“You’re telling me you don’t do anything? Like… with your friends?” Blake asks, surprised.
Realizing we burned through the shoes pretty quickly, I look away and step onto a stool to get started on the top shelf of stuff. Blankets, a few hats and scarves, a couple of odds and ends. Things I can part with. She picks up the other box, catching the items I toss in her direction.
“Well, my best friend goes to this sleepaway camp in the middle of absolute nowhere for half the summer,” I say, throwing a pair of gloves before picking up an Eagles hat my dad bought for my mom during treatment. I cringe and chuck it to Blake, eager to be rid of the painful memories it brings up.
I don’t add the fact that, besides Kiera, none of my friends wants to hang out with me right now. If Blake finds out the whole story, I doubt she’s going to be making impromptu visits to Nina’s. “So, aside from a phone call every Sunday and the occasional letter in the mail, I don’t really have anything planned until she gets back.”
I grab a rolled-up fleece blanket, stopping short when I come face-to-face with a cardboard box shoved into the very corner of the closet. Printed in dark Sharpie on the side of the box is HIGH SCHOOL MEMORIES, a small heart drawn next to the words.
I’ve never seen this box before.
I don’t know how. I used to spend nearly every morning in here with her, helping her pick the perfect outfit for the day. But really, more than outfit picking, it was the time it was just the two of us, talking about the latest gossip at school, or getting advice about whatever drama was bubbling up in my friend group.
I’ve been in this closet hundreds of times since, my eyes looking over every inch of the space for pieces of her.
But I never found this one.
I can feel my heart pounding as I reach up, stretching as much as I possibly can, my fingertips clawing at the edges of the cardboard. No matter how hard I stretch though, I’m not even close to getting it down. Even with the small stool, which starts wobbling dangerously underneath me.
“Here,” Blake says as she puts the donation box down. I step off the stool and she slides past me, a wave of that warm-sunshine, blue-ocean smell mixing with Mom’s lilac.
I rub my arm, watching as she reaches up and smoothly pulls the box down like I didn’t just dislocate my elbow trying to get it.
She doesn’t tease me though, just turns and carefully holds it out to me, like she can sense the importance.
I walk out of the closet in a daze, the worn cardboard corners slowly wilting open from age as I place the box on the ground. I slide onto my knees as I begin to pull out the contents hidden inside. Blake sits down on the opposite side of the box, her hands crossed in her lap, her honey-brown eyes wide as my mom’s high school years pool on the ground in front of us.
The first few things are what I expect them to be. Royal-blue varsity letters for cheerleading and soccer. Medals from her statewide competitions, earned her sophomore and junior years. A soccer T-shirt with HUCKABEE HIGH stamped across the front. A picture of her with a group of her soccer besties in their matching, brightly colored late-nineties tracksuits.
I stare at the picture for a long moment, recognizing Nina and Donna Taylor’s sister, Samantha.
I put it down and move on to the rest of the box, my hands eagerly wrapping around a manila envelope.
“Can I?” Blake asks as she reaches out for the soccer-team photo I put down.
“Sure.” She picks it up, her eyes widening as she looks at it. “Wow. You do look just like your mom.”
“Yeah,” I say, prickling slightly.
“Do you hate it?”
She’s the first person to ever ask that. I jerk my head up to look at her, and our eyes meet as she peers at me from over the photo.
“No,” I say, but then I hesitate. “It just… makes me feel like a walking memorial card.” I unfold the metal prongs of the envelope, trying to keep my hands busy.
A small line forms in between Blake’s eyebrows as she processes my comment. “It’s kind of cool, though, isn’t it? That people see her in you. That you keep her memory alive without even trying.”
I’ve never thought about it like that.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding, my eyes falling to the picture in her hands, my mom’s face staring back at me. “I guess it is.”
I pull the envelope open and find it’s full of certificates, none of them surprising. Honor Roll, Perfect Attendance, Most Likely to Be President.
Crazy to think that she barely lived long enough to be eligible to run for president.
Blake whistles as I sift through them all. “Jeez. What didn’t your mom do? I’m surprised someone like that was hanging out with my high school dropout of a dad.”
I laugh, my wrist honestly aching from the weight of all these awards. “Well, it was our dads who put a stop to all this. Look.…” I fan out the papers in my hands. “Nothing after her junior year.”
“What’d she do instead?” Blake asks, reaching out to pluck a Hall Monitor certificate from the bunch.
“Started actually living the life she wanted to, I guess. Started doing the things she always wanted to do, instead of trying to be president of every club on campus and having panic attacks over AP English presentations,” I say, thinking back to what my mom had told me. “She said after she started hanging out with our dads, she realized what she thought was living really
