The Higher Power of Lucky

by Susan Patron

  Brigitte slammed closed the lid of her computer with one hand and stood up, blocking Lucky’s view of the booklet. “Lucky, I cannot think when you talk so much bêtises…silly stuff.” Brigitte yanked a ragged wire-mesh fly-swatter from a peg and slapped it hard against the table edge. A fly took off from the spot and circled overhead. Brigitte tried to swat it in flight. “That stupid fly,” she said. “She always escapes!” She clapped the swatter back on its wall hook.

  Thinking that a real mother would never be so mean and that a real mother would share all her secrets, especially the secret of her mysterious lessons and the secret of her passport, Lucky took the flyswatter, waited until the fly landed, tapped it lightly, and scooped it up, fluttering. She opened the screen door and shook the fly off into the hot night.

  Hooking the swatter back on its peg, Lucky said in a dignified voice, “I’m going to bed now. And by the way, a fly is ‘it,’ not ‘she.’”

  “Pfff,” said Brigitte, and shrugged, turning back to her laptop. “Lucky, I cannot stop following this lesson right now. Go to bed. I check you later. Bisous.”

  “Pfff,” said Lucky, and got a look at the booklet over Brigitte’s shoulder. The top part was in French, so Lucky skipped down, where underneath were the words:

  Certified Course in Restaurant Management and Administration with Diploma from the Culinary Institute of France in Paris

  That was how Lucky learned for sure why Brigitte was planning to return home. She was getting an online diploma from some French school in running a restaurant. This explained all those times Brigitte talked about how much she wished she had a job. All along Brigitte had been telling Lucky that what she really wanted was to go back to France and run a restaurant.

  Lucky sat on her bed thinking this over. Some tears came out of her eyes, and she wished Brigitte would come—not so she could sit on her lap and let herself be hugged, but so that Brigitte could see what a sad and abandoned child she was, an orphan whose Guardian was too busy for hugging. As soon as she began imagining the shocked and concerned look on Brigitte’s face if Brigitte were to see her crying, Lucky cried some more. HMS Beagle, who slept on the round rug beside the bed, came to lay her head on Lucky’s pillow.

  “Poor, poor HMS Beagle,” Lucky whispered. “When Brigitte goes back to France you will have to go live with Short Sammy, or with Miles and his grandma. I doubt the orphanage in L.A. will admit dogs.”

  Sadly, lonesomely, she got into her hot bed, kicking the sheet away.

  Lucky lay on her back, her pillow feeling as hot as if it had been baked in the oven. She decided to run away very soon. If she ran away, Brigitte would have to call the police, and the police would call her father and tell him he had better have a talk with Brigitte about doing her Guardian job a little better than that. Lucky liked the idea that by running away she could make people do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.

  Brigitte was entirely wrong as a choice for a Guardian, Lucky decided. Even though she had come to California right after Lucky’s mom died to take care of Lucky, she was just too French and too unmotherly. She should have had lessons or some kind of manual on how to do the job. If they had online courses in how to manage restaurants, they should at least have courses on how to be a good Guardian or even how to be a good actual birth mom, which was a more important job than restauranting. Lucky thought that writing this manual would be a good project for her once she was grown up.

  The manual would be called,

  Certificated Course in How to Raise a Girl

  for Guardians and Actual Mothers

  with Diploma

  When she ran away, everyone would be worried and sad, and Miles would miss her horribly. The thought of how much Miles would miss her made Lucky cry again. And Lincoln! Probably Lincoln would be so sad his brain would quit sending knot-tying secretions. Tears ran down the sides of her face and into her ears, which felt strange. She needed to blow her nose but sniffed hard instead. The mucus she swallowed tasted like the biggest sadness in the world. Even the crickets outside sounded mournful.

  Drying her face with the sheet, Lucky turned on her side and flipped the soggy pillow over. Running away takes very good planning. She already had her survival kit. She thought of a few more items to take that most people wouldn’t consider necessary for survival. They were not things you can eat or drink or use for protection or to get rescued or to keep from being bored. They were things that Lucky’s heart needed in order to stay brave and not falter.

