The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

“I got mostly cacti for a reason,” she says when she sees me staring at the row of plants. “Sometimes
I forget to water them.” She takes a step closer, carefully inspecting them. She reaches out to prod at
the soil. “I think it’s genetic. Unlike your mom, my mom apparently had the polar opposite of a green
thumb. One look at a plant and it dropped dead.”
I laugh at that before catching sight of the frames hanging around the room, tiny pinpoints of color
against the white wall. ey’re all pictures of houses. A split-level perched on the edge of the sand, a
cottage surrounded by a wall of trees, a white bungalow with Winston out front, tongue lolling as he
chases a tennis ball.
I take a step closer, astonished when I realize that they aren’t pictures.
They’re paintings.
“Did you do these?” I ask, pointing in awe at one of them.
“Yeah,” Blake says, like it’s no big deal, sitting down on her gray-and-white-striped bedspread. She
peers at the small pile of boxes. “My easel is somewhere in here.”
“You’re insanely good,” I say, looking from the painting to the real-life Winston over and over again.
Winston wags his tail at my excitement, trotting over for a pet. “Like… I have never seen anyone our
age this talented before.”
“Thanks,” Blake says, blushing slightly at my praise.
“Is that what you want to do?” I ask her.
“Pretty much,” she says, nodding. “I want to go to school in New York. Or California, maybe, so I
can be close to the beach. Get a degree in architecture. Do what my grandpa never got the chance to.” I
can easily picture her in a class on top of some high-rise, her hair pulled back into that messy bun, ink
splattered on her hands and her tan arms as she works at a drafting table.
She leans back, looking around the room, the house he designed. “We used to FaceTime a bunch and
talk about it, especially when the house was being built. He’d show me pictures of cool buildings and
send me floor plans in the mail, try to teach me the way he had learned. It really sucks I couldn’t spend
more time with him in person before he died.”
She shrugs and gives me a thin-lipped smile I recognize all too well. “Anyway, what about you?
What are your plans postgraduation?”
I freeze and search for words, but come up empty. To be honest, I haven’t really thought about it.
Not since Mom died, at least. Matt was always bringing up college applications and where we should
go, but I’d just clam up. We already have so much debt, there’s no way I can go into more just to go to
school. Especially when I don’t even know what I want to do there.
In a lot of ways, Blake’s future is way easier to picture than my own.
I think about working at Nina’s. e smell of flour and butter and chocolate. How the rest of the
world fades away when I’m decorating a cake or weighing dough or cooking up a new recipe. “I don’t
know. I guess I… like baking,” I say, which is a start.
But do I really want to work at Nina’s forever? I could go to culinary school, I guess, but that’s not
something I could do here in Huckabee.
“Secretly, I think the one thing I do want is to get out of here. To go to a big city somewhere, away
from all the sympathetic, knowing smiles. Away from everybody knowing everything about everyone
else. Where I’m able to figure out who I am and what I’m like, without an entire town of people