The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

I’m honestly not sure we’d be friends if it weren’t for Kiera. ey’d become close during home ec
class in seventh grade, but we’ve never exactly been BFFs.
“Yeah, but not if they’re rotten,” she says, rolling her eyes.
Ryan laughs at that, and Matt cracks a small smile, but then an awkward silence settles back over
everyone.
“Well, we better get these back to Nina’s,” Blake says, nodding to the apples. “I’ll see you guys at
work tomorrow.”
ere’s a chorus of goodbyes, directed entirely at Blake, before we head in the exact opposite
direction of the exit. I glance behind me at Matt as his broad shoulders disappear from view, the look
he gave me still fresh in my mind.
“So, clearly,” Blake says when we’re a safe distance away, “things are not at all awkward between the
two of you.”
Her tone is light and joking, and I breathe an internal sigh of relief. She doesn’t know anything new.
“Yeah,” I say, looking up to see the sunlight filtering in through the trees, my arms getting tired from
carrying the basket of apples. “We still haven’t spoken since the breakup. Honestly, none of them has
spoken to me since the breakup. This one’s… definitely the worst.”
“This one?” Blake asks.
“We’re a bit like a faulty light switch,” I say. “Most times, we’re back on before you can tell it
flickered. But this time’s different.”
e other times it had always been small, stupid incidents. Moments I’d ended things because I felt
like we weren’t clicking in the way I wanted to, the way my mom talked about with my dad. Moments I
didn’t feel butterflies in my chest. Moments when I felt like he was being too clingy. Or too distant.
That time he said I’d kept myself in a little box the past three years.
I always hoped when we’d get back together that it would bring about a new result. Would make
things feel less… off.
Would they really this time?
“I mean, it’s just my luck we would see them here today.” I groan and spin around to face her,
turning my back on the tree, on my mom’s list. “Why did she do this? Why am I doing this? What if I
trip? Or we get caught? What will people say? What—”
“Don’t overthink it,” Blake says, her voice stopping me from spiraling. “Who cares what other people
think? Maybe that’s why your mom did it. To get out of her head. To stop obsessing over what other
people thought about her. To break the mold she was stuck in.”
I think about my mom and her manila envelope of awards. All the years she had spent cementing
her golden image in the eyes of Huckabee, this small act of rebellion a sharp turn away from that. A
way to break her mold.
A way to break my mold. Or at least put a crack in it.
I think about how stuck I feel. Stuck in other people’s perceptions of me, in that moment at junior
prom, in my mom dying, in my own friends’ opinions of me, all of it completely weighing me down.
“I’ll admit, blowing up Santa may have been my idea,” she says, a trace of that mischievous smile
lingering on her lips. “But you’re the one who planned it.” She spins me back around to face the clearing.
“So, what’s the plan this time?”