Most Likely to Succeed

Note: This story contains mentions of substance abuse, physical violence, terminal illness, mental health, and self-harm.

Sadie Woo was Most Likely to Succeed. 

It wasn’t a guess.  

Lily Lancaster plucked tiny strips of Bluetac and stuck them to the corners of Sadie’s photo. Flipped it over. Pressed it against an A4 page. Admired the way she’d captured Sadie’s serious eyes and sharp chin. She scribbled her prediction beneath the photo in black permanent marker.  

The midday sun had baked the Middleton Prep Yearbook Committee’s room into a fermented fart factory. Lily waited for the room to stop swaying, walked to the rubbish bin, and threw up her cheese and tomato sauce sandwich.  

There was something in her biology that made it impossible to throw up without crying. If anyone had walked in, they’d have seen Lily folded over the filthy bin, her pale face streaked with smudges of falsely advertised waterproof mascara, as she laughed, and laughed, and laughed. 

~ ~ ~  

Lily was fair about it.  

She refused to tell her classmates what she saw. Even though everyone knew she saw something. She had to. You couldn’t take a photo of the future and develop words.  

“At least tell us how it works, Lil?” Daniel Armstrong pouted, handsomely, futilely.  

Lily shrugged. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s a Lancaster thing.” 

It was Amy Jenkins who decided Lily couldn’t tell anyone what she saw. "All magic demands a toll, right? So, like, Lily literally can’t tell us. Or she’ll be cursed.” 

A few classmates wouldn’t have minded if Lily tripped face-first into a wall or fire-walked barefoot across a pavement of Lego. But nobody wanted Lily to be cursed. Curses were vile, volatile beasts unleashed upon only the most bottom-feeding dregs of society. Murderers and rapists, not 17-year-old girls who cheated on math exams.  

So everyone stopped asking how and what, and started waiting for the moment Lily would finally exhibit their future as a succinct class superlative.  

~ ~ ~ 

Lily delivered the rest of the predictions the next morning on an empty stomach.  

Some felt intentionally petty. Others were more mundane. All started with, ‘Most Likely to’ but everyone knew Lily meant, ‘Would Definitely’.  

Daniel Armstrong would peak in University, Amir Shah would die in their hometown, Michael Brady would cheat on his husband, Amy Jenkins would get married three times, Aarav Patel was going to be a tech mastermind, and Katie Prince was going to go viral – but not on the internet. 

One after the next, the predictions were just like Lily: savage, innocuous, captivating.  

Lily leaned back in her chair, spooned blueberry yoghurt into her mouth, and watched her classmates read each other’s fates. “Oh yeah,” Lily said, casually, lifting her spoon, drawing a circle in the air, dripping creamy mess onto carpet that’d seen far worse than blueberry yoghurt. 

The common room silenced. Lily drew it out, making deliberate eye contact with their small graduating class. Her smile was slim. Feline.  

“One of the predictions is a lie.” 

~ ~ ~ 

Sadie wasn’t worried. 

You didn’t get valedictorian, an award from the Premier, and your first premature grey hair without being Most Likely to Succeed.  

But. 

Did her classmates collectively concur that Sadie deserved her superior superlative? Did they understand now why she’d sacrificed attending Fern’s 16th birthday party – the one where Chris Xiao lost his virginity to that soccer player from Cranberry Public, and Ashley Ibrahim paid Michael B’s big brother 30 bucks for dried tea leaves because she thought it was weed – so she could study the molecular anatomy of the Drosophila melanogaster? Did they appreciate how difficult it’d been to get an A+ in Mr. Smith’s English extension class when he was a raging misogynist? Why she was 17 and a half years old and had never been kissed? 

She’d earned that success.  

Foretold or not.  

~ ~ ~ 

Michael Brady didn’t show up to graduation.  

He’d tried to hide his yearbook from his parents. “There was an ecological conflict with the Tasmanian lumber yards. They’re on strike,” He’d offered as a somewhat believable explanation for a yearbook paper crisis. 

But his parents had found it, unsigned, stuffed between his mattress and cracked bed slats like a contraband Playboy magazine. Except, his father thought, at least that he would’ve understood.  

Because they didn’t. Understand.  

“Is this a typo?” Michael’s proudly Christian mother had asked, permed bob squirming like cooked noodles as she tilted her head, as though seeing the page from a different angle would impart a new meaning.  

Michael Brady had taken the biggest breath of his life and said, “No. No, it isn’t.” 

