Cal & Penny's Anti Bucket List

Penny- The First Time You Texted Me

Eva and Sophie hardly ever came over junior year, but they were there the night I started getting text messages on Garrett's old phone. We were still best friends, just not the kind on teen TV shows that gathered at each others' houses and did homework for hours after school. Eva had a boyfriend, Sophie had a job, and I had strict parents, so it wasn't worth jumping through scheduling hoops just to flip through pages of old yearbooks on a Monday night, which is what we usually did. We had an excuse that particular Monday night, though. We were supposed to be working on a history project, creating an Instagram page for a famous civil rights activist. After we finished that in about fifteen minutes, Sophie and Eva headed straight for my bookshelves.

"Penny, puberty hit you like a freight train," Sophie said, pointing to a black and white photo of me with straight, shoulder length brown hair, and braces. Most people thought my signature curls were an expression of my Judaism, but really, I got up at 5 AM every morning to take a shower, dry my hair, and spend thirty minutes wrestling with it under a curling iron.

"Oh, it's natural," I would say, and they would believe me, because I celebrated Chanukah and my nose was also larger than average.

"Didn't it though? I don't know what I was doing with my hair. Or with my makeup. Or with my life."

"Did you even wear makeup? This is eighth grade."

"I'm not sure. I probably wore lip gloss." Lipgloss was my other wardrobe staple, next to my elaborate hairdos. All the other girls at school wasted their time on winged eyeliner, but I knew what the real secret was. "Sophie, you still don't wear makeup." I didn't say that as an insult, it was just an observation. She grinned at me, and said,

"If it ain't broke."

"Didn't you say eighth grade was the year you had the crush on Jacob?" Eva said.

"Yeah, because that's the year we were in the same Spanish class. If I close my eyes, I can still see where he was sitting. I don't think he ever noticed me, aside from the whole 'I wrote your initials on my forearm' debacle."

"What is this story?" Sophie asked. I couldn't believe I had never told her, but I actually didn't meet Sophie until sophomore year, which was much later than the rest of my friends. She moved from Seattle, Washington, but from her very first day at the Academy, we knew she belonged. Still, it was moments like those when I would remember she had a lot to catch up on. We really needed to take her through a crash course, a power point presentation outlining all the perpetuated inside jokes and major life events in our friend group.

"You know the one from Africa? The one with the British accent? But who also plays basketball?"

"Oh, you mean the robot you invented?"

"I swear, this is a real person." I grabbed the yearbook off of Sophie's lap, and flipped to a listing of all the freshman that year, stabbing my manicured finger at the page when I found his name. "He's a senior now. Jacob... Fuentes?" I had forgotten his last name.

"Any relation to Cal?" Eva asked curiously, leaning over to catch a glimpse. "Wow, he really was cute. For a freshman, I mean."

"High school boys are only cute to high school girls," Sophie observed. "It must have something to do with the fluorescent lighting in classrooms."

"I doubt it," I said, answering Eva's question. "They don't look alike."

"Maybe one of them is adopted, or both of them," Sophie suggested, always liking to keep an open mind.

"How common is that last name?"

"Hold up, I'm googling it." Eva pulled out her blackberry, because she still had a blackberry, and was always waist deep in my love life.