  She would run away to the old miners’ dugout caves and stay about a week, then she would see what next. If the rescuers and the police still hadn’t found her, maybe she would sneak back into the town on a Saturday morning and hide under the porch of Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon at the back of Dot’s house to find out what people were saying about her disappearance while they got their hair done.

  Lucky arranged some permed curls over her ear to keep bugs from crawling in, and she was almost asleep when she heard Brigitte tiptoe to her open doorway.

  “Are you asleep, Lucky?” she whispered.

  Lucky pretended to be sleeping. She’d given Brigitte a chance to talk, but Brigitte had had more important things to do. Now it was too late. Lucky breathed deeply and slowly, in and out, and waited for Brigitte to tiptoe away, but she must have stayed there in the doorway for a long time. Lucky had not heard the sound of her leaving when she finally did fall asleep for real.

  14. The First Sign

  Lucky didn’t realize that she would get Three Signs telling her that it was the exact perfect day to run away. Her running-away idea was even more definite Monday morning, and it was very thorough, rather than being just a whim where you could make mistakes or do something tragical. She had told HMS Beagle that they would probably take off as soon as she got home from school.

  She had to jog uphill, her survival kit slapping her back, to meet the school bus in time. She saw Lincoln waiting in the very back of the bus and Miles skipping—he had just learned to skip—down from his house. At the wheel, her elbow sticking out the window, Sandi, the bus driver, glowered at Lucky. She looked at her watch and shook her head. The exhaust from the bus drowned out the fresh smell of the new morning.

  “Hurry up, Miles,” Lucky yelled as she waited by the front door of the bus, panting. “He’s coming,” she called up to Sandi, who shook her head again.

  “We got fifty miles to cover before the bell rings,” Sandi said, as she always did, “and I’m not waiting.”

  “He’s only five,” said Lucky.

  Sandi flipped on her turn signal and checked the side view mirrors.

  “Here he is,” Lucky said, and grabbed Miles’s plastic sack so he could climb up the two deep steps quickly.

  “Don’t help me, Lucky,” he said. “I can climb up by myself.”

  “Let’s go,” said Sandi.

  “Did you see me skip?” Miles asked Sandi. “I skipped all the way down the hill.”

  “Rear of the bus,” said Sandi, who didn’t want kids sitting close enough to talk to her.

  Lucky followed Miles past sixty empty seats, to the last long bench, where Lincoln was knotting a piece of yellow twine.

  “Did you see me skip?” Miles asked Lincoln.

  “No,” said Lincoln, frowning at his knot.

  Lucky looked out the rear window. HMS Beagle stood watching the bus, then turned and trotted toward home. She would be waiting when the bus arrived back at four fifteen, as she did every day.

  Miles sat by the window, took Are You My Mother? out of the plastic sack, and held it on his lap. He had an almost-healed scab on one knee and a new-looking scrape on the other. One sneaker had a hole in the side where his little toe poked through. The sun shining through the window glinted on his coppery hair, which was mashed down on one side.

  The bus climbed up and out of the valley, then turned and joined the highway to Sierra City. Miles swiped the dusty window with his hand, wiped his hand on his pants, and poin
ted to the forest of Joshua trees. “Is this Short Sammy’s adopted highway?” he asked.

  “Not yet. Wait, here comes the little sign,” Lucky said. Then it flashed by:

  ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY

  SAMMY DESOTO

  Adopting a highway is not like adopting a child. Lucky planned to adopt seven or eight highways when she got old enough, if she had time. What it means is that you take care of this certain stretch of road by picking up all the litter every week. Also you get an official orange vest and hard hat, and special trash bags, plus you get a sign on the highway that people can admire as they drive past.

  “Was that it? Sandi should stop so we can read it,” Miles complained. “Some people need more time to sound out their words.”

  Lucky and Lincoln eye-smiled at each other without letting Miles see. That, thought Lucky, was the First Sign. The way she and Lincoln understood right then what each other was thinking.

