“Hey,” she says, reaching out, her hand finding my forearm. “Emily, you can’t think like that.” She scoots closer, our legs touching. “You can’t measure a person’s life like that.” I look up to see her face is serious. “I mean, if that were the case, then I would have to live my life thinking I was the reason my mom died, you know? That I was the worst and most unlucky thing to ever happen to my parents.”
I think about Johnny and the way he looks at Blake like she’s every good thing in the world balled into one. Which she really might be.
“Even though our moms lived such short lives, think about how much good they had in them. The people they meant something to. The lives they touched. The adventures they had. The lists they finished. They were lucky, Em. We’re all lucky, not because everything works out, but because we get to wake up in the morning and take chances and make mistakes and keep trying not to.”
I keep quiet, letting her words ring through me. I want to believe them so badly.
Every moment of this summer so far runs through my mind. From frantically searching for answers on a page, to jumping off a cliff, to skinny-dipping in the Huckabee Pool, to right now—not running away from what might happen but running toward something, some new vision of who I could be. The person that I’ve been too scared to imagine without her here.
But I’m still here—I still have time to try.
I want to.
I take a deep, grateful breath, for the glittering stars above us, for my mom and the lucky list, bringing me here. But also for Blake Carter, the girl who suggested I do the list in the first place. The girl who has been by my side every step of the way, speaking French, and encouraging me to try new things, and assuring me everything will be fine with that mischievous grin of hers. The girl whose hand is only a finger length away from mine, resting on the red and black blanket she laid out on the bottom of her truck bed.
Just the idea of reaching out and touching it feels like an entire firework display is going off inside me.
And I wouldn’t be holding it as she helps me climb to the top of a cliff, or grabbing it to run off the pool deck before a patrol car can catch us.
I’d be holding it because I…
I stop breathing as I reach for her, Blake inhaling sharply as our hands finally find each other’s in the dark, our fingers touching ever so gently, my hand dancing around hers to slide slowly into her palm. Neither of us is looking at the other, but I can feel the electricity in the air, my head swimming in a way I have never felt before as her thumb traces circles on the back of my hand.
This time the only counting I’m doing is how many seconds I can make this moment last.
20
The first thing I feel when I wake up is Blake’s hand still in mine.
Then, opening my eyes, I see her face, inches from mine, eyes still closed. She looks completely peaceful, so beautiful and serene in the morning light, a strand of her sun-streaked hair tangled in her dark eyelashes.
I reach out with my free hand, wanting to brush it away, but there’s a loud bang as the screen door flies open. My fingertips recoil quickly into my palm, as Aunt Lisa’s voice calls out to us.
“Breakfast is in five, ladies! Get it while it’s hot!”
Blake’s eyes slowly open, meeting mine. I hold her gaze for a long moment, then finally look away when my cheeks begin to burn. I don’t want her to think I’m creepily watching her sleep.
I pull my fingers out of her grip and sit up, sliding carefully to the edge of the truck bed, my eyes searching the light blue horizon, the magic from last night still lingering in the air, but fainter now in the light of day.
She groans, following just behind me. “Listen, I’m not saying that wasn’t fun,” she says as she slides past me, hopping down onto the grass, rubbing at her left shoulder. “But sleeping in the back of a truck was not one of our best ideas.”
I laugh and jump down after her, my back letting out a sympathy twang of pain. The hard metal of the truck bed was pretty unforgiving. We collect the pillows and the blankets, shuffling toward the screen door.
“Admit it,” Blake says over the top of her armful of pillows. “How many times did you think about bailing to sleep inside?”
I snort and hold the door open for her. “Only seven times. Maybe eight. You?”
I don’t add that I don’t know if it was because of the hard truck bed, or the fact that it was hard to get any sleep at all with her so close to me.
“Not even once,” she says, stopping me in my tracks. I don’t want to think her words mean more than they do, but I still feel a tiny swell of hope in the pit of my stomach.
I mask it by narrowing my eyes suspiciously at her as we drop the pillows off in the spare room. “Bullshit,” I say, and she breaks.
“Practically every hour on the hour,” she admits as she slides past me into the hallway, close enough to send goose bumps up and down the length of my arm.
* * *
“We must be getting close,” I say to Blake as the smell of manure comes wafting into the truck. As if on cue, the both of us start frantically rolling up our windows to block out the scent.
She nods, glancing at the GPS on her phone. “Under half an hour.”
I press my forehead against the glass and watch the familiar farmlands roll by, my long sigh condensing on the glass of the window.
I almost understand how Kiera must be feeling. I mean, after yesterday, I don’t exactly want to go back to Huckabee either.
It was hard to leave Aunt Lisa’s this morning, the beach and the sun and the possibilities. My return to Huckabee feels like crash-landing into reality in a lot of ways, but even still, the closer and closer we get, I feel… hopeful.
I tuck my leg underneath me as I scroll through my pictures from our trip. I keep scrolling back, through the photos I’ve taken this summer, through every item I’ve ticked off the list, through junior and sophomore year, farther and farther and farther until I find myself face-to-face again with Mom and her tattoo.
