“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
