“It took the whole school two days to clean up the mess we made,” Johnny says, wiping away a tear from all the laughter. “I’m pretty certain there’s still a chocolate-pudding stain on the ceiling.”
“I almost killed you both,” Mrs. Carter adds, still doubled over.
I watch in awe as Johnny and Blake down an entire pizza by themselves through several more stories, having absolutely no idea where it could possibly fit inside their lanky bodies. Soon the plates rest on the coffee table, the laughter dying down, a single slice sitting in the center of the second box.
“We’ll clean up,” Johnny says, reaching for it. “You girls can work on Blake’s stuff. I got a bit of a head start today while you were at work.”
“If you call unpacking a single box and watching TV a head start, I’d hate to see what the rest of the race looks like,” Mrs. Carter says, roasting her own son. Blake snorts, a look of camaraderie passing between the two of them.
“I brought most of my boxes upstairs this morning,” Blake says to me as we head over to the pile in the corner. “Didn’t want my grandma to have to do it,” she adds in a whisper. She rifles around in the corner, pulling three boxes out of the mix, a strong cursive on the top differentiating them from the others. “Just gotta take these up.”
I hold out my arms as she hands me a single box, then balances the remaining two in her arms, letting out a long exhale as she stands under the weight of them.
I follow her up another set of metal stairs and down a long hallway. The walls are a stark, barren white, so different from the photo-lined ones at my house. Winston trails just a little bit behind us, his claws clicking noisily on the floor. At the very last door, Blake turns, pushing it carefully open with her foot.
“I don’t think it’ll take us that long to get everything unpacked,” she says over her shoulder. “I got a little done last night.”
I step inside, and the room instantly feels homier than the rest of the house. Mostly just because it feels more like… well… like Blake. Her warm, familiar smell washes over me, like the whole room is her cozy sweatshirt.
I add my box to a small pile on the floor, looking around at everything. The walls are the same bland white of the hallway, but Blake has added string lights around the entire ceiling, which cast a warm glow on the overflowing bookshelf in the corner and the row of plants sitting in front of a wall of glass.
I see what she meant about the no-privacy thing. If there was anyone even remotely close by, they’d get a clear view straight into here.
“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. They’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. The 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 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. There 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 stuff, 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 off the rest of the tape and start to unpack the boxes we brought up. I sit on the floor, handing stuff to Blake for her to put away, one of her Spotify playlists playing softly in the background. She likes a lot of the same stuff I like. Indie. Folk pop. Some Billboard Hot 100 hits. She hums along to “Alaska” by Maggie 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 off it. The two of us flip through the photographs of sandy beaches and surfing and happy faces.
“These 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 after school. It’s pret
ty big in Kauai. The tourists, thankfully, don’t know about this particular spot. You flavor it with a bunch of syrups, and real fruit and stuff.” She flips to the next picture, a close-up of a yellow and orange shave ice, covered in mango and guava.
“This 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 different 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.”
I couldn’t imagine leaving here before my senior year of school. Leaving Kiera behind. Leaving the familiar hallways of Huckabee High.
Then again, that sounds like it could be a miracle after the past few weeks.
But Blake isn’t running from a ruined social life.
“My grandma back there is doing a lot better than Grandma Carter though.”
“Is that why you moved? Because of your grandma?”
Blake shifts, leaning her head back against the wall. “Yeah, she hasn’t been doing so well since my grandpa died. And my aunt Lisa lives way closer than Hawaii, but still a bit too far away to check up on her regularly.” I think about seeing her downstairs. The cane. The hollowness of her cheeks. “Plus, I didn’t want to feel like I didn’t spend enough time with her, you know? Like I did when my grandpa died. I think my dad felt the same.”
There’s a loud bang from somewhere down the hall, Johnny and my dad up to no good. “That, and I think he wanted to be close to her when I go away to college.” She stands with a stretch. We hear another bang followed by some laughter, the two of us smiling at each other. “It’ll probably be a good thing for your dad when you head to college too,” she says, doubling down on her confidence in me getting out of here. “Not sure about anyone else, though. The two of them together might just bring about Huckabee’s demise.”
