* * *
Now that I had some proof that the letter was really lucky, I didn’t want to waste any time or overlook any chances. Time to take Ms. Engel’s advice and buy some raffle tickets.
Mom was working at the kitchen table when I came home that afternoon wearing my best I-want-something smile. She didn’t even have to look up at me to know that I was scheming. “What do you want?” she asked.
“Mom, awesome Mom, most legit Mom, will you please buy me some scratch-off lottery tickets?”
Two years ago, Aunt Jenny let me use the edge of a dime to scratch the silver coating off her lottery ticket, and I fell in love with the idea of winning free money. I wanted my own scratch-offs, but I couldn’t buy them for myself, because it’s gambling, and I was under 18. So I had to rely on sympathetic adults. I showed Mom the cash and prayed that she was feeling sympathetic.
She was not. “No more scratch-offs! Grandma gave you all that money for your twelfth birthday, and you spent the whole thing on the lottery. I don’t even know how you managed that.”
I’d given my birthday money from Grandma to Aunt Jenny so she could buy some scratch-offs for me. I got $20 worth of tickets, thinking that at least one of them had to be lucky. I’d sat down at our table and scratched and scratched, but all I got was a pile of silver coating.
“That was almost a year ago! Please? Even just one? It’s important.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “What’s so important? You owe money to your bookie? You need to bail somebody out of prison?”
I tried not to roll my eyes in frustration. “Okay, it’s not important. I just … I have a lucky feeling.”
Mom debated it silently for a minute, then said, “All right. You promise to walk Penguin the next three nights after dinner, and I’ll get you one ticket.”
Penguin always gets excited at his name. I was just as excited. “Yes yes yes,” I agreed, handing her the money, and Penguin and I rolled around on the floor for the ninety-nine hours it took for Mom to get her shoes on, go to the bodega on the corner, and return with a scratch ticket.
“Here you go,” she said, handing it to me. “Don’t ask me for another for at least six months.”
“Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you,” I said, already scratching at the silver.
The game was to scratch off the squares and hope to find matching numbers. If I uncovered a match, I could win as little as one dollar and as much as ten thousand. I started scratching, and right away I had a match.
This was really good luck.
Mom laughed in surprise. “You won!”
But how much did I win? The amount was hidden under the silver coating. I couldn’t scratch fast enough. I knew it would tell me that I’d won the ten thousand dollars.
I won ten bucks.
I was confused, and a little let down. I thought my good luck meant I’d win the big jackpot. I mean, ten bucks is great and all, but not when you expect ten thousand.
Mom saw the look on my face and stared at me strangely. “You just won! You should be dancing with joy!”
Oh, right. I had to act normal so I wouldn’t give away the secret to Mom the Human Person. “Yeah! Woo!” I smiled wide and pumped my fist. “Lucky me.”
She relaxed. Now I was acting like the kid she knew. “I’ll cash it in for you tomorrow. But that’s it! I know it feels great to win, but you’re not going to win every time. And the last thing I need is a twelve-year-old with a gambling problem.”
I nodded and hugged her. “Thanks, Moop.” Then I went back to my room.
* * *
As Week 1 wore into Week 2, I kept noticing how good luck led to more good luck: getting the part in the play led to new friends, which led to focusing less on old friends. We cast members bonded pretty hard—hanging out in the morning, sitting together at lunch, group-texting each other all the time. Rehearsals were so much fun, we didn’t want to leave the auditorium when we were done, which was how some of us got in the habit of stopping by Brooke’s afterward to keep our (usually ridiculous) conversation going a while longer.
I had so many new friends, Mom had to keep making me start stories over: “Wait, which one is Brooke again? And who’s Geneva?”
