The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

29
The second I walk into Nina’s the next day, Kiera storms o to the back room, leaving me standing in
the doorway watching her go. I catch Nina peering at us from the kitchen, her brow furrowed in
concern. Paul is just behind the counter, his pen frozen midair.
“Kiera!” I call, following aer her. I reach out and stop the door from slamming in my face, slipping
inside and closing it behind me.
She crosses her arms and turns around to look at me. “What?”
We both stare at each other for a long moment, the cracks in our friendship that we’ve ignored for
so long suddenly a cavern between us.
“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to cross the divide. “I’m sorry about what I said.”
“Honestly, it was a bit of a welcome relief. You’re always shutting me out and refusing to open up,”
she says, glowering across the room at me. “It was nice to actually hear what you thought for once.”
I nod, thinking about that little box that I kept myself in. How it impacted everything in my life.
My relationship with Matt. My friendship with Kiera.
“I think I just felt like you were so obsessed with fixing everything so we could have this shiny,
wonderful senior year, that you just… stopped seeing me completely.”
“Well, you wouldn’t let me see you, Em,” she says, understandably frustrated. “I mean, what is going
on? I thought this is what you wanted! I mean, our plan worked, didn’t it?”
“It worked,” I say as I take a deep breath. “But I… I don’t think it was the right plan.”
Kiera is silent, leaving me a space to continue. To tell her the thing I kept from her that would have
made a world of difference.
I feel my heart hammering in my chest, the truth I’ve never told anyone before on the tip of my
tongue. The part of me I never got to share with my mom.
“I don’t like Matt, Kiera,” I say, and her mouth falls open in surprise. “Not like that. No matter how
hard I tried to. No matter how hard I tried to not be like this, it’s no use.”
“ ‘Like this’?” she echoes.
I take a deep breath, the truth coming out in a whisper. “I like Blake.”
I wait for the storm. For the world to come crashing in around me.
But it doesn’t.