And just like that, they understood.  

Eventually, they accepted it. Accepted him. But for a long time after that day in the common room, Michael fell asleep whispering a prayer that maybe, just maybe, Lily Lancaster would be cursed.  

~ ~ ~ 

Katie Price did, in fact, contract chlamydia that summer.  

“It’s gotta be cosmic payback,” Amy Jenkins declared, peering at the grainy photo of Lily’s skanky ex, Matt Wilde, locked in a spicy embrace with Katie.  

She passed the phone back to Dan and took a sip of his warm beer. She pretended not to notice when he wiped the rim of the bottle on his t-shirt before chugging from it again.  

“Nah, I reckon this just means Matt gave Lily the clap first,” Aarav snickered. 

Amy had laughed along, but mentally, she was ticking off another prediction. She reached for the beer again, hungry eyes searching the crowd at Dan’s house party. 

How many predictions were left to prove? ‘Bout half? 

After Amy's parents separated when she was eight – Mum got custody; Dad got their crappy fibro holiday home on the coast - she’d decided marriage was a scam. Not even in, like, an alternate dimension could she imagine getting married once, let alone three times.  

She eyed Dan, appreciating the blocky angles of his face. 

What a beautiful bloody pity. 

~ ~ ~ 

Lily had felt her Gift abandon her after the final prediction. 

It had hollowed her, scraping at her insides, marking her with welts of wanting. 

She filled the emptiness with strong liquor and stronger men. Sometimes women. Anything, really, that made her feel as special as she’d been that morning, lounging in her cold plastic throne, sentencing her captivated kingdom. 

Lily had taken hundreds of thousands of photos since that day. But all she ever saw were artful compositions with creative lighting and interesting symmetry. She ground her canine teeth flat while sleeping, locked her jaw so tight the dentist had to inject a relaxant to make her let go. 

Eventually, she gave up photography, the way her Gift had given up on her, started afresh under the name ‘Summer Dae’, and tried to forget what it felt like to be powerful. 

~ ~ ~ 

Amir Shah couldn’t sleep. 

Dark circles underlined bloodshot eyes. He grew used to operating the heavy machinery of his body within a disorienting dense fog. 

At first, he’d tried asking Lily. He’d tried begging Lily. “Please. Tell me how it happens. Tell me when it happens.” 

But ever since he’d called her family irrelevant in the eighth grade, he’d been on her shit list. Still, he never considered that she’d lied. Everyone died. Besides, there’d been something in her eyes when she’d looked at him that day. Sympathy, possibly. Disgust, probably. 

How. When. How. When. 

Amir raked his nails over his arms, carving train tracks of desperation into his dry skin. 

~ ~ ~ 

Amy Jenkins met her first husband at a Blink-182 concert. 

He had three tattoos, five piercings, and her complete heart in the calloused palm of his hand before intermission. 

Some people, she realised, blow into your life like a gale, and upend everything, forever. 

She didn’t get out of bed for 48 days after he died. 

~ ~ ~ 

Daniel Armstrong tried very hard to prove Lily wrong. 

Or to be fairer, he tried very hard not to try at uni. His logic was simple: If he effed everything up now, he couldn’t peak, right? 

So, he skipped classes, scraped by on C-’s, barely trained for footy, ate pizza before games, and basically did his very best to be completely mediocre. 

He succeeded. 

Uni was alright, but it wasn’t the backslapping, female fan-clubbed championship run that everyone assumed it’d be for him.

When Daniel finally graduated, he felt lightened by liberation. 

Then he got cancer. 

~ ~ ~ 

Amir decided to take care of himself first. 

That’s what you were meant to do in an emergency. And this was definitely an emergency. 

“Amir, angel, please. We need you. Your father needs you.” His mother had cried during their last Facetime call. 

Amir had nodded, agreed, cried, too. Seeing his stern father so small and fragile in that hospital bed had broken him a little. 

But Amir couldn’t go home – not until he knew. 

How. When. 

And the only person in the world that knew was Lily Lancaster. 

~ ~ ~ 

Lily hadn’t just fallen on hard times; she’d crash landed into a total existential dumpster fire. 

Amir found her, greasy-haired and strung out, in a seedy caravan park in rural Victoria. At first, Lily had been embarrassed. Then, she’d been inspired. 

If Amir was so desperate to cough up an eyeball-bleeding amount of cash just to find out more details about his future, maybe others would, too. 

Lily saw her golden parachute and pulled the string. 

