“He’ll be here soon.”
Thiago tossed me a shovel. We had been digging a minute or so when we heard footsteps. As I aimed the flashlight to greet Taylor, I got the fright of my life. I automatically dropped my shovel, hearing it land on the ground with a loud thump, and held up my hands to feign innocence. “We… We didn’t…”
Then the loudest cackle in all of history rang out, and I pointed the beam of light into the face of the person laughing at me. “Are you fucking serious?” I screamed. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!”
“That was the idea, gorgeous!”
Thiago started laughing uncontrollably too. Taylor threw an arm around me and said to his brother, “I told you I had a killer costume.”
“A cop?” I said. “Whatever. It does look realistic, though.”
“Damn right it does. It’s real,” Taylor explained, picking up a shovel and sinking it into the dirt.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked, grabbing my own shovel in an attempt to help out.
“I’ve got my contacts,” he said with an impish grin. “I’m gonna have a great time pretending to bust my party tonight.”
I didn’t doubt that. There was nothing that would scare a teenager more than seeing a policeman at a party where at least four state laws were being broken.
We kept digging—or rather, they did, because I got tired after about five minutes, so I just went through the motions. Soon Thiago struck something hard.
“I think this is it,” he said, crouching down and pushing the dirt aside with his hands. He uncovered the metal box, and my nerves got the better of me. I knelt too, as did Tay, and we all struggled to pull it out.
“Damn, that’s heavy,” Taylor grunted, exhaling a lungful of air. We stared at it for a few seconds until he said, “We should open it, right?” He was now rubbing his hands together and breathing on them to warm them up. It must have dropped another ten degrees since we were setting up at his house.
“Yeah, unless you want to catch a case of pneumonia,” Thiago responded.
Taylor did the honors, wiping off the last bits of dirt and lifting the latch. “Thiago, look! Our Captain America comics!” he shouted, grabbing one and flipping through the pages.
“I totally forgot we had put those in there,” Thiago said.
I saw one of my old treasures. “Polly Pocket!” I called out, grabbing the little flower-shaped box and opening it to reveal the tiny house inside. I had spent hours playing with those as a kid. “And my Furby! Remember Furbies?”
“I hated those fucking things. I can still remember how it would wake me up in the middle of the night asking for food,” Taylor said, putting aside his comics. There was all kinds of stuff inside: toys, drawings, coins. “Oh, shit, fifty bucks!” Taylor announced. “Why would we have left money in here?”
“It was in case we were starving in the future,” Thiago remembered, and we all laughed.
“And there are our letters!” I said, grabbing the three envelopes with our names on them. Thiago looked weirdly serious as I asked, “Should we read them out loud? I can’t remember what I wrote.”
“Yeah,” Taylor agreed, “let’s do it!” He unwrapped a chocolate that was in there. I wasn’t sure that was the best idea, and I asked if he really intended to eat it.
“Of course! Chocolate from the past, awesome!”
I shook my head in disgust and told him, “It’s gonna make you sick. It must have expired years ago.” But he shoved four more in his mouth before finally admitting, “Yeah, they do taste kind of weird.”
“You really are a moron,” Thiago said.
“Kami, read your letter,” Taylor said, ignoring him.
I smiled nervously and began:
“Dear future Kami: I hope that now that you’re all grown up, you’ve learned to understand all the stuff that ten-year-old Kami still doesn’t get. Like where do babies come from—”
“I can explain all that to you,” Taylor interrupted me, and I told him to shut up.
“I hope you got into Yale. You know you want to be a veterinarian or a famous painter. You’ve got time to figure it out.Damn. I completely forgot I wanted to be a vet.”
“You don’t remember how you used to pick up little animals on the roadside and from the woods?” Thiago asked. “You even brought us a bat one time.” He and his brother looked at each other, reminiscing.