I nod and don’t say anything, continuing to look through the pictures. I stop on one of Blake and her friends from back home sitting atop a huge cliff, the jagged edges of the rock illuminated by the sunlight, the distance to the water enough to make me feel dizzy just looking at it.
I spin the picture around to face her. “Did you jump off this?”
“Yeah,” she says as she stoops down to look at it, her eyes flicking up to meet mine, a mischievous grin on her face. “You ever been cliff jumping before?”
“Have I ever been cliff jumping?” I snort. “Blake, that’s like asking if I’ve ever robbed a bank, or solved pi.”
I push down the initial wave of excitement I had upon seeing the photo. I’ve definitely read articles about cliff-diving accidents. People breaking their necks, or losing their balance and smacking their head on the way down.
I don’t need to test my luck falling off anything.
She turns back to me, confused. “I always remembered you as the adventurous type,” she says. “Sledding down that huge hill backward, chucking snowballs at those teenage boys who were being jerks, trying to blow up Santa.”
“First of all, the last one was all you,” I say, raising my eyebrows at her. “And besides, cliff jumping is more than just being adventurous. I’m way too afraid of…” My voice trails off as I realize what I’m about to say.
“Heights?” Blake finishes, her eyes wide, that mischievous grin reappearing.
“No,” I say, shaking my head, even though that’s exactly what I was going to say.
“Like… what’s on the list? Like… we should probably go cliff jumping so you can check it off the list?” she asks.
I start to object, but I can feel the cracks starting to form, the Huckabee Lake trip getting closer and closer with each passing second. It is kind of perfect.
“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 huff 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. The thought comes to me despite myself. He would be thrilled to hear I was thinking about launching myself off a cliff.
The 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 after 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. That 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. That’s a good feeling in a summer I’ve pretty much watched the seconds tick away in.
“Thanks for the help,” Blake says when they’ve left the two of us to break down the now empty boxes. “I’m sure it wasn’t exactly the most entertaining night.”
I shrug as we shuffle off down the hall, each carrying an armful. “Honestly, it was the most enjoyable night I’ve had in a while.”
We drop them off in the living room, all the boxes now reduced to a flattened pile of car
dboard.
As we say our goodbyes, my dad jingles his car keys in his pocket, a contented look on his face I haven’t seen in years. As we head for the door, Winston’s tail droops to half-mast, his brown eyes fixed on me mournfully.
Blake pats him on the head, right between his big, doofy ears. “She’s coming back, man. Don’t worry.”
He wags his tail slightly at her words, comforted by her hand on his head. Something about what she says comforts me, too. The fact that I’ll be back here, Blake’s friendship not ruined by Matt and the Huckabee Pool.
At least not yet.
“See you,” I say, more to Blake than Winston, although he wiggles a bit at my words.
“Medium cliff, Em,” she says, rehashing the terms of our cliff-jumping agreement. “Or else it doesn’t count. We can’t half-ass any of these.”
I think of how I felt putting that first check mark down at Hank’s. The rush it gave me. But it also kind of felt like a consolation prize.
I want this one to feel bigger. More earned.
“Might as well find the biggest cliff in Huckabee,” I say, and her face lights up mischievously. I’m completely going to regret that, but I can’t deny the fact that our small, shared adventure sends a little thrill through my spine, carrying me all the way out to my dad’s pickup truck and down the long driveway.
The ride home is dark, the sides of the road illuminated only by lightning bugs, but for once, the shadows beyond the trees feel a little less scary.
11
I usually don’t work on Sundays, but when I heard Nina needed apples from Snyder’s Orchard for the first batch of apple tarts this season, I jumped at the opportunity to check another item off the list. Especially one that doesn’t involve jumping off a cliff.
Although… this one isn’t exactly going to be easy.
“I never knew why we didn’t come apple picking when I was a kid, but I guess now I know,” I tell Blake as we each grab an empty brown basket before strolling through the grass to the orchard, the afternoon sun beating down on us. “Take it in, Blake. We’re about to get banned.”
The Lucky List Page 9