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
The words that I couldn’t make sense of then suddenly mean something to me now, the same way they had meant something to her. After everything that had happened, I was so… stuck. So deep in winter, it didn’t seem like I’d find a way out. All I saw was the ways I could break.
But when I’m riding around with Blake, or sitting in the bed of her pickup truck, or tackling a new adventure, I feel it. I feel invincible.
Like she did.
That summer, and raising me, and even on that very last day, her hand in mine, the room filled with absolute calm. The cancer couldn’t even touch her anymore.
And it’s that invincible feeling that nudges me to flip from my mom’s tattoo to the Sycamore Street Tattoos Instagram account. Immediately, I see a cartoon pair of tighty-whities, complete with arms and a face, holding up a sign reading: NATIONAL UNDERWEAR DAY TATTOO SPECIAL!
I mean, who would get a tattoo for National Underwear Day? Except, well…
“Blake,” I say, not wanting this adventure to end just yet. “Let’s do this.” I hold up my phone, and she glances quickly at it.
“National Underwear Day? What even is that?”
“What, you’ve never celebrated?”
“Has anyone?”
I glance down at my phone, the tiny cartoon underwear eyes in the Sycamore Street picture staring back at me. “The tattoo parlor in town always has these discount specials around random national holidays.” I double-tap the photo, giving it a like. “You can get a tattoo for, like, fifty bucks. They’ve got a huge clearance binder and everything.”
“Wait. A clearance binder? A clearance binder of tattoos?” Blake asks. “That’s…”
“That’s Huckabee,” I say with a laugh.
“Valid point.” She nods, pausing to scan the farmlands all around us. “What are you going to get?”
“I have a good idea,” I say,
reaching out to plug Sycamore Street Tattoos into the GPS.
* * *
The inside of the tattoo parlor is surprisingly dark, considering the detail I imagine is required for tattooing.
The walls are lined with brightly colored designs, framed in an attempt at preservation, but the corners are still yellowing with age. Black fold-out chairs sit underneath them, the seats off-kilter. It’s a Russian roulette game to pick the one that won’t collapse underneath you.
I peer past the big counter to the room behind it, where, in front of a faded red curtain, a huge guy with a big gray beard and a red bandanna is in the middle of tattooing an intricate heart on the wrist of Katie Moore, the older sister of a girl in my grade.
You would never think that the best offensive lineman Huckabee High had ever seen could tattoo something so delicate, but Big Eddie is a real artist. And also a total softie. I think he maybe cried the hardest at my mom’s funeral, and they’d only been in homeroom together at school.
“Hey, Big Eddie!” I call out to him.
He glances up, beaming when he sees it’s me, his eyes practically disappearing behind his round cheeks. “Emily! You here for the special?”
I nod, patting the enormous binder sitting on the front counter, pages of designs overflowing out of it. Blake leans over my shoulder, her face lighting up when she sees the faded black Sharpie on the cover: CLEARINSE BINDER.
“Let’s hope he tattoos better than he spells,” she whispers to me.
I elbow her in the side, and she elbows me right back, a big grin appearing on her face.
“You’re not gonna chicken out this time, are ya?” Big Eddie asks, the tattoo gun buzzing again as he leans back over the girl’s wrist.
I grimace, cringing. I look over to see Blake open her mouth to tease me. “Say a word and I will never talk to you again.”
“That’ll be pretty tough considering I’m your ride home,” she says, leaning casually against the counter.
I give her a look before turning my attention back to Eddie. “Can I maybe get something not in the clearance binder?”
“No can do, Em,” he says, his eyes focused on the tattoo he’s doing. “You know the rules of the special.”
My heart sinks, but I refuse to turn back now. Yeah, this is an invincible summer. But it’s mine.
Maybe my tattoo doesn’t have to be the same as Mom’s.
Maybe this should be for me.
Determined, I lean over the pages of the binder. A purple butterfly, a devil smoking a cigarette, a cup of coffee with a halo, a disheveled-looking goat. I have no idea how these were all squeezed together on the same sheet of paper, but all the pages are like that.
No theme. Just tiny, random drawings spread out on a blanket of white.
Blake points at a piece of pizza wearing sunglasses, amused. “Where would you even put a tattoo like that?”
“Oh, that’s a definite butt tattoo,” I say.
“Well, pizza does go straight to your ass.”
We keep looking, the binder slowly passing the halfway point. I feel a small pit of dread deep in my stomach, as I begin to worry that I won’t find anything. Nothing that really means something.
I put my hand into my pocket, fingers wrapping instinctively around the quarter.
Two more pages go by. Then another three.
Nothing.
I turn the page once more, and suddenly there it is, calling out to me. A small sunflower, the deep yellow the same warm color as the sunflowers in my mom’s garden. The same ones my dad lays on my mom’s grave every year.
It’s like a sign from her. Something real and significant in this massive binder of comical images. Lucky.
I push away from the heavy binder, nodding determinedly, the dread releasing its grip on me.
“You picked one?” Blake asks, her eyes scanning the page eagerly.
