Julie Halpern - The F- It List

“Take it down a notch, Alex. Your bucket list can wait. I’m the one dying here.”

“I’ll only help you if you stop fucking saying that.”

“I like saying it. The more I say it, the less real it sounds.”

“Fair enough. What do I have to do?”

Becca waved me over to her bed with a floppy hand, and I scrunched in next to her. Even without hair, I could smell her shampoo, citrusy and fresh, almost good enough to eat.

She reached underneath her mattress and pulled out a crinkled piece of Hello Kitty stationery I vaguely remembered giving her for her birthday in elementary school.

“This is my bucket list. I’ve been writing it since I was nine,” Becca shared.

“And I’m the morbid one?” I raised my eyebrows.

“Yes. I’m not the one who used a needle and pen to tattoo their thigh with a smiley face.”

“It’s not a smiley face. It’s a dead guy smiley face. That’s what the X’s instead of eyes mean.”

“Yeah, like I said, morbid. The point was—”

“There was a point?” I laughed a little.

“Alex, we’re running out of time. I’m running out of time. Tomorrow is it. Whatever happens, I have no idea what it’s going to be like or how long or what I’ll look like or when I’ll see you again, so we need to do this now.” Becca had worked herself up, or I had, and she started coughing. When she didn’t stop after a few hacks, her mom’s feet pounded up the stairs.

“Here, honey.” Becca’s mom reached for a small pitcher on her nightstand, and, with shaking hands, poured a glass of water. Becca drank it slowly, deliberately, until the glass was emptied and her mom filled it again.

“Thanks, Mom.” Becca sounded younger and sweeter, like a little kid version of Becca I remembered from when she had a broken arm and she worked the pity factor to get a massive Polly Pocket yacht. But this didn’t feel like working it. She was already becoming a smaller, frightened version of herself.

“Alex, Becca needs to get her rest for tomorrow. I hate to ask, but I think you should probably go.”

Becca snapped out of her Polly Pocket pity voice for a moment. “Mom, I need to keep talking to Alex. I might not see her for a while.” She looked at me. “The doctors said I’d be really out of it. And I can’t risk bringing germs into the house because of my weakened immune system. You won’t want to see me all gross and gnarly anyway,” she assumed, turning to me.

“Gross and gnarly is my business, Becca. But whatever you need me to do.”

“Fifteen minutes more, Mom?” Becca opened her eyes wide in their most manipulative, manga-like expression.

“Your hair—” It was as though Becca’s mom just noticed the mass of missing locks. Tears and shudders erupted from her, the absolute worst thing to watch. I knew parents are supposed to be human and all, but I wish she could have pulled it together for Becca’s sake. And mine.

“I saved some in a bag for you.” I tried to cheer Becca’s mom up and held the bag out for her to see. Apparently, that wasn’t the correct thing to do. The sobs and shudders turned even more extreme.

“Mom, you’re freaking Alex out, and I just got her back. Can you please give us fifteen minutes alone? I’m fine without the hair. Just pretend it’s for a big role starring opposite Hugh Jackman.” Becca always knew the right thing to say, and I saw the smile I had hoped for spread across her mom’s face. She loved Hugh Jackman.

“Fifteen minutes,” she agreed, and grabbed a handful of tissues on her way out.

“And you wonder why I’m in drama,” Becca sighed after her mom closed the door.

“The list?” I had to know where she was going with this.

“Yeah, so I’ve been doing this since I was nine. Not, like, as an I’m going to die list but more like a list of things I need to do someday.”

“Before you die,” I pushed.

“Well, I sure as fuck can’t do them after I die.”

“Says you. What if I learn the art of taxidermy, stuff you, and take you with me everywhere I go until we complete the list?”

“You’re totally going to turn that into a movie someday, aren’t you?”

“Probably.”

“You can use my dead body as the dead body,” Becca volunteered.

“You’ll be too busy starring as the gorgeous, living friend. Who is alive. And not dead at all.”

