Lucky Little Things Read online

  So then it was a free-for-all. And I was stuck there in the middle of it. If I got up and left, I’d be a baby who couldn’t take a joke. If I sat there stone-faced, they’d know they were really upsetting me and they’d go even harder. I had to just sit there and smile while they laughed and called me “Little Orphan Emma” and “Welfare Queen.”

  All because I’d mentioned the twenty dollars. The twenty dollars that was supposed to be a lucky thing. At that moment it didn’t feel lucky at all.

  You know what would be lucky? I thought. If a meteor slammed through the side of the building and crushed everybody here except me.

  I held my breath and hoped for a second. No meteor.

  The stupid letter was obviously fake.

  * * *

  The rest of that Monday was like any other awful Monday. Nothing especially good or bad happened after lunch, except I got a better grade than I expected on my science test. But I didn’t think that was related to the letter. I took the test before the weekend, and I really studied for a change.

  After school, we all hung out on the sidewalk as usual. The younger kids, and even some kids in our class, still got picked up by a babysitter or a parent. The rest of us, the mature and independent types, liked to stand there and witness their shame before we moved along.

  Everybody was either on their phone or looking at somebody else’s phone. Blah blah blah. Gotta put up new pictures of themselves doing duckface and making peace signs. Savvy kept moving around on the sidewalk like she didn’t want me to stand right next to her. I could tell she was waiting to be invited to Dakota’s house, but Dakota was ignoring her. Naturi and Sierra started walking backward toward Third Avenue, impatient for Dakota to join them.

  “Let’s go already!” Naturi called.

  “I’m coming!” Dakota finished whatever she was doing and turned to Savvy with a smile. “Bye.”

  Savvy looked like she’d been punched in the gut. “Bye,” she said.

  “Bye,” I said, though nobody was talking to me.

  Dakota walked away.

  “Bye!” yelled Naturi from halfway down the block. “Have fun, you two!”

  Savvy went back to her phone. She looked like she was going to cry. In the old days, I would have suggested that we go look at wigs and glittery makeup at the drugstore. With my twenty, I could have bought us both fake eyelashes with rhinestones on them. Now I didn’t know what to say.

  “What?” said Savvy, not looking up from her phone.

  “What what?”

  “What do you want?”

  Was she still mad from this morning, when I said the thing about her mom’s shirt? I didn’t do it on purpose. Meanwhile, she’d purposely made fun of me in front of everyone today. I was the one who should have been mad.

  “Um, to see if you want to do something?”

  She scowled and turned away, still bent over her phone. “Obviously, I’m busy. You don’t have to stand there looking over my shoulder.”

  “I wasn’t looking over your shoulder,” I said. Now I was on the brink of tears for the second time that day. “Why are you being like this?”

  “I’m not being like anything,” she said. “Whatever.” She started walking away.

  I felt like running after her and kicking her in the back of the knee. Instead I yelled at her, “BYE, SAVANNAH!”

  She hates her full name.

  * * *

  I stopped at one of my favorite stores and did a little shopping on my own, so Mom was out at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting by the time I got home. Mom’s not an alcoholic—she used to be, before I was born. She quit drinking fifteen years ago, but for some reason she’s still supposed to go to meetings.

  I was relieved that Mom wasn’t home yet. Whenever she can tell I’m upset, she starts digging to find out what’s wrong, and I didn’t want to talk to her about Savvy.

  I wished I could talk to Aunt Jenny. Aunt Jenny and I had a policy that I could tell her anything and she wouldn’t tell Mom (unless I told her I was going to smother Penguin or something crazy like that). I know for a fact that she kept her word—she always deleted my texts right away so Mom wouldn’t see them, even by accident, and one night when I was supposed to be asleep, I heard Mom raise her voice to Aunt Jenny in the kitchen.

  “You can’t let her keep secrets from me!”

  Aunt Jenny’s reply was loud, too. “Yeah? Guess what—you’re her mom. She’s going to keep secrets from you. Better that somebody knows what she’s up to.”

