The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

thinking they already know.”
It feels weird to say it out loud. Matt may have money, but he’s like my dad. He loves it here.
Leaving doesn’t even occur to him.
“Why couldn’t you?” Blake asks as she rips the tape off the top of one of the boxes.
I look away and shrug. “I don’t know. ere are a lot of reasons, I guess. I mean, could I leave my
dad alone here in Huckabee?”
“Would he want to be the reason stopping you?”
I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out, her words taking me by surprise. I don’t
know how to tell her that it just feels… impossible. Too big. Too risky. I haven’t even left Huckabee for
a single day in the past three years.
I put my hands on my hips. “I thought we were here to unpack your stu, not my problems,” I say,
and Blake laughs, chucking the balled-up hunk of packing tape at me. I swat it away with a grin.
We peel o the rest of the tape and start to unpack the boxes we brought up. I sit on the floor,
handing stu to Blake for her to put away, one of her Spotify playlists playing soly in the
background. She likes a lot of the same stu I like. Indie. Folk pop. Some Billboard Hot 100 hits. She
hums along to “Alaska” by Maie Rogers, her head moving back and forth to the beat as clothes and
shoes give way to art supplies and sketchbooks, sand embedded in the bindings.
From the bottom of a box I pull out a pile of pictures, and… I’m not sure if I should look. It feels
super personal. Like each one is showing some small part of the life Blake lived before coming here.
And I know better than anyone that some parts you just don’t want to show.
But she smiles, sitting down next to me, her leg close enough for me to feel the heat radiating o it.
The two of us flip through the photographs of sandy beaches and surfing and happy faces.
“ese are my friends Jay and Claire,” she says as I take in a picture of her sitting on a curb, a girl
with brown hair next to her, a guy in a gray T-shirt on the other side, all of them clutching Styrofoam
cups. “We would always get shave ice at this spot down the street from my house on Fridays aer
school. It’s pretty big in Kauai. e tourists, thankfully, don’t know about this particular spot. You
flavor it with a bunch of syrups, and real fruit and stu.” She flips to the next picture, a close-up of a
yellow and orange shave ice, covered in mango and guava.
“is is Jay when we all skipped school on his birthday and went kayaking,” she says, handing me a
picture of the gray T-shirt boy, shirtless and paddling a lime-green kayak. “And Claire on the back of
his bike on our way to a Valentine’s Day dance our school has every year.” She hands me another one,
Claire’s brown hair and striped dress flowing in the wind, her hands clutching Jay’s shoulders, the both
of them laughing against a sunset.
Everything she shows me is so fun and exciting. A place I’ve never been before. A place so dierent
from Huckabee. I’m surprised she hasn’t complained more about being stuck here.
I study a picture of her on a surfboard, her smile somehow a little brighter than I’ve seen it.
“Do you miss it?”
“Yeah,” Blake says simply, her eyes dark and serious. “I miss the sand. And the sun. And the water.”
She lets out a long sigh. A sigh that says the dirty Huckabee public pool definitely does not come close.
She shrugs, squinting at the picture of Jay and Claire on the bike. “And my friends and family, most of
all. We did everything together. It feels kind of impossible to picture a senior year without them.”