I showed her a picture on my phone, taken the day before. “Brooke’s the one holding the snake. She’s best friends with Harrison—he’s been in love with her forever. The whole reason he’s stage-managing the show is so he can be around her during rehearsals without having to be in the play. Geneva’s the one with the braids and she’s in love with Harrison, so this morning she was telling me how she was having a bunch of people over on Friday … Oh, can I hang out at Geneva’s on Friday after school? We don’t have rehearsal. So she’s thinking about telling him then, but I said she should talk to Brooke first, because Brooke would know if Harrison likes her or not…”
Yeah, I didn’t blame Mom for being confused. It was a complicated set of relationships. I was still puzzling them out myself.
Lewis hung out with the rest of the cast a little bit, but he still sat with Tyler and Dakota at lunch. They didn’t appreciate his new after-school interests. The one and only time Lewis started walking toward the cast table at lunch, Tyler yelled out, “Where you going, Lew-zer?” And Lewis instantly turned and went to his usual seat.
I was starting to suspect that Lewis was almost not awful, as long as he was away from his awful friends.
* * *
On Lucky Day 9, Lewis and I were backstage together at rehearsal while Ms. Engel and Melanie discussed the blocking for the next scene, and I saw him fiddling with some loose script pages, folding and tearing them randomly. But when he finished folding, I saw it wasn’t random at all. He’d made an origami frog.
I forgot that Lewis used to do origami. Back in the third grade, he would fold any piece of paper he could grab, even if it was your language arts worksheet. I remember untwisting a spelling quiz of mine after he’d made it into a rose and presented it to me with pride. “I can’t believe you undid it,” he sulked, even though I had to so I could see which words I misspelled. He never made an origami rose for me again.
Lewis saw me notice the frog in his hand, and he looked mortified. He clenched his fist and squished the frog into a ball, then threw it on the floor.
I cringed. “Why did you—” I started to ask, but he turned and walked away.
Okay, here’s a thing about me: I have a really hard time with inanimate objects that are shaped like animals and/or have faces. I am aware that, in reality, a teddy bear is not alive and doesn’t have feelings, because it’s basically a pillow with googly eyes glued on it. I don’t feel guilty about throwing my pillow on the floor, so why do I have to pick up the teddy bear if it falls on the floor and place it carefully back on its spot on my bed and apologize to it in my mind? (Not that I have a teddy bear on my bed or anything.) People can throw all the science in the world at me, and I will agree with them all day long: Stuffed animals are not alive. These are facts. But I’m still going to apologize to the bear.
So I felt bad for the poor squished frog on the floor. I picked it up and tried to uncrumple it. I noticed that it was made out of a script page from Act III, where Julian helps Nadine leave their small town because he wants her to pursue her dreams, even though it means she is leaving him. He’s saying goodbye to her at the bus station.
NADINE
Come with me.
JULIAN
I can’t.
NADINE
You keep telling me I can leave——why can’t you?
JULIAN
I’m not as brave as you.
I’m not as brave as you. This line was circled a few times in messy black ink.
We were encouraged by Ms. Engel to take notes on our scripts. We wrote down notes on the blocking (upstage left), the directions we received (go louder here, then pause), and any ideas we might have that would bring us “closer to the truth of the character” (Nadine = angry at mom for dying).
/> I’m not as brave as you. I wondered what made Lewis circle that one line. Lewis wasn’t a coward. He talked a lot of trash about people, but he did it right to their faces, even if they were bigger than him. And he never backed down, no matter what punishment he faced. He was obnoxious and stubborn and infuriating at times, but he was brave about it.
I refolded the frog along its creases as best I could and put it carefully in my backpack. I reassured it in my mind: You’re safe now, little frog.
* * *
I was coming home after rehearsal the next day when I saw Fran the Super in front of the building, about to light a cigarette. Fran smokes all the time, so her breath smells like a dirty ashtray and her fingers are brown and yellow from the tar. It’s fairly disgusting. Other than that, she’s cool.
“Hey, kid.”
“Hey.”
Then I had a thought. Maybe Fran knew something about the letter. Even if she wasn’t the person who left it, she might have seen or heard something that could lead to the person who did.
“Um,” I said, thinking quickly. “Mom said to tell you, the towel rack in the bathroom is loose.”
