The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

away that the family of Huckabee’s founder still owns,” I say, pulling a moose stued animal out of the
box. “My school has a lake trip there every August for the incoming senior class as a ‘Congrats, you
almost survived high school’ kind of thing. It’s a tradition. ey’ve done it for, like, a hundred and
sixteen years. My parents actually started dating during their senior-year lake trip.” I toss her the
moose, grinning. “Our school, rather.”
She grins back at me, catching the moose and holding it up, her brown eyes inspecting its face. “It
kind of looks like your dad,” she says as she spins it around to face me.
I pretend to be oended on his behalf, but… I definitely see it. e eyes, the unruly brown hair, the
stocky build.
“So, are you going?” she asks as she carefully places the Joseph Clark moose down on top of the
manila envelope. “On the lake trip?”
“Absolutely not.” I grimace. I decided pretty much my first day of high school I wouldn’t be going
because of 1) the three-hour bus ride there, 2) the three-hour bus ride back, and 3) I’m definitely not a
Lake-Going Person.
Oh, and, newly added: 4) I’d rather not be stuck at a lake for three days with my ex and a bunch of
people who either want to gossip about me or hate me.
“Why not?” she asks, clearly surprised by my adamant decision.
Blake is obviously a Lake-Going Person.
“Do you have any idea how much bacteria is in a lake?” I ask. “When I was in middle school,
Huckabee Lake was shut down for the whole summer because of a massive breakout of carp herpes.
The shore was literally lined with dead fish.”
Carp herpes is no joke.
She snorts, shaking her head as she puts the room-number plate down. “I didn’t even know carp
could get herpes.”
I turn back to the box, pulling out two cassette tapes’ worth of music, a worn blue baseball cap, a
small jar of sand, a worse-for-wear book by Albert Camus, and wait.…
My eyes widen when I see what’s at the very bottom.
I’ve just hit the jackpot.
A yearbook. “Huckabee High Class of 2000” is printed in big block letters on the front of it, a
picture of the graduating class on the cover in matching royal-blue graduation attire. I pull it out,
flipping through the brightly colored pages.
“Oh my gosh,” I say, “look at this.”
I spin the yearbook around to face Blake so she can see the picture that stopped me dead in my
tracks. Two boys decked out in face paint, one perched on the other one’s shoulders, swinging a T-shirt
wildly around over his head. Joseph Clark and Johnny Carter, our dads, in all their high school glory.
My dad looks almost exactly the same, except for the lack of a beard and the backward blue cap he’s
sporting in the photo. He’s even got on a leather jacket that I am 99.9 percent certain he still has to
this day.
Johnny, on the other hand, looks completely dierent. Perched on my dad’s shoulders, he looks
nothing like the lady-killer at bingo night. He’s pretty much just a clone of young Blake. Small, lanky,
and wearing a pair of glasses that takes up most of his paint-covered face.