  “She can’t stop or we’ll be late for school,” Lincoln said. “Check out how the highway along here is so clean, though. Short Sammy cleans it.”

  “In his orange vest?”

  “Yeah.”

  Miles began making frog croaking noises. Lincoln immediately put on his headphones. He didn’t have a player for them to plug into, but by wearing them Lucky figured he could concentrate better on his knots. Finally Lucky couldn’t stand any more frog croaking, so she told Miles a story of how the Joshua trees were playing Statues, and when they thought you weren’t looking they changed their weird positions.

  “If you stare at them very quietly you’ll see them move,” she said. Miles rested his forehead on the dusty window and stared out for about three minutes. Then he said, “Lucky?”

  “What.”

  “Do you have an extra Fig Newton?”

  “Oh, Miles,” she said, and dug a Fig Newton out of her tote bag. “Doesn’t your grandmother ever comb your hair?”

  “Sometimes,” said Miles, lightly kicking the seat in front of him as he ate tiny bites of the cookie.

  15. The Second Sign

  and the Third Sign

  Lucky felt excited and impatient all day at school. Ms. McBeam read a thin book to the fifth grade about Charles Darwin, the scientist Lucky most admired. The totally amazing thing about Charles Darwin was how much he and Lucky were alike. For instance, in the book there was a part where Charles Darwin found two interesting beetles. To capture them, all he had was his hands, so he caught one in each hand. Then—and this was the great part—he found a third interesting beetle, so he popped it into his mouth! That was exactly something Lucky would do, except for the constant fact that she carried her survival backpack full of specimen boxes with her at all times.

  Then Ms. McBeam showed pictures of polar bears in the snow and explained that Charles Darwin figured out that animals survive by adapting to their environment. Polar bears are white like the snow so they will be harder to see and they can sneak up on their next meal. (And also to make them harder to be spotted by other animals or people who hunt them.) The same with insects who look like the plants they eat—except they’re hiding from the birds that want to eat them, Ms. McBeam explained.

  At that exact moment, Lucky looked at her sandy-colored arms and realized, finally, why her hair and eyes and skin were all one color! Charles Darwin had a very good point. She was like those lizards and sidewinders—exactly the color of the sand outside. She blended in too.

  She, Lucky, was perfectly adapted to her environment, the northern Mojave Desert, and she knew that the sameness of her coloring was exactly right. It was the Second Sign, as significant and thrilling as the secret eye-smiling First Sign on the bus.

  Just after lunch, when Lucky thought she could not bear to wait until three fifteen for the school bus to arrive for the ride home, the principal came to Room Four. Lucky sat forward in her seat to stare at Ms. Baum-Izzart, who was eight months pregnant and wore black pants and a tight-fitting flowered shirt that showed exactly the shape of her pregnant stomach. Ms. Baum-Izzart smiled at Ms. McBeam and at the fifth graders. She put her two hands on her shirt, holding the sides of her stomach. Lucky noticed that there were slightly darker marks where Ms. Baum-Izzart put her hands, like the dark stains on the sides of Miles’s pants where he wiped his hands. She figured Ms. Baum-Izzart spent a lot of time feeling the interesting huge round ball of her stomach.

  A part of Lucky wished the principal would suddenly start having the baby so they could all watch. Maybe Lucky could even help in some very important way, like if they needed mineral oil and only she had some at the last minute.

  Instead of going into labor, Ms. Baum-Izzart said, “There’s a pretty big dust storm coming off the dry lake. We’re sending the children from outlying areas home early. I want those of you who ride the school bus to take all your belongings and meet your bus outside right now. Walk, please; do not run.”

  The kids who lived in Sierra City groaned because they had to stay till the normal end of school. But for Lucky this was the Third Sign that of all possible days to run away, today was the exact right one.

  “…fifty-five-mile-per-hour winds in high-desert areas…” the tinny voice of the radio announcer was saying as Lucky climbed on the bus. “…trailers and campers should avoid Highway 395 in the passes due to high winds.” Sandi jerked her head, to show Lucky that she should hurry up to the rear, which Lucky already knew from having Sandi as her bus driver since kindergarten.