  I heard Mom bang her fist on the counter. “That somebody should be me!”

  “Well, it can’t be,” said Aunt Jenny. “Deal with it.”

  Typical Aunt Jenny. She always fought for what she thought was right, and she was never afraid to say how she felt. I could hear her voice in my head so clearly, it felt impossible that I would never hear it again in real life.

  Since I couldn’t talk to her, I scrolled through some old texts of hers I had saved.

  One from last year, when she was healthy, and I was stressing over a crush who didn’t crush me back:

  Not him! He looks like a jerk. Soccer jersey, Yankees hat, AND a skateboard? All he needs is a hockey stick and a Frisbee.

  One from October, when she was going from tests to appointments to more tests, and I had to confess to my mom that I’d stolen money from her purse:

  Hate to tell you this, but she probs already knows. Just tell her and get it over with! She’ll be happy you were honest. Just be super sorry about it!

  One from December, when she was on her second round of chemo and surgeries, and I was upset because Savvy was being weird:

  Tell Savannah Bananah I have a pic of her crying like a b**** at the end of Toy Story 3.

  The pic was attached: Me, Mom, and Savvy were in our living room. Penguin was sleeping between me and Mom on the couch, and Savvy was in the big orange chair making one of those crying faces where your whole lower lip turns inside out and your chin gets shiny with drool and snot. If I had my own Instagram, I would so post the pic and tag Savvy.

  Everything was great back then. My friendship with Savvy was tight. We were best friends, practically sisters, and we were going to live together in our thirty-room mansion until we died at the age of one hundred. How did things get so complicated?

  * * *

  Mom came home from her meeting and poked her head into my room. She looked frazzled and worn out. “Bloop. Bloopity bloop.”

  “Bloop bloop.”

  “I got you a black-and-white cookie from Zabar’s.”

  “Yay.” I hopped off my bed to go get it, with Penguin close behind me.

  Mom usually came home with something sweet after she went to one of her AA meetings. She met her last two boyfriends through the AA group near our house, so now she doesn’t like to go to that group anymore. Fortunately for her, there’s like seventy different group meetings in the city, and fortunately for me, she always gets me a black-and-white cookie when she goes to the one near Zabar’s.

  Mom settled down at the laptop on the kitchen table, aka her command center, and passed the cookie my way. This was my chance to really examine her and see if she knew anything about the mystery letter.

  “What’s new?” Mom asked, scanning her email, only half paying attention. She certainly was acting like everything was normal, so I acted like that, too.

  “Nothing. Got an A on the science test.”

  “That’s great! Sounds like you’ve caught up on … everything.”

  “Everything” meant all the school I’d missed during Aunt Jenny’s last weeks, when I was absent so much that the principal said I might not graduate eighth grade if I missed another day. Now I wasn’t allowed to get sick or injured until June 23. If my appendix burst on the subway one morning, I’d have to suck it up and get to school for attendance. Then I could go to the nurse.

  “Yeah.” I needed to steer the conversation toward the subject on my mind. “Lucky.”

  Mom frowned at an e
mail and started typing. “Not ‘lucky.’ You worked hard.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Mmmmmm,” she said. Typety type type type. “Luck is when you don’t deserve something but you get it anyway.”

  “I thought luck was when you get the things you want to happen.”

  I watched her slyly. Things you want to happen was how the letter put it. So if she wrote the letter, she’d know I was on to her. But she didn’t respond at all—she just kept typing.

  “Maybe I don’t know what luck is,” she said.

  Mom didn’t seem interested in talking. I heard her mutter the words “duck knocker,” so I knew whatever she was dealing with was bad. She used to curse a lot, until I was three years old and I asked her, “Mommy, what is a duck knocker?” After she literally fell on the floor from laughing, she started using it as her go-to curse word.

  Mom wasn’t that good an actress. If she was playing mind games with me, she wouldn’t have been able to act so normal. I retreated to my room and left her to her knocking ducks.

  I spent most of the night thinking about who was behind the letter.