~ ~ ~ 

Lily sent the texts in two batches. 

The first batch were easy wins. She wasn’t surprised they all fell at her feet again. She was only mad she hadn’t thought of it sooner.

Lily moved out of the caravan park and purchased a penthouse in Melbourne. She hired an assistant to make sure her pantry was always packed with Fruit Loops and her lolly jar had a mix of M&M’s and E’s, and despite the persistent exhaustion plaguing her, felt better than she had in over a decade. 

~ ~ ~ 

Sadie received her text at 2.05am on a Sunday morning. 

She lifted her reading glasses off the bedside table and squinted at her phone, the blurry letters jumbling in her sleep-smudged eyes.

Unknown number: Your prediction was the lie. 

It took Sadie a moment to understand. Had she made a mistake at work? No, not possible. So, what – oh. Oh.  

Sadie: Lily? 

Unknown number: Ofc, dumbass. 

Unknown number: Do u want to know the truth? 

Sadie didn’t know if she believed her. Still, the lure was too strong. Who didn’t want to learn more about their future? 

The next text from Lily was a bank account, and a series of numbers Sadie had assumed was a mistyped phone number, then realised was a dollar amount. 

~ ~ ~ 

Everyone ended up purchasing more predictions. 

Well, except for Daniel Armstrong, may he rest in peace, Aarav Patel, who had changed his number three times, and Amir Shah, who had left the Middleton Prep group chat a few years after Lily had contacted them all again. Nobody had seen or heard from him since. 

They had heard and seen from Lily again, though. 

The revised predictions received mixed reviews. For some, having the details of the scene Lily had foreseen gave them closure. Context. For others, it presented a challenge they were eager to disprove. For most, it was simply the next chapter in the Lily Lancaster drama. 

Nobody talked about the possibility of a curse anymore, even though they all noticed the wheezing cough that rattled Lily’s chest during phone calls, the uncharacteristic typos in her text messages, and the sunken eyes that peered out at them in video calls. 

They were in too deep now. 

~ ~ ~ 

Lily puffed, extinguishing the candle in one fast exhalation. The smoke spiralled, undulating playfully, as hardening wax wept creamy tears over her 32nd birthday cake. 

She’d taken a photo of herself yesterday. The short-lived spark that had shaken her alive when she was 17 had returned for a beautiful, aching, fleeting second. 

Lily had two days left to live. 

~ ~ ~ 

Aarav Patel thought Lily Lancaster was an attention-seeking wannabee skating on the worn-out infamy of her enchanted ancestors. 

These days, that family divination was as diluted as a drop of piss in the ocean. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise Aarav if all Lily's predictions were lies. Pathetic, really, the way people clung to fame like a life raft. 

So, no, he didn’t think about Lily’s strange yellow eyes, or the way there were always dust bunnies dancing in the morning light of the common room, or anything else from high school, not for years after that. Not when he had an app idea that his gut told him was worth exploring. Not when, high on coke and youth, he’d coded the entire thing in one night. Not even when his start-up had been bought by Microsoft and Aarav had to double check with his partner whether the numbers on the offer meant millions or billions.  

It wasn’t until that airhead Amy Jenkins messaged him on Facebook asking, “Did u hear about Lily???” that he remembered the stupid red bow Lily had always worn in her overbleached white hair, how she’d always smelled like synthetic rose soap, and how she’d known. 

She’d known. 

~ ~ ~ 

Dr. Sadie Woo owned a McMansion worth more than the combined lifetime income of all her peers at Middleton Prep. 

She drove a flashy Mercedes Benz, paid an obscene monthly fee for a time-share yacht to be permanently moored in glitzy Sydney Harbour, and had a full-time nanny raising two children primed to become valedictorians. More importantly, at least to Sadie, there wasn’t a medical professional in Australia that didn’t respect her name. 

Sadie was officially the most successful person she knew. 

And Lily Lancaster was dead. 

The Middleton Prep group chat were conflicted on whether it was drug abuse or the curse that caught up with her. 

It didn’t matter, she supposed. In the end, Lily had been right, about everything. 

Sadie looked around the monument that was meant to be a home. Her home. It was empty. The kids were at school, probably bullying or biting some other parent’s poor children, her husband was at work, likely with his assistant on her knees beneath his desk, and Sadie was alone in a life she’d built brick by brick without wondering if it was even what she wanted. 

This wasn’t success. 

Sadie laughed, and laughed, and laughed.