Meet Me in Paradise by Libby Hubscher

Author:Libby Hubscher [Hubscher, Libby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

It was everything I’d ever wanted, but somehow instead of seeing the rest of the words on that fancy letterhead, all I saw was Sadie, spinning in the rain, in the dark street, and that shard of lightning sizzling down and splitting the Newmans’ ancient oak tree right down the middle. It could have been her. God, she was so reckless. If it hadn’t been for me dragging her inside, who knows what might have happened? I glanced up at the map of the United States that we used to use to mark our adventures as a family when Mom was alive. There were pins all over—Joshua Tree, Chicago, Québec, and all the way up from our town of Sweetwater, just outside Chattanooga, to New York City. I’d planned on having my own map someday, all my adventures marked out like I was conquering the world. But that was before. How was I supposed to be brave without Mom? Now I counted the seconds it took my finger to travel there and looked back at Sadie’s Post-it note. In classic Sadie style, she had used four different colored markers and had filled each bubble letter with a unique pattern—stripes in the P, swirls in the I. I stared at it for a minute until it blurred, then I looked at the letter from Columbia, the distance on the map. Pick me. I picked up the letter from Columbia and dropped it into the trash can. Then I stuck Sadie’s Post-it note to the top corner of my computer screen. I navigated to UT at Chattanooga’s online admissions portal and moved the cursor to the button that read, Accept offer.

Mom and I had talked so many times about my going to Columbia. For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted to follow in her footsteps. Be a writer. Travel the world and do important things. Be fearless. Live on words and adrenaline, just like she did. But she wasn’t here. Where had words and adrenaline got her? Where had they gotten me . . . and Sadie? We were on our own, living lives that looked the same but didn’t fit anymore. And maybe Columbia didn’t fit me anymore either. It was so far away from Sadie—a plane trip far. Who was going to pull her out of the street when it stormed? Who was going to make sure she showed up at school often enough to graduate? I looked over at Sadie’s message one last time. Pick me. I clicked the button. I wasn’t irresponsible or risky. I would make sure that our little family of two would be safe and sound and in one piece. Even if it meant staying here and letting go of my dream of sitting where Mom had once sat and learned, walking the same bustling streets Mom had walked. I let go of my dream of graduating with a degree in English from Columbia. No, I wasn’t going anywhere, ever again.

The following fall I enrolled at UT at C.

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