” Sydney said dryly. “It was not pretty.”
Bryce’s father chuckled. “You could even make a list.”
Carter squeezed Bryce’s knee under the table. She nudged him, trying to hold back a smile. She thought about the things she’d done since she woke up, the mental list she’d made more than a month ago. Sun, clothes, exercise. Bryce had done all right with those.
“I’m going to do that,” she said suddenly. “Check off items until it’s all done.”
“I do love checking things off lists,” Carter admitted.
Bryce giggled. “Yes, I know.”
Bryce had spent so much time longing for what she’d lost. She’d never thought of actually getting any of it back. But why not?
Bryce’s father cleared his throat. Carter and Bryce looked at him and sat up straighter in their chairs. They had their heads pretty close together.
Her dad folded his arms. “I noticed that you were talking closely with your gentleman caller at my breakfast table.”
Bryce braced herself for a lecture. Sometimes her dad got an old Southern streak in him.
“Gentleman caller?” Sydney asked with disbelief. “Really?”
He looked sternly at Carter. “Can the first item of said list be more pancakes?”
he first on Bryce’s list of things she’d missed was cheesy senior photos.
Bryce had always loved when the Hilwood yearbook came out. She and Gabby would lie on Gabby’s bed and make fun of the kids whose pictures looked like glamour shots from the mall, or who had taken shots with their hands placed lovingly on their pickup trucks. Some kids took pictures with their dogs. Everyone’s smile was forced, their turtlenecks or sweater vests picked out by their parents. The best part was that Bryce and Gabby and Greg were all supposed to have done the same thing. Bryce’s had been scheduled for right after the Trials—so she could give a thumbs-up while wearing an Olympic T-shirt.
But this time around the photos would be even cheesier, Bryce decided. The cheesiest version of everyone’s worst pictures.
“Are you sure?” Carter had asked as they checked out a nice camera from Vanderbilt’s media department. “Don’t you want to look back on these?”
“I’d be betraying my high school self if I took this seriously. Trust me,” Bryce replied.
They went to Percy Lake, and Bryce basked on the rocks in her best clothes, holding her head at weird angles while Carter told her to look natural. They had already done the obligatory “wheat picture” that no Tennessee girl could do without, where Bryce stood in shoulder-high grasses in her letter jacket, pretending to push the yellow blades aside with a mystical look on her face.
The last one was of Bryce surrounded by her diving trophies. Every single trophy or medal they could dig out, they used. It turned out to be about thirty-five. Carter complained he could barely see Bryce behind all the trophies, yet there she was, putting her fist under her chin with a gigantic grin on her face.
The pictures had turned out cheesily excellent. Bryce had even asked Carter to Photoshop them to have a cloudy outline like the mall glamour shots, with the words Bryce Forever engraved in shiny letters in the corner.
The second item on the list was the homecoming football game.
Bryce loved football games. She loved being in the middle of the crowd. She loved how everyone in the stadium stood up when Hilwood was about to score a touchdown. She loved the pep band’s terrible rendition of “YMCA,” and that no one paid attention to the pep band in the first place.