“Well, I was gonna kill myself slowly with this thing.” She tucked the unlit cigarette back into the pack and shoved it in her pocket. “But let’s get a look at that towel rack.”
She tromped up the stairs in her work boots, little clouds of dust coming off her with every step. I followed behind, trying not to inhale too deeply.
The towel rack truly was loose, not that Mom or I cared. Fran looked at it, then back at me. “That’s it? You just gotta tighten these two nuts here. Where’s your wrench?”
This was going to be a quick job. I had to find a way to bring up the letter. I shrugged, stalling for time.
Fran went into the kitchen and opened a few drawers, looking for the tool she needed. “Find the wrench,” she muttered to herself. “Then I can smoke this Lucky.”
THAT WORD!
“What did you say?” I asked.
Fran found the wrench. She flipped it in the air and caught it smoothly by its handle. “Said this’ll take two seconds, then I’m gonna smoke.”
“I thought you said something about luck.”
Fran applied her magic to the towel rack. Somehow, though she was not working on the plumbing, her plumber’s butt managed to peek out the back of her pants. Maybe it happened automatically every time she entered a bathroom.
“That’s my brand,” she explained. She pulled the pack from her pocket to show me. “Lucky Strikes.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. It was just a coincidence.
“Your mom’s friend used to nag me. ‘There’s no such thing as a lucky cigarette. Every cigarette is bad luck.’”
Mom’s friend. I felt a zing! run through my whole body. Out of nowhere, Fran had brought up the subject of Aunt Jenny. Maybe it wasn’t coincidence after all.
“Aunt Jenny,” I said. “She talked a lot about luck. Like, in horoscopes, how certain days were ‘more favorable’ than others…”
“Yeah, yeah.” Fran was finished, but she leaned back against the wall with a smile on her face, obviously thinking of Aunt Jenny. “I don’t believe that garbage about horoscopes or fortune-telling or hanging a horseshoe right-side up for luck.”
“You don’t?”
“Nah. The way I see it, you’re either lucky or you’re not. It’s got nothing to do with the planets. It doesn’t go up and down, like the stock market. You’re born with it. You born starving in Siberia? You got bad luck. You born with bad health? Also bad luck. The rest of us? We got it good. If you’re not struggling to survive, you got it good. End of story.”
I had no idea Fran was such a philosopher. I was trying to make sense of what she was saying when she spoke again.
“Jenny…” Fran cleared her throat a little.
I couldn’t tell if she was sad from saying Aunt Jenny’s name or if she just had gunk in her throat.
“Jenny had good luck. She had a happy life. A lot of friends. It ended too soon.”
We were quiet. Fran cleared her throat again. She took out a cigarette and looked at it like she wished Aunt Jenny were there to nag her about it.
Then she sighed. “Might as well join her.”
* * *
When Mom got back from her meeting a half hour later, she was delighted with the new, stable towel rack. “I didn’t even realize how much it was annoying me until you got it fixed.”
I had learned a few things from my time with Fran: (1) A wrench is used for tightening bolts. (2) Fran did not believe in any “garbage” about horoscopes, fortunes, or luck. Which meant that (3) Fran had not written the letter.
Six
The following day, someone from Mom’s volunteer group at the library called to tell her that Herbie died. Bad luck, especially for Herbie.
Mom was sad but not surprised. “Well,” she said, sighing as she told me the news, “he was eighty-six. And from all the stories he told me, it sounded like he had a great life. And he went quickly, in his sleep, after watching the Yankees win, so I know he was happy.”
Mom and I were invited to the memorial service. I didn’t want to go. I went to Aunt Jenny’s memorial service, and that was enough memorial services for the rest of my life. I spent the whole time furious—after their tearful speeches, Derek and Brik and a lot of Aunt Jenny’s best friends were laughing and telling jokes and talking to each other about things that had nothing to do with Aunt Jenny. It wasn’t supposed to be a party.
* * *
So Mom attended Herbie’s memorial alone. Afterward, she came home with a strange look on her face.