  Miles and Lincoln followed her down the aisle, past a few kids who got off at Talc Town, and Sandi started up. Usually Lucky worried about dust storms because all you could do was go inside and close all the windows, no matter how hot it was. Dust came inside anyway, and when the storm was over, she and Brigitte had to vacuum and wipe down everything. Brigitte always said the devil left his back door open and let all the dust of hell blow into her kitchen.

  But today Lucky loved the dust storm. She would be home early and have more time for running away before dark.

  “Lucky,” said Miles as he flung his plastic bag on the seat. “When is Ms. Baum-Izzart going to have her baby?”

  “Pretty soon,” said Lucky. “Maybe in about three weeks.”

  “Will the storm be over when she has it?”

  Lucky clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes at him. “Of course.”

  “What about Chesterfield’s baby?”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, where will Chesterfield and her baby go during the dust storm?”

  “Oh, probably to the dugouts, where they’ll be nice and protected. They’ll wait there till it’s over,” said Lucky.

  “My grandmother said you could die in a dust storm,” said Miles.

  “But not Chesterfield or her child.” Lucky peered out the window. The sky had turned brownish and seemed lower, like a giant dirty blanket drifting down to cover everything. It was growing dark because the thick dust blocked the sun. She turned back to Miles, who was looking up at her worriedly. “Burros help each other. They stand head to tail with another burro and each one’s tail swishes the flies from the other’s face. In a dust storm they all stay close together. Besides, they have long thick eyelashes to protect their eyes. Chesterfield is totally adapted to her desert habitat. Do you want me to explain about habitats?”

  “No,” said Miles, and opened Are You My Mother? He turned the pages slowly, reading it aloud from memory, his small dirty index finger more or less following the words.

  Lincoln rolled his eyes at Lucky, which she considered Part B of the First Sign. She knew he meant that listening to Miles sound out Are You My Mother? again, after having heard him do it eight thousand times on the bus ride to school and back, was too boring to bear. He put his headphones on and got out a piece of rope.

  Even though she was tempted to tell Lincoln about her decision to run away, the valve that kept secrets locked up in Lucky’s heart was clamped shut. Lucky’s heart would have liked to share her secret with Lincoln, but his knowing could
wreck everything. So the heart-valve stayed closed, and Lucky kept her dangerous secret to herself.

  16. Getting Ready

  to Run Away

  Lucky’s original plan had been to pretend to go to her job at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center early, right after coming back from school, rather than her usual time of late afternoon. But instead she’d run away. Then when the bus arrived hours before the regular time and Lucky saw Brigitte’s Jeep and Short Sammy’s Cadillac parked at the Captain’s house, she decided to leave right away. Brigitte wouldn’t miss her for a long time. But first there were important supplies to get at home.

  Even though the bus had come back way earlier than usual, HMS Beagle was waiting in the usual place. It was too windy for Lucky to explain about the Three Signs, and anyway, they had to watch out for things blowing around, like dead bushes and pieces of trash. Lucky knew that it could get so windy that even roofs blew off houses, and you couldn’t tell what direction you were going because the sun was blotted out. Tiny twisters of sand rose up from the ground, as if miniature people were throwing handfuls in the air. A loose flap of tin banged on someone’s roof, and the wind tugged the tamarisk trees sideways.

  Lucky spread a towel on her bed next to her survival kit backpack. It was already ready, but she checked again to be sure. Crammed inside were:

  empty mint boxes for collecting specimens, scrounged from trash left by ex-smokers, plus a large tin for HMS Beagle’s water bowl

  nail polish remover and cotton balls

  mineral oil for the glistening of eyebrows

  a survival blanket (kind of like very strong tin foil folded up into a tiny square)—not the keep-you-warm kind of blanket, but shiny so the rescue helicopter can spot it; also, if you know how, you can use such a blanket to collect drops of water to keep from dying of thirst. Lucky would figure out how this worked if the time came.