“Yeah, it’s—”
She grabs my arm, stopping me. “Shh! I want to guess.”
She narrows her eyes but doesn’t pull her hand away, looking between me and the images, her dark eyebrows furrowing as she makes her way down the page.
Finally, she taps the sunflower, peering up at me eagerly. “Sunflowers! Like your mom’s garden.” I nod, a warm feeling filling my chest at her validation.
“I mean, it was a tough call between that and the dancing donut.…”
“Fair,” she says, sliding out of the way as Big Eddie lumbers over with the freshly tattooed girl.
“What’ll it be?” he asks as he reaches under the counter to grab a clipboard.
I point to the sunflower and he nods, giving Blake a quick look before grabbing some paperwork and sliding it into the metal clasp of the clipboard.
“You getting one?” he asks.
Blake shakes her head. “Not today! May come back for the slice of pizza in the sunglasses, though.”
Big Eddie holds out the clipboard to me and lets out a low chuckle. “You’d be surprised the number of people that get that one.” His eyes shift over to meet mine. “Where you getting yours at, Em?”
I tap the bare skin of my forearm, trying to imagine that space no longer smooth and blank. I wonder if it felt weird to her too, if she chose that spot because she’d always see it and be reminded.
He nods to the black fold-out chairs. “Look over all these documents and give them a signature. I’ll get everything ready.”
I manage to pick the structurally safe fold-out chair, but Blake, on the other hand, has the plastic seat buckle almost completely out from under her. She perches unsteadily on the edge of the chair, her eyes wide as she waits for a total collapse.
Her expression cracks me up so much that it takes everything in me to turn my attention back to the clipboard in front of me.
I scan it while Big Eddie rings up Katie, then preps everything for my tattoo. Most of it is pretty self-explanatory, talking about infection and how Big Eddie always sanitizes everything and uses clean needles and all that.
Even though I can literally see him doing it now, a month ago I would have been running for the door after Googling tattoo-related infections, the worst-case scenarios guiding my decision.
Like this past February when I came with Kiera.
There’s no denying the fact that the thoughts still come this time. But, when they do, I think about just how great this tattoo will be. How another list item will be checked off. How my mom must have felt in this exact moment.
The weight of these thoughts far outweighs the worst-case-scenario ones, pushing me forward as I sign on the dotted line, my fear no longer debilitating.
Big Eddie heads back up to take the clipboard, motioning to the faux-leather tattoo chair sitting empty in the middle of the room.
I walk over and slide into it, my legs squeaking noisily against the leather as I perch on the edge. Big Eddie has me put my arm up on the armrest, cleaning it with rubbing alcohol. I’m surprised when he pulls out a razor to shave down the faint brown hair on my right arm, the skin underneath prickling. He puts down a stencil of the sunflower, transferring it onto my arm with water, his thick fingers working carefully as he slowly pulls the paper away.
And suddenly there it is. My soon-to-be tattoo. I exhale slowly, taking it in.
“Look all right?” he asks. “There’s a mirror over there if you want to double-check.”
I push myself up and walk over to the mirror attached to the back of a worn closet door, turning my arm right and left in the reflection. The flower stands out against my pale skin. A lot. My eyes find Blake’s in the reflection, and I hesitate, but she nods with absolute certainty, her arms crossed.
“It’s the perfect thing to get. Your mom would love it.”
I swallow hard on the tears that begin to bubble up at her words and head back to the tattoo chair, putting my arm back up on the armrest.
Big Eddie gets all the ink ready while Blake wheels a stool over, sitting down across from him, and suddenly he’s asking me, “You ready?
”
And that’s when my eyes find the glimmering silver needle.
“Uh,” I manage to get out. Big Eddie stops in his tracks and gives me a once-over.
Am I ready to do this? I think of all the other items on the list. How I don’t regret doing a single one.
Everything my mom had on it has led me to feeling closer to not only her…
But also to the person I actually want to be. And this is a reminder of that.
Blake scoots the stool closer and holds out her hand to me. The same hand I held last night, underneath a blanket of stars. “You can squeeze it when it hurts, okay?” she says. “It’ll be over in no time.”
I pry my fingers off the armrest, placing my sweaty palm in her very dry and very soft hand, her fingers folding safely over mine, the feeling familiar and dizzying and distracting.
“All good?” Big Eddie asks again, the tattoo gun buzzing.
This time I nod.
He presses down, and the pressure goes from nagging to unpleasant to painful. I grimace, squeezing Blake’s hand tighter as the pain swells from an uncomfortable prickle to blindingly overpowering.
Even when my grip tightens hard enough for her fingers to lose color, or the bones to pop straight out, Blake never pulls her hand away. She sticks by me, just like she has this entire summer.
I squeeze my eyes shut and count to five, over and over again in my head, until the buzzing stops, giving way to absolute silence.
I pop one eye open and then the other, peering down to see the result.
It looks different from the one drawn on the page of that thick binder, something about the colors and the shape transforming underneath these dim tattoo parlor lights.
The Lucky List Page 16
