“Lucky?” Blake asks, and the word feels electric.
It’s the word my mom would use.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding, the word feeling right for the first time in a long time, not a burden or a lie anymore. A feeling I thought had completely run out. A feeling I thought I would never get back. “Lucky.”
“That makes it more than a bucket list, then. It’s a lucky list,” Blake says, and I can’t help but like the sound of it.
“God, that’s so my mom,” I say. “She was lucky right up until she got cancer, let me tell you that.”
Blake’s silent, leaving a space for me to continue or to bail.
For once, I don’t bail. I let myself feel everything, let the pain and the hurt come seeping in.
“She was like a walking rabbit’s foot, always jumping into things like the odds were already in her favor. Like they had to be. I remember going to the Huckabee Fall Festival, and she put one raffle ticket in for the grand prize basket. People buy thousands of tickets for that, and she won it with one.” I shake my head, remembering how outraged Jim Donovan had been. “She was always so sure. Even when she started having these bad headaches and dizzy spells, I think she thought she was fine. I think I thought she was fine.”
I picture her lying on the couch, a compress pressed to her head while she waited for the pain pill to kick in.
“That summer, I went to Misty Oasis, where my best friend is now. I knew she was finally going to the doctor while I was away, but I just… wasn’t even worried about it. I didn’t think anything of it.”
Tears spring into my eyes, but I fight to keep going, words I’ve kept hidden inside tumbling out. “I should have been. Stage four. Glioblastoma. I should have pushed her to go to the doctor sooner. I should have stayed by her side every minute. Even after her diagnosis, I thought she would beat the odds, because she always had. I thought she would beat the odds because she thought she would. Up until the last week.”
I take a deep breath, picturing my mom, her body frail, her face sunken in, the way her hand felt in mine on that last day. Bony and weak and fragile. The unfamiliar look on her face, knowing what was coming. Saying it was fine when it wasn’t. We could’ve at least had a fighting chance if she had been more careful. If she had gone to the doctors sooner. “It was like all the bad luck she never had hit at once. It wasn’t one of those small miracles where they say you have weeks to live and you get months, or a year, or a decade. They gave her six months, and she didn’t make it two.” I look over at Blake. “Her luck ran out, Blake. My luck ran out.”
“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
