The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

6
Lounging upside down on my bed later that day, I pull up my phone calendar, counting down the days
until the end of the Huckabee Lake trip. e last day of the trip is my newly planned goal for finishing
the list, according to Blake, at least.
Twenty-one.
Twenty-one days to get this list done, the trip being the very last item.
Twenty-one days from now, I will have finished my mom’s bucket list. Provided I actually pick an
item to get things started.
I switch over to Instagram and scroll through Sycamore Street Tattoos’ page for the millionth time,
since that’s number one. Photos of newly decorated arms and legs and underboobs glide across my
screen as I try to make a plan of attack. I pause on a familiar picture of a red rose, planted for all
eternity on the side of my best friend, Kiera.
We went last Galentine’s Day for a discount special that Sycamore Street runs for just about every
major, minor, and entirely made-up holiday. You could go and pick from an overflowing binder of
artwork, the price always ringing up under fiy dollars. ey even ran a special on National Cheese
Day, which I’m pretty sure isn’t actually a real thing.
True to Huckabee form, Sycamore Street Tattoos doesn’t bother with carding, which was why Kiera
and about half our classmates have gotten their first tattoos long before their eighteenth birthdays.
Like we were going to this past February.
“Come on, Em!” she had said. “Let’s do something bad for once. Like we—”
Like we used to. She stopped herself before she said it, but I could still feel the burn.
I remember Kiera spinning the binder around to face me aer flipping through only two pages and
pointing to the rose. “Arm or rib cage?”
I said arm, but she went for rib cage.
I chickened out a few minutes later at the sight of the needle, wondering when they’d last been
cleaned, as the statistics I’d read on infections circled around and around inside my brain. I could tell
Kiera was disappointed, but she still faithfully went through with hers, squeezing my hand so tight, I
had entirely lost feeling in my fingers by the end of it.
Which had absolutely affirmed my decision not to get one.