“Okay, good, because that’s on my list.” She pointed to number 19: Star in one of Alex’s movies, and have it seen by actual people instead of just me and Alex. “Sorry,” she noticed. “My bucket list isn’t very well-worded.”

“Can we stop calling it a bucket list? Again: implied death,” I noted.

“I thought it meant all the things you can fit into a bucket to do.”

“Um, no, I think it means all the things you can do before you kick the bucket. Which, actually, I think is an allusion to suicide, right? Like, kicking the bucket out from under your feet while you hang. Or maybe someone else is kicking out the bucket?”

“Yuck and gross and eeww.”

“So no more bucket. How about the Fuck-It List? Like, fuck it, I might die, so let me look like an idiot doing all sorts of ridiculous things?”

“The Fuck-It List. Noble, but with a hint of edge to it.”

“Think they’d ever let me name a movie The Fuck-It List?”

“Probably not. They’d be all, ‘How about The Stuff-It List? That’s how kids these days really talk, right?’” Becca perfectly adopted a hilariously oblivious male executive’s voice.

From downstairs we heard Becca’s mom yell, “Ten minutes!”

“Damn, woman. She’s probably got her stopwatch ticking. Okay, we need to focus. I don’t know how much of the list I can do by myself in a short amount of time, so I had the idea that maybe you could help me out with some things on it and I could live vicariously through you.”

I grabbed the list and skimmed through the scribbles written over every possible inch of the worn paper. “No way in hell am I sending my bra to Zac Efron.” I gagged.

“Shut up. I was like twelve when I wrote that.”

“Did you even have boobs?”

“I had a training bra. I think SpongeBob was on it. Anyway, you don’t have to do everything, but, like, here, number thirteen.” She pointed to a line written in pink pen. “Sleep on a beach to watch the sunset and sunrise. You could definitely manage that.”

“So could you! Come on!” I prodded. It was hard for me to imagine Becca being so sick, or maybe not even here to do something so simple.

“Alex, humor me. Things on this list need to start getting done, so I can feel like I accomplished something just in case I do die. And don’t give me that shit that I’ll be dead so I won’t know whether or not I accomplished anything because now you will know and you’ll have to live with it weighing on your lightly existing conscience.”

“Geez, fine. No need to bring my conscience into this. I’ll sleep on a beach. I’ll be a regular beach bum. I’ll bring you back a grain of sand and everything.”

“This is serious, Alex. You can’t just do it half-assed. Do everything like it’s your last night on Earth.”

“Are you going to quote Ke$ha again? Fine. Two grains of sand.” Becca smacked my shoulder. “Isn’t there anything on here we could take care of now? So you can do some of it?” I scanned the page. Numbers and sentences in various colored pens and markers were strewn every which way. “Here! I found one. Number eight: Crank call Adam Levitz.”

“That’s on the list? God, I was such a douchey nine-year-old.”

Adam Levitz was a crush gone wrong in fourth grade. He invited Becca to the Fun Fair at our elementary school, but when he didn’t pick her up at her house she and I went to the school in hopes of meeting him there. Turned out it was all a trick masterminded by Queen Bitch Mara Radnor. Apparently, Becca hadn’t gotten over it.

“It’s on the list. Let’s do it.” I reached for Becca’s phone and punched in *67, so her number would show up as private.

“Give me that.” Becca grabbed the phone out of my hands and dialed some numbers.

“Why do you still know his phone number?” I was incredulous.

“I tried calling him so many times that night he ditched me, it stayed in my head. Ssshhh—” Becca held up a finger to quiet me. In a hilariously sexy, breathy voice, Becca asked, “Is Adam there? No? Well, can you tell him Cassandra called, and I just wanted to let him know he gave me chlamydia. Thanks.”

We both started giggling when she hung up. “That was weird,” I told her.

“I know. Cassandra’s such a tramp.”

“Cross it off.” I pushed the list at her along with a pen from her nightstand. “Let’s do one more,” I suggested. “We have five minutes. Is there a quick one? Like where we make out or something?” I asked.

