Cynthia Kadohata - The Thing About Luck

As I was thinking all this, Robbie suddenly stopped. “I have to get to bed because I need to get up early and clean the combines.” He yawned again. “I’ll kiss you again tomorrow,” he added, almost as if he was bored. I wondered if boys generally let you know ahead of time that they’re going to kiss you. “I’ll teach you how.”

Oh no! That meant I hadn’t done it right. On the other hand—yay! He was going to kiss me again!

He stood up and walked with me to the door. “See ya,” he said, and closed the door.

I stood there, my hands shaking when I held them out in front of me. “These are my hands,” I said, just to ground myself. “This is me.”

I couldn’t move. I turned to stare at his door and replay the last few minutes in my head. Sometimes my friends and I talked about kissing, but so far, it had only been talk. Still, around the time I was leaving, the girls and boys in my class had started to notice one another in a new way. I wondered if this was part of the change my mother said was coming. Maybe I didn’t have to spend the summer at home to experience this change. If I had a phone, I could call Melody and talk to her. I made a mental note to sneak out with Obaachan’s cell phone one day.

When I got back to our camper, I expected to be lectured by Obaachan for being gone, but my luck was still holding because she was still asleep. Jaz was awake, though. He didn’t seem mad anymore. He never stayed mad for long. I went to the bathroom and put on a long T-shirt. When I got to the bedroom, I felt my way through the dark.

“Where were you?” Jaz asked softly.

“Robbie’s,” I answered quietly.

“Does he like you? Did he kiss you?”

I swear, sometimes I thought he had ESP that he’d inherited from our grandmother.

“MYOB,” I told him. But I felt giddy.

“I’ll take that as a yes. I think it would make me throw up to kiss you.” He didn’t say that in a mean way. He was just stating a fact.

“That’s because you’re my brother. It could be I did kiss him, but I’m not going to tell you . And don’t talk so loud—I don’t want Obaachan to wake up.”

“Summer? Seriously.”

“What?”

“What will happen when I grow up?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Will I have friends? Will I have a job? Am I too much of a weirdo?”

I paused. Once in a while he’d just abruptly ask me questions like these. It all revolved around the fact that he didn’t have friends. For a moment I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Then he said, “I’m sad.”

Ohhh. I felt a rush of love for my brother. “Your life won’t be sad,” I said. “I’m positive.”

I saw a luna moth the size of my hand on the window. I couldn’t tell if it was inside or outside. It was so graceful, more like an exotic leaf than an insect. Luna moths did not feed because they had no mouths, so the one I was looking at would be dead soon. What a crazy world!

“Why do you think that?” Jaz asked.

I couldn’t really help him much because I had never been a grown-up, so I didn’t know what it would be like. Finally, I said, “Sometimes you’ll be happy and sometimes you’ll be sad, just like anyone.”

“But I’ll be more sad than happy, won’t I? Just like now.”

Then I had a brainstorm. “With you, it won’t matter if you’re happy or sad. You’ll just be intense, like you are now, and then your life will be perfect.”

He thought that over. “I’ll accept that for now.”

What was that supposed to mean? Sometimes he seemed like a complicated adult instead of a little boy. I thought about it some more. He was kind of unplaceable, actually, neither young nor old.

I climbed up to my second-level bunk and Thunder leapt up with me.

Obaachan said, “I never go to sleep.”

“What?” I nearly tumbled off the mattress.

“I never go to sleep. I no need.”

She was trying to tell me she had heard the whole conversation. So be it. I fell asleep.

I think we all slept lightly until Jiichan came in. I heard the squeak of his feet on the kitchen linoleum, and that small noise woke me. I didn’t know what time it was. “Hi, Jiichan,” Jaz and I both said.

“You two up still?”

“I was thinking about life,” Jaz said. “I’m in your bed.”

It was very dark, but I heard the sound of Jiichan climbing into the other second-level bed without changing. “I tell you a story about life, and then you go to sleep. When I live in Wakayamaken, I get lost. I walk, but I think of school instead of think of walk. Then I don’t know where I am. Everywhere is mandarin orange farm. Which way to go? It starting to be night. I see stars. I finally walk to farmhouse. I knock on door. Biggest man I ever see answer door. Mean face. I think he want to eat me, and I run away. I spend night outside, sleeping with oranges. My parents find me next day. They say school number one important, but even number one you don’t have to think of all the time. When you walk, think of walk. Oyasumi .”

“ Oyasuminasai , Jiichan.”

The next afternoon the temperature hit 103 degrees. It was also grocery shopping day, but Obaachan said I had to stay home to study and also to take care of my brother. Jaz didn’t have to do anything at all because he was still sick. But he was bored, so I read him A Separate Peace .

“Summer, do you have any other books? This is the most boring book ever written.”

“I have two books about girls.”

“Is that it?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, keep reading.”

I kept reading, listening to my gravelly voice. Maybe someday I could do voice-overs for commercials. That’s what I was thinking about when I realized Jaz had fallen asleep.

We were cooking chili for dinner. I had cleaned and soaked the kidney beans overnight, so I took them out of the fridge. I poured the beans into a big pot and brought them to a boil, then turned them down to a simmer. Even with the air-conditioning, sweat beaded on my face. Mrs. Parker had brought a pressure cooker, but Obaachan didn’t want to use it because she was afraid it might explode. “Pressure most powerful force in world,” she had said. Then she’d seemed to be in an argument with herself: “Of course, nuclear bomb powerful too. But pressure make things blow up, so that just as bad. I think about this and get back to you.”

The beans had to simmer until they were soft. Every so often, I would stir them and check to see if they were ready.

It was kind of relaxing while Obaachan was at the store. I spent my time reading an article that Jiichan had given Jaz and me copies of. He did that sometimes when he happened across something interesting he’d read. The article was called “Opinions and Social Pressure,” and it was dated 1955, first published in Scientific American .

“Opinions and Social Pressure” was kind of hard to understand, but not as hard as you might think. It was pretty straightforward and didn’t use a lot of big words. Basically, it was about research on peer pressure and showed how this kind of pressure could literally change what people saw with their own eyes. They would think a long line on a large white card was short and a short line was long, just because everyone else said so. And once you started down the road of giving in to peer pressure, you couldn’t escape. The research showed this. You might never know what you saw with your own eyes.

I knew Jiichan was making us read this article so we wouldn’t give in to peer pressure. Peer pressure was a big fear of his. And, strangely enough, Jiichan seemed more worried about Jaz than about me. I thought this was odd since Jaz was so different that he would always be completely out of step with the other kids in his class. He could never give in to peer pressure, because he could only be himself. But Jiichan suspected Jaz was more vulnerable, because having a friend made him so happy that he would start to see the world the way the friend told him to if that was the best way to keep this friend.