The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

“Okay. Fine. It has to be a small one, though. I don’t want to break my neck or anything.”
“Medium, and you’ve got a deal,” she challenges, holding out her hand.
I stare at it before letting out a long hu of air and shaking on it. “Fine. Medium. ONE jump, and
then we’re done.”
She pauses midshake. “Just one little detail. Are there, like, cliffs around here?”
I laugh and pull my hand away, looking back down at the water in the picture. I know this is an out.
I know I can lie and say there aren’t.
But I think of the list, and I don’t take it.
“There’s a bunch of lakes and creeks around here. I’m sure we can find something.”
Matt would know. e thought comes to me despite myself. He would be thrilled to hear I was
thinking about launching myself off a cliff.
e second-to-last time we broke up, he told me I’d been keeping myself in a little box the past
three years.
“Because I won’t go backpacking with you this weekend?” I fired back at him.
He ran his fingers through his unkempt hair, frustrated. “It’s more than just the backpacking, Emily,
and you know it.”
I did know it.
Back when we were just friends, we used to go mountain biking in Huckabee State Park, or hiking
by the old bridge over Coal Creek. But aer Mom was gone, none of it seemed the same to me. Instead
of adventures, I’d just see the five most common mountain-bike injuries, or how if we got cut by the
bridge metal, a tetanus shot is only 95 percent effective at protection against something like diphtheria.
Why seek out the chance for something to go terribly wrong when life was always threatening to do
that without your help?
Eventually, he just stopped asking. I didn’t realize he’d felt boxed in with me until that fight. I
realized then some part of him was bummed I wasn’t as adventurous as I used to be. at he was still
hoping to get the daredevil Emily he had a crush on in middle school to reappear.
He was just too nice to outright say it. And I was too cowardly to bring it up again. So maybe if I
did this… I could get a piece of that back. Maybe that’s what’s been so off between us.
I slowly put the photos away, watching Blake put together her easel, her dark eyebrows knit
together in concentration as she works.
I wonder what someone like Blake is afraid of.
I wonder if she’d think less of me if she knew I was afraid of mostly everything now, the statistics
and the unexpected worst-case scenarios.
I wonder if my mom would think less of me if she knew I was afraid of mostly everything.
I jump when there’s a knock on the door. Johnny’s and my dad’s heads pop inside, appearing stacked
on top of each other.
“Em, we gotta head on down the road,” my dad says. “I’ve got work in the morning.”
I tap my phone to see it’s already almost ten. Wow, the hours with Blake completely flew by. at’s
a good feeling in a summer I’ve pretty much watched the seconds tick away in.
“anks for the help,” Blake says when they’ve le the two of us to break down the now empty
boxes. “I’m sure it wasn’t exactly the most entertaining night.”