The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

“Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais enfin qu’il y avait en moi un été invincible.”
My head snaps up to see Blake reading from the book in perfect French. Her eyes move from page
number 158 up to meet mine, my heart hammering noisily in my chest.
“You speak French? Why didn’t you say something!”
“I wanted to, but someone was a little too eager to get over here to let me get a word in edgewise.”
ere’s a teasing glint in her eyes, and I feel my cheeks begin to burn. “Took it since middle school. I
was thinking about maybe minoring in it in college.”
My phone pings, the pointless, no-longer-necessary app finally starting to download. “So do you
know what it means?” I ask, sliding around the table and sitting down in the booth next to her.
I peer over her tan shoulder at the book, and she taps the sentence she just read aloud. “It means
something like, ‘In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.’ ”
I nod slowly, taking it in, trying to find a connection. Trying to find something hidden in there.
Something about her and her experience.
I squint at the words, thinking of Matt and junior prom, and the past three years without my mom,
filled with ups and downs. inking of the taped-together SAT results I found in my mom’s box of
things.
But nothing about those words makes any of that come together for me.
“Well, that’s just great,” I say, throwing my hands up. “I mean, what does that even mean? Leave it to
me to tear through a bookstore, expecting this quote from some old French dude to tell me some longlost
secret about my mom.”
Blake laughs and pulls out her phone. I watch as she types the translation into it, sending the words
to me in a text. She leans on her elbow, looking directly at me, her sun-streaked hair hanging over her
arm. “Well, maybe that will change. It may not mean anything now, but maybe it will one day. Maybe
you just need to finish the list or something first.”
“I am deep in winter, Blake! Nothing about this summer is invincible,” I mutter, reaching out to grab
my milkshake and taking a long, slow sip.
“Not yet,” Blake clarifies, giving me one of her big, ear-to-ear smiles, which makes me remember how
she convinced me to light a sparkler in my living room ten years ago. I have a feeling I’d probably still
go along with that. “I mean, maybe it didn’t make sense to your mom at first either. Maybe her summer
didn’t exactly start out as an invincible one. But it became one.”
I bite my straw thoughtfully.
“Besides, you’ve already taken the first step,” she says, reaching past me to grab the pen Judy le on
our table. She holds it out to me, spinning my mom’s list around to face me, my eyes landing on
number nine.
Buy a book in another language.
My first list item.
I feel a swell of happiness as I take the pen from her hand, carefully putting a small blue check mark
next to the line.
The first step. One item checked off my mom’s bucket list.