Cynthia Kadohata - The Thing About Luck

I pressed my lips together and looked at my flip-flops.

Obaachan set down her stirring spoon. “What you thinking about?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“I know you thinking,” she said. “Remember, I can see inside your head.”

“Well, I’m always thinking. I wasn’t thinking about anything special. If you could really see inside my head, you’d know I wasn’t thinking about anything special.”

“I only see shapes and writing in your head, but I no can read the writing because it too messy. You tell me what writing say. I see shape of something bad.”

I wondered if it was shaped like a dead chicken. I’d actually rather tell Jiichan than Obaachan, but Jiichan wouldn’t be finished working until two in the morning. I looked down at my flip-flops again. What if something terrible happened, like Obaachan made me get rid of Thunder?

“Something happened,” I said.

“Something happen every day.”

“It’s really all my fault. It isn’t Thunder’s fault, and it isn’t Robbie’s fault. It’s all mine, one hundred percent,” I said passionately.

“Tell me what it is,” Obaachan said. “But I warn you, you tell me something that give me heart attack, my death on your conscience forever.”

I looked directly at Obaachan. “Well, I went with Robbie to look at a gigantic horse in the Laskeys’ stable. He was really huge. And I forgot all about Thunder, and he got to where the free-range chickens are ... and ... killed three of them.” I felt my eyes filling with tears.

Obaachan snapped, “Tears don’t change my heart.” Then she got down on all fours again, the top of her head against the floor. “ Hara tell me all I need to know about that boy,” she said.

Hara means “stomach” or “gut.” Although Japanese do think with their hearts or heads like anyone, for them, thinking with your gut was a whole different level of thinking. My grandfather was always telling me, “Think with your hara !”

“Obaachan, it wasn’t his fault,” I exclaimed. It wasn’t. “I’m the one who should have been watching Thunder.”

Thunder hung his head.

“Nothing no happen without Robbie.”

“That doesn’t make it his fault.” I watched her for a moment. I wondered if this getting on all fours meant her back was getting even worse. “Why are you doing that?”

“Because my body tell me to. I no say it his fault. It your fault.” She pushed herself up with a grunt. “You tell the Parkers at dinner. Now you and Jaz do homework. When buzzer go, turn off oven and take out pie. Keep eye on stew. Turn off in four hour exactly to get all the taste into water. Make sure you exact, or Mrs. Parker fire us.”

She pushed herself up and walked toward our bedroom, stopping to turn around and look directly at me. “You go study.”

“Okay.”

“I know what you thinking. You thinking about that boy. You thinking you find that boy. You thinking you do anything except study.”

“Obaachan, I honestly wasn’t thinking anything. I didn’t have time.”

“That what you were going to think, even if you didn’t think yet.”

I rolled my head around. “Obaachan, it’s really not fair to get mad at me for something I didn’t even think yet.”

“I know your brain. You study, or I put more grounding on list I keeping. For killing chicken, you get six-week grounding.”

I turned to Jaz. “ You better study too.”

“What did I do?”

I looked to the shelf where we kept Mrs. Parker’s binders. That’s where we also kept our schoolbooks. I picked out my math book and set it in front of me on the table. I moved my hands closer to it. I couldn’t open it, though. I willed my hands to open it. But I still couldn’t do it. Then I returned it to the shelf and took down my history book. I’ll bet all sorts of things happened in history that were more interesting than the stuff in this book. In fact, I was sure of it, because Jiichan was reading my history book once and said, “This not history. This public relation document.”

Jaz took down his math workbook and was immediately so engrossed, he probably wouldn’t even have noticed if there was a tornado—he’d just keep working while he was swirling around in the air.

I decided not to read my history book, so I took down my journal. I was supposed to write about my experiences on harvest for my new teacher, and I would read some of them to the class so they could learn about this lifestyle. But they all knew about it already. We lived in farm country. So what could I say? I had a crush on a boy and Thunder killed some chickens? I cooked sausages? I sat down and tapped my pen on the journal. Then I wrote.

When you are on harvest, you don’t care much about what is going on in the world. What is Congress doing? What is the president doing? I have no idea. All you care about is cutting that wheat as quickly and effishefficiently as you can. You are in another world. I like being in this world because the motto of U.S. Custom Harvesters, Inc., is “We harvest the crops that feed the world.” If not for us, many people wouldn’t have bread.

That was lame. I drew a line through it and turned the page to start again.

The thing about being a kid is that you don’t get to make any decisions on harvest. You just work all the time. I help cook for the crew because my grandmother, who is supposed to be cooking, isn’t well.

I drew a line through that too. Then I closed my journal and put it back on the shelf.

I took down paper and A Separate Peace to write my book report. The teacher said to sum up your feelings about the book in the first paragraph. Then tell what happened and also mention what you do or don’t have in common with the main character. Also, somewhere in there you’re supposed to state how the main character changes in the story.

My sixth-grade teacher hated contractions. We were supposed to write, for instance, “do not” rather than “don’t.” One thing I didn’t understand was punctuation. My teacher always said to put your punctuation where it “feels” right. But then when I did that, she always marked up my paper because she said the punctuation was all wrong. Fortunately, the main thing was to mix up descriptions of the book with your own feelings, not to have perfect punctuation. You had to write at least three drafts and hand in all three.

For draft number one, here’s what I wrote:

I thought A Separate Peace was a strange and kind of amazing book. It was very quitequiet, and then suddenly, it was not quiet at all. So then the parts that are not quiet make all the quiet parts seem like they are not quiet after all. Once I read the whole book, my mind flashed back through the whole book again. It is a book about two boys, Finny and Gene, and they are best friends. They are in high school. They go to a boarding school. It is during World War II. I am only twelve years old, so I don’tdo not know much about World War II.

This book starts at the end not the beginning. Most of the book takes place fifteen years earlier than it is in the first and last chapters. The main character, is Gene. Gene used to have fear when he went to school, but, he then gets rid of his fear. This was very interesting to me, because I am scared of a lot of things. Sometimes, I just want to stay locked up in my room at night, because I think a mosquito might bite me. And, I am afraid, to ride my bicycle in the night, even though I have my dog, Thunder, with me and even if I am covered in DEET. Even if a mosquito does not bite me, who knows a car might hit me.

For Gene, there was a very important insident that happened fifteen years earlier. If anyone reads this report and has not read the book yet, consider this, a *spoiler alert*. Finny climbs up a tree and when he is on a branch, Gene shakes the branch and Finny falls.