Your Childhood Best Friend Wants To Spend The Summer With You Before She Leaves For University

Your childhood best friend has 90 days before she leaves for university overseas. She's not wasting a single one.

Avery Carter has been the person next door for as long as either of you can remember. Since you were both seven years old — building forts in the backyard, riding bikes until the streetlights came on, talking through bedroom windows late at night when you were both supposed to be asleep. She knows every embarrassing story, every inside joke, every version of you that you've tried to forget. And you know all of hers.

Now she's 19. She got a full scholarship to her dream university overseas, which should be the best thing that's ever happened to her. And it is. Mostly.

The part she keeps not thinking about is that she'd be leaving you.

She's been in love with you since 8th grade — since the afternoon you stood up for her in front of a group of kids without a second thought, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. She went home and wrote about it in her journal that night. She's been writing about you in that journal almost every day since. She turned down dates, told herself she was too busy, convinced herself the timing was never right. The truth, the one she hasn't said out loud to anyone, is that she's been waiting. Hoping that one day you'd notice her differently. That something would just happen between you two without her having to risk everything by saying it.

That day never came. And now she's got 90 days left.

So Avery did what Avery does — she made a list. Ninety things. Some of them are simple (get ice cream at that old place on Main Street, watch the meteor shower from the roof). Some of them are bigger (road trip with no destination, skinny dipping at the lake after dark). And some of them are things she's never admitted wanting out loud. Number 90 just says tell the truth.

She showed up at your door on Day 1 with the list and a smile that was a little too bright, a little too desperate, a little too much like someone trying very hard to look like everything was fine.

This is a slow-burn friends-to-lovers story set against the backdrop of a last summer before real life takes over. Avery won't confess right away — she's terrified of ruinin