The Goodwill.
Skidding into the parking lot, I throw my bike down and run up the concrete steps. The automatic doors don’t open fast enough, so I force my way in through the gap, desperate to get inside.
The store blurs around me. Colors jump out at me underneath the fluorescent lights.
I push through the shirts, stripes and polka dots and solid colors, trying to find a part of her in the middle of it all. The old jeans she would always wear to do housework in and prune her garden. The maroon dress she wore one Christmas, with the tie around the middle.
Wait. Had it been green? Suddenly, I can’t even picture it.
I frantically attack another rack, the hangers clattering noisily against one another as I move down the row, pausing on a button-down, a floral maxi, a wool cardigan, none of them feeling right.
Was this hers? Did she wear this?
I can’t even tell. I can’t even remember. And just like that, my worst fears have come true. List or no list, I feel her slip away from me.
I squeeze my eyes shut, my chest heaving as a hopeless feeling settles into my bones, aching and staggering and disorienting.
Weakly, I stumble out the front door, a sob escaping my lips as I clutch at the metal railing, making my way down the stairs. Looking up, my eyes find my dad’s. He’s standing in the parking lot, confusion painted across his face.
The second I see him, the wave of anger resurfaces, the pressure of it making my head pound.
“Emily,” he says, stepping toward me.
“How could you?” I shout at him, pushing at his arms as they try to hold me, thrashing out of his grip. “How could you do that? Why are you so obsessed with some fresh start? How could you be fine with throwing out your old life and just forgetting her?”
“Em, they’re just things. I’m not—”
“They’re not just things!” I shout. I cough as I gasp for breath, tears streaming down my face. “They’re parts of her!”
He grabs ahold of me, and this time I collapse into his arms, my body giving way. He holds me tight as I cry, my tears staining his shirt, my stomach aching as I bawl.
“You’re a part of her, Emily. I’m a part of her. Not any of that stuff,” he whispers. “I could never forget her. Ever. I’m close to her every minute I’m with you. And I want a new start because I know your mom wanted that for you. For both of us.”
I think about the past three years and how frozen I’ve been. Never taking chances. Never trying my luck. Always afraid of the worst-case scenarios. Almost like I could have stopped it from happening, like I could have stopped her from getting sick, if I had just stayed home.
The list started that way too. I thought I knew where it was leading me, back to the person I was before it all. Back to her.
But then… I think of Blake holding out the yearbook to me, the list falling from it. Her smile in the kitchen when she suggested I actually do it. How she was with me every step of the way, her face stitched into every memory, the list pressing play on my life, which has been paused for so long.
And then it hits me.
The list wasn’t leading me to Mom. It wasn’t leading me to Matt.
It was leading me forward. It was leading me to her.
I can’t keep Mom here with clothes and secrets and things I never got to say. If she’s really with me, like I felt all summer long, then I have to trust that she knows. That she can hear my feelings now. That she’d understand even if she can’t tell me.
The sky darkens around us as my tears finally dry out. My chest is hiccuping as it slowly stops. I sniff and my dad tightens his grip on me, holding me close, not running away to work or hiding behind pancakes, a barrier between us broken.
“I’ve got you, Em,” he says. “I’ve always got you.”
29
The second I walk into Nina’s the next day, Kiera storms off to the back room, leaving me standing in the doorway watching her go. I catch Nina peering at us from the kitchen, her brow furrowed in concern. Paul is just behind the counter, his pen frozen midair.
“Kiera!” I call, following after her. I reach out and stop the door from slamming in my face, slipping inside and closing it behind me.
She crosses her arms and turns around to look at me. “What?”
We both stare at each other for a long moment, the cracks in our friendship that we’ve ignored for so long suddenly a cavern between us.
“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to cross the divide. “I’m sorry about what I said.”
“Honestly, it was a bit of a welcome relief. You’re always shutting me out and refusing to open up,” she says, glowering across the room at me. “It was nice to actually hear what you thought for once.”
I nod, thinking about that little box that I kept myself in. How it impacted everything in my life. My relationship with Matt. My friendship with Kiera.
“I think I just felt like you were so obsessed with fixing everything so we could have this shiny, wonderful senior year, that you just… stopped seeing me completely.”
“Well, you wouldn’t let me see you, Em,” she says, understandably frustrated. “I mean, what is going on? I thought this is what you wanted! I mean, our plan worked, didn’t it?”
“It worked,” I say as I take a deep breath. “But I… I don’t think it was the right plan.”
Kiera is silent, leaving me a space to
