The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

My eyes widen in surprise. I had no idea. “Wait. She what? France?”
“Yeah,” he says, chuckling. “She studied French in high school and was determined to get out of
Huckabee one day and board a plane there for good. You know, marry some stylish Parisian and eat
baguettes by the Eiffel Tower and shit.”
I laugh, giving him a once-over in his torn jeans and sweat-stained T-shirt.
“Eventually, she just wanted to go to France,” he says, noticing my look and smirking. “And then we
got married, and had you, and she realized she had everything she needed right here in Huckabee.”
He gets a distant look in his eyes, a furrow forming on his forehead. Finally, he clears his throat,
taking one last solemn bite of his cereal.
“You good?” I ask him as he puts his bowl in the sink, the spoon loudly clattering against the
porcelain bottom.
He nods, looking back to give me a small, thin-lipped smile.
“That wasn’t very convincing,” I say.
He laughs, calling out, “I’m great! Never better!” before kissing me on the top of the head and
leaving for work.
I look down at the tattoo on my mom’s arm, processing all this new information. An invincible
summer. Her invincible summer.
If the quote is the key, I finally know what I have to do.
I don’t even bother to clean the dishes. e second my dad crosses over the threshold, I’m tearing up
the stairs to my room. I duck under the edge of my floral bedspread, my hands clawing at the box I’ve
hidden under my bed.
I rifle through everything, the manila envelope, the stued moose, the soccer T-shirt, until I see the
book, nestled into the corner.
I pull it out to see “L’ÉTÉ” is written across the front in a bold red, “par Albert Camus” just
underneath it in black.
And… there’s my first problem. As I flip through the yellowing pages, I realize this entire book is in
French. With three years of Spanish under my belt, I couldn’t find the quote she’d pulled her tattoo
from even if I tried.
I stop my flipping, my brow furrowing when I see there’s a page missing, a gap between 156 and 159,
the jagged paper near the binding the only clue that something had been there.
She’d ripped a page out.
I could probably just Google it? Or…
I flip back to the title page and see a faded blue stamp reading “O’Reilly’s Used Books,” and suddenly
the possibility of my first bucket list item is sitting right in front of me.
9. Buy a book in another language.
If they have this exact book, not only would I check my first list item o, but I could figure out
what that missing page said. And, if I could figure out what the missing page said, I bet I could figure