  Someone from school? No, the writing didn’t sound like a kid. And a mystery letter wasn’t the type of thing a kid would come up with. A letter was way too old-school. I could safely rule out people my age, whether they were friends or enemies or both.

  Fran, our superintendent? I thought I’d heard her footsteps in the hall that morning. She was a logical suspect, since she always slipped notes under doors, except that theory made no sense. Fran wasn’t really involved in my life. She hadn’t even been around much lately. She used to drop by our apartment once in a while to flirt with Aunt Jenny, but Aunt Jenny hadn’t been here in a while, so neither had Fran.

  Did Grandma send the letter? Hah! Grandma doesn’t even send birthday cards, much less mystery letters. Also, she’s three hours away by train, so she couldn’t have hand-delivered it overnight.

  If I was still seven years old, I might have thought the letter came from my father, Eduardo. That’s back when I still thought my father was a magical man who watched over me in secret. I dreamed that he would appear in my life one day, take me away, and make me the princess of some far-off land. Then when I was ten, Mom and I flew to Colombia so I could meet him, and I saw who he really was: a boring jerk who’d cheated on his wife with Mom and then left town.

  The letter didn’t come from Eduardo. Nothing ever came from him, and nothing would ever come from him. Fine with me.

  I couldn’t think of anybody else to suspect. Day 1 of my magical lucky month was over, and I was no closer to understanding who had delivered this letter to me, how, or (most important) why.

  I wondered what the next twenty-nine days would bring.

  Three

  Day 2 of my lucky month, and things were already starting to change for the better.

  It started as soon as I got to school that morning. Savvy came right over to me and hugged me like everything was normal. “Hey,” she said. “Sorry I was a binch yesterday. Ooh, I like those earrings.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I comfort-shopped them after our argument yesterday, with the twenty dollars you made fun of me for. I kept that thought to myself. It was messed up how off and on Savvy was acting with me, but it did bother me less when she was on.

  “I finished my self-portrait,” she said. “Want to see?”

  Savvy had been taking an advanced painting workshop on Saturdays at an old, fancy artists’ club in the Village. The class was for adults, but one of her moms had a friend at the club who saw Savvy’s work and decided to make an exception. For the past few weeks, she’d been working on a self-portrait in oils. She showed me a close-up pic of it on her phone.

  Savvy had painted her face in two separate halves. Both halves looked like her, but one half looked more like her mom Charise and the other half looked more like her mom Ava. The realness of the image was astounding, even though the colors were bizarre—yellows and violets and acid greens. The thick brushstrokes gave it an almost rippled texture. It was breathtaking.

  Savvy pointed at a few gray droplets in the background. They could have been raindrops or tears or ghosts. “Those are my bio dad,” she said.

  “This is amazing,” I said. “Seriously. This is so incredible.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Next we’re doing landscapes. I’m not that psyched.”

  I noticed as we walked into school that Dakota didn’t seem to be there yet, nor was she there at lunch. Savvy and I sat at our regular table, and she did not spend the entire time turning around on the bench to talk to the rest of that group for a change. I couldn’t help wondering how much Dakota’s absence had to do with Savvy being so normal with me.

  That afternoon, our English teacher, Ms. Engel, reminded us about the auditions for the middle school play. This was where I was really hoping for some luck. I had been in the chorus the last two years, but this year I wanted a speaking part, any speaking part that would allow me to actually act. I wasn’t aiming too high—I knew I’d never get a lead role, because I can’t sing very well. (And yet I kept winding up in the chorus, singing.)

  “This year’s play is not a musical,” Ms. Engel announced.

  Naturi and some of the other good singers in the class pouted.

  “One of our upper school students has written a play that was selected for a Young Writers Award,” Ms. Engel continued. “In honor of that achievement, for our middle school spring play, we will be doing Melanie Lambright’s Umbilical.”

  A murmur swept through the room.

  “Unbiblical?” asked this kid Shane.

  Lewis the Troll laughed at him.

