Cynthia Kadohata - The Thing About Luck

“Obaachan?” I said softly.

“What you want?”

“Nothing.” Had I woken her up, or did she really never sleep?

Then somehow it was light out, and I was alone in the room. Where was everybody? I checked the clock—it was ten already. Had I just dreamed the previous night, or had it really happened? Obaachan had let me sleep in!

I lay in bed thinking, trying to figure it all out. There was Obaachan the ogre, and there was Obaachan who let me sleep late. There was Obaachan who scolded me night and day, and there was Obaachan who did as much of the cooking as she could, despite her pain, so I wouldn’t have to. There was Obaachan who supposedly lived at the hospital when I was sick, and there was Obaachan who taunted me for, well, for everything. I mean, there was only one me, one Jaz, one Mom, one Dad, and one Jiichan. But it seemed like there were two Obaachans—the good one and the bad one.

I got up, slathered on DEET, and pulled on my only long-sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans—I wanted as much of my body covered as possible, even though most mosquitoes were nocturnal. Then I grabbed some one-dollar bills from my purse for the vending machine. When I stepped outside, the heat hit me hard. Jaz and a boy I’d never seen were sitting in the shade doing something—it looked like arranging gravel. I bought iced tea and trail mix at the vending machines and eagerly tore open the trail mix. Blech. It tasted just as old as the one I’d eaten before.

I sat down next to Jaz. “How is Jiichan?” I asked.

“Same,” Jaz said without looking at me. He was studying a single piece of gravel; for whatever crazy reason, he rejected it and chose another. He placed the new piece into the arrangement they were making. The arrangement looked like lace—perfect lace.

“You mean he’s still really sick?”

“Maybe a little better.” Then Jaz lifted his head and evaluated me like a detective. “Something’s fishy,” he said. “What are you up to?

“What?”

Then he lost interest in me and turned back to his gravel. “What did they say?” I asked.

“Who?” Jaz held up a piece of gravel for his companion to inspect. “What do you think?”

The other boy looked up, but he didn’t glance my way. He watched Jaz set the piece into the lace. “Cool,” he said.

“Obaachan and Jiichan, what did they say?”

“What do you mean? Say when?”

“About me sleeping so late or about anything.”

“Nothing.”

I looked really closely at the lace. It was gorgeous, like something you would see in Queen Elizabeth’s room. “Where is Obaachan?”

“She’s riding with Jiichan because he’s still sick or she’s at the elevator,” Jaz said impatiently. He wanted to concentrate on his gravel. The other boy just stared at the ground too.

I knew that Obaachan’s back would hurt even more than usual tonight because of how uncomfortable the passenger seat was in the combine. And they had no real food. I squinted toward the sky. There were clouds gathering, but they weren’t yet rain clouds. Since Jiichan was still sick, I definitely would be needed again tonight. I tried to figure out how that made me feel, and it came to me: determined. I imagined going three miles per hour, even four. But actually, I didn’t want to go faster. Two was fine.

“That’s pretty,” I told Jaz, pointing to the arrangement.

He squinted at me with scorn, either because I was bothering him or because he didn’t like me calling his work “pretty.”

He returned to his project. The amazing thing was how even the spaces were, how perfect the curves. It was really beautiful. A touch of envy rose inside me. He was so, so good at things. Ridiculous things, maybe, but couldn’t he transfer that perfectionism to anything he wanted when he grew up? And who was this other boy? I could hardly tell the difference between his work and Jaz’s. And they’d found each other in a small town in Oklahoma. That reminded me of something Jiichan had once said: “You find magic everywhere, in wheat field, in mosquito, even here.” When he’d said that, we were driving through the town of Lost Springs, Wyoming, which had a population of four. Jaz and I were making fun of it, and Jiichan had cautioned us to stop laughing. “Don’t make fun. You don’t know what magic here. Maybe bad magic, maybe good.”

“Do you get an endorphin rush doing that?” I asked Jaz. “Remember endorphins from Obaachan’s acupuncture?” We’d once gone to Wichita with her to get acupuncture for her back, and the acupuncturist had said that when the needles were placed just right, you got a rush of something inside you that made you feel good. That something was called “endorphins.”

“I remember,” he said, as if annoyed that I was still there. “What does gravel have to do with endorphins?”

I leaned back again. The pattern was about four feet long by two feet wide. But what was its purpose? Shoot, if I could make a lace pattern like that, well, I wouldn’t be wasting my time making a lace pattern like that. I’d be ... doing something—not sure exactly what.

Jaz looked at the intricate arrangement one last time and stood up. Then, with his foot, he wiped away the gravel. That startled me. All that work destroyed in an instant. “Come on,” he said to the boy. They walked away, then the two of them stood facing the door to our motel room.

“I don’t have a key,” Jaz said to me.

I held up mine, and he came and got it without speaking. The boys went inside the room. Obviously, they didn’t want me in their little gravel-arranging club. I decided to try to make some lace of my own. I know I had just gotten through saying it was a waste of time, but I wanted to see if I could do it. Though there was no physical exertion involved, soon I was sweating profusely. It was like working my brain was causing me to sweat. I got really involved with making the lace. It was so hard for me to make my lines perfect, and when I stepped away, I saw how uneven it all was.

After a while I bought a bottle of water from the machine and said to Thunder, “Water.” He stretched his neck and opened his mouth as I poured in a small amount at a time. He was as much of a genius as Jaz was, just in a different way.

I sat back down. I was going to make beautiful lace. If I could drive a combine, I could do this. For hours I sat there arranging the gravel into lace, occasionally stopping to eat stale trail mix, drink iced tea, and give Thunder water. By two p.m., my T-shirt was soaked and my hair was matted with perspiration. Thunder was panting. And my lace still didn’t look half as good as Jaz’s.

My back ached from leaning over. I lay down and stared at the awning above me. I could really see why Obaachan liked to lie down flat on her back. It felt great. Thunder got up and put his nose on my face to make sure I was okay.

“I’m a failure at arranging gravel,” I told him. He licked my face. “I give up.” I pushed myself up with a groan and went to the door to our room. When I knocked, Jaz didn’t answer. I knocked harder. The door opened, and on the floor were a bunch of LEGOs arranged into a lace pattern.

With the boys hard at work, my mind wandered back to A Separate Peace , to how Finny had died. The weird thing about dying is that while you’re doing it, you’re not afraid of it, but the second you’re not doing it, you’re scared of it again. So did that mean it was scary or not scary? I started reading the book again.