“What? That’s not on there, is it?” Becca scanned the list. “How about this one?” Number fifteen: Flash the homeschool boy next door.”

Becca lived next to a family with six girls and one boy, all homeschooled. We knew nothing about them except that the boy was our age, ridiculously hot, and his bedroom window lined up perfectly with Becca’s.

“You little whore. You have to do this one.” I nudged her.

“I don’t know. Is it too skanky?”

“It’s not like your list said to give the homeschool boy a handjob. Unless that’s further down. Ha. Get it? Further down?”

“Alex! Time to go!” Becca’s mom called once again from downstairs.

“Your mom is insane, by the way,” I told her.

Becca wasted no time answering me. Before I finished my sentence, she was on her feet and heading to her window.

“Oh my god. He’s there. At his little homeschool desk facing his little homeschool window. He looked up. He sees me.”

“No time like the present for a nip slip,” I advised.

“I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it,” Becca chanted. She threw her t-shirt to the floor. “I’m totally doing it. He’s looking! I’m going to take off my bra. I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.”

“This play-by-play is really sexy, Becca,” I teased.

Becca reached around her back and unhooked her bra. “Here I go. I’m taking off my bra. One. Two. Three.” Becca flung her bra across her room and threw her arms up in the air. “He’s smiling!”

“Yeah. I’d imagine so.”

“I’m going to blow him a kiss.” Becca did just that. Then her bedroom door opened, and her mom barged in. Becca spun around instantly, arms crossed over her chest. “Mom! Get out!” Becca screamed. “Alex is leaving! Give us a minute, damnit!”

I don’t know if Becca’s mom left because of what Becca said or because she didn’t want to know what Becca was actually doing. We busted out laughing the second the door closed. Becca threw her shirt back on and climbed into bed.

“That was so excellent. See how good it’s going to feel when you do these things for me?” She was really serious about me doing her list.

“I’m not showing my tits to your neighbor, Becca.”

“You don’t have to. I already did!” she squealed. “Calm thyself, Becca,” she breathed, something she often did before a show to center herself. “You don’t have to do all of them. I know it’s a lot. Just some of them so you can report back to me. Really live while I can’t.”

“When you put it that way, I’m pretty much obligated to say yes, aren’t I?”

“That’s the idea.”

“I better go, or your mom might try to smoke me out. Should we hug?” Hugging now felt too infinite.

“Yes, we should, and we will.” Becca worked herself out of the bed and wrapped her arms around me. That did it. My hard candy shell melted into a puddle of chocolate in her arms. “I always knew you were a softy.”

“Careful what you say. I’ve got a shiv in my pocket.” I sniffed.

“I love you, Alex. You and your shiv.”

“Love you, too, Becca. Even if I have to sleep on a beach to prove it.”

“I hope you get sand in your undies,” Becca whispered in my ear.

WHEN I PARKED my dad’s car in our empty garage, I knew I’d be home alone. But I didn’t want to be. A note on the kitchen table read, “The boys have soccer. Be home by 8. Pizza in the freezer. Hope you had a good first day. Love you, Mom.” The thought crossed my mind to actually watch my brothers’ soccer game, but that momentary lapse of sport dementia quickly passed. I could’ve studied Becca’s list, started my game plan, created a schedule. But maybe I didn’t want to think about it, about anything. Instead, I opted for a pint of Cherry Garcia and a viewing of my comfort film Dead Alive. Most people know Peter Jackson as the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, and rightly so because they’re brilliant. I would argue even more brilliant is his early, and finest, film about a man in New Zealand whose mom gets bitten by a plague-infected monkey at the zoo. As a result, she turns into a festering, hungry horndog along with other not-so-upstanding members of town, and her son does his best to take care of them. Possibly one of the goriest films ever made, there is even a sweet love story, a hilarious running zombie baby, and a priest who yells, “I kick ass for the Lord!” Could there be anything better?