“Herbie left me some stuff,” she said, puzzled.
My ears perked up, just like Penguin’s do. “What kind of stuff? Where is it?”
“A couple of boxes. They’re at his apartment uptown. His grandnephew Darren from North Carolina is staying there, packing up and sorting everything out. He says we can go to the apartment this weekend and pick up … whatever it is.”
A couple of boxes? Was that a bunch of boxes or a few boxes? “How many? And what’s in the boxes?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Darren just said some boxes. He doesn’t even know what’s in them. He said they’re heavy, though, so it’s probably books.”
“Or gold bullion,” I said optimistically. Who knew? Maybe one of the boxes was full of money. Then Herbie’s death would be good luck. Not for Herbie, of course. I didn’t love the idea of someone’s death bringing good luck to me. Then again, I didn’t kill Herbie.
* * *
The next day, we rode the train up to Herbie’s apartment in Harlem. We spent the trip talking about the boxes.
“What would be the least convenient kind of box?” asked Mom. “Because I’m sure that’s what they’ll turn out to be.”
“A box made of marble?” I suggested.
“A box made of lead?”
“A box made of some outer-space material where one particle of it weighs a thousand pounds?”
“A box made out of a million boxes?”
We went on like this all the way to 125th Street, suggesting boxes made out of cooked spaghetti, butterfly wings, fine crystal, air. We mimed handing each other air boxes.
“Boxes made out of used diapers,” I said.
“He better not have left me any boxes of adult diapers,” Mom said.
Herbie’s “apartment” turned out to be a whole brownstone building, four floors and a small backyard. There was a moving/storage truck parked outside. A short guy was trying to carry a table down the stairs, but the table was too big and heavy for him alone. Mom ran up and grabbed the other end of the table, and they carried it down cautiously, step by step.
“Thanks,” the guy said, mopping his face with his T-shirt. “My great-uncle only bought furniture made of lead.”
I shot a look at Mom—we were just joking about the boxes being lead!—but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the m
ad abdominals the guy exposed while wiping his face.
“Hey, Darren, this is my daughter, Emma. Emma, this is Darren, Herbie’s grandnephew. We met at the memorial service yesterday, and he told me about the boxes Herbie left for you and me.”
Darren turned to me. “So you’re the one who wound up with the phone.”
I hoped he wasn’t mad at me because Herbie gave away his expensive gift.
But he smiled and said, “I’m glad it went to someone who could operate it.”
It was obvious that Darren was overwhelmed with getting everything down to the truck, so we got out of the way. Mom and I went into the near-empty building and started looking at all the boxes. There were at least twenty of them, and they were all unmarked. Since we couldn’t tell which ones were ours, we sat down on a window seat and waited for Darren to be done.
But that was going to take a while. In between lugging furniture and dealing with the guys in the truck, his phone kept ringing. As soon as the truck pulled away, we heard him call someone back.
“Pauline,” he said. He was outside on the stoop, but the windows were open, and we could hear him clearly. “Stop it. I told you, I’m not having this talk until I get home. Pauline … Pauline!”
Mom smirked at me and I smirked back. People with girlfriends or boyfriends were always arguing on the phone.
“Yes,” he shouted. “I did tell you how long I was going to be away, when I told you I DIDN’T KNOW HOW LONG I WAS GOING TO BE AWAY!”
Mom and I were both highly amused. I stifled a laugh, which turned into a snort.
“I’m hanging up now. And I’m turning off my phone for the rest of the day.”
Darren came back inside the house, and we tried to pretend we hadn’t been listening. Our faces must have told him otherwise.
“Uh, that was a business thing,” he said, embarrassed. “Let me get you some water. All I have are plastic cups—everything else is packed.”
Darren got us cups of water from the kitchen and rejoined us in the bare living room. We took our cups and thanked him.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you at the memorial,” he said to Mom, “but Uncle Herb talked about you a lot. He called you Katie, Katie, the Computer Lady.”
Lucky Little Things Page 5