  “Umbilical,” Ms. Engel corrected him. “Like the cord. Since it’s a straight drama, there are no songs or monologues to learn in advance. You’ll get scripts at the auditions on Friday and read from those.” She stopped and smiled. “As you know, in the theater, we don’t say ‘Good luck.’ We say ‘Break a leg.’ So, to those of you who want to audition, break a leg!”

  Everyone else started making jokes about casts, crutches, breaking each other’s legs, and so on, but I sat silent in my seat, stunned by what had just happened: When Ms. Engel said “We don’t say ‘Good luck,’” she had looked directly at me.

  * * *

  Instead of going straight to lunch that day, I decided to chat with Ms. Engel.

  I dropped by her classroom. She was sitting at her desk grading papers.

  “Ms. Macintyre,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  Um, Ms. Engel, you didn’t by any chance sneak into my apartment building and slip a letter under my front door promising me little bits of good luck for a month, did you? Even in my head that question sounded insane. Why would she do something like that? I wasn’t even one of her favorite students.

  I sat down at a nearby desk. “Could you explain why actors don’t say ‘Good luck’?” I asked.

  Ms. Engel looked pleased by my interest. “Well, it’s just a superstition, really. You don’t want to jinx another actor. Do you know what a jinx is?”

  I did. It was like, if your team was winning in basketball, you shouldn’t shout, “We’re gonna win!” or that would be jinxing it.

  “I guess it means, if you say something good’s going to happen, saying it out loud makes it not happen.”

  “That’s the idea,” Ms. Engel said. “Or if you say it out loud, the opposite thing will happen. In the theater, we say ‘Break a leg’ because the opposite of breaking your leg is having a great show.”

  So if someone told me I was going to have good luck all month, was that a jinx? Did it doom me to thirty days of bad luck instead? Suddenly I felt scared. Was I cursed now? Was the money cursed? Were the earrings I bought with the money cursed? I should have burned that letter the minute I saw it.

  “Do you believe in jinxes?” I asked.

  “No,” said Ms. Engel. “And I’m not afraid of things like black cats or broken mirrors. I think peopl
e come up with superstitions to try to explain things we can’t explain.”

  “Do you believe in luck?”

  “I believe we make our own luck,” she said.

  It would be great if adults occasionally answered questions with actual answers, like yes or no, instead of with confusing sentences. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you will never be in the right place at the right time unless you go looking for the right places. It’s like the school raffle. You can’t win the raffle if you don’t buy a ticket.”

  I nodded. Our school, Knights Seminary, holds a fund-raising raffle every year, and all students from grades K–12 can enter. I didn’t buy a ticket last year, when the prize was a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate at the bike store on Sixth Avenue. I was jealous of the kid who won, but I never even took a shot at winning. This year, I would buy a ticket. Maybe two.

  Ms. Engel continued. “So you can’t count on good things or bad things to happen because of some mysterious sign. You have to try to make good things happen.”

  Right. Exactly. That’s what I wanted to do. But …

  “How?” I asked. “How do you try to make good things happen?”

  She smiled and picked up her grading pen. “By trying.”

  We were just going in circles now. I got up from the desk. “Thanks, Ms. Engel.”

  “You’re very welcome,” she said. She went back to her work, and I turned to leave. Just as I reached the door, she said, “Emma.”

  I turned back around. She gave me the same look she had given me in class, like she was trying to tell me something important but couldn’t say it in words. Had my hunch about her been right? Was she about to confess that she was behind the letter?

  She said, “Break a leg on Friday.”

  * * *

  After school that day I had my volunteer project. My school wants everybody to volunteer, so they work with charities to find jobs for kids, and we get extra credit for doing them. My volunteer project this semester was walking dogs for Waggytail, the rescue shelter where we got Penguin. I liked everything about it, except knowing that these lovable dogs didn’t have people or homes to go to. I was especially sad for this sweet dachshund mutt named Lancelot—the vet at Waggytail said Lancelot had a cancerous tumor in his leg. Lancelot was going to have his leg removed, but even that might not save his life.