Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

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 pointed 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?”