Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

Lucky spread a towel on her bed next to her survival kit backpack. It was already ready, but she checked again to be sure. Crammed inside were:

empty mint boxes for collecting specimens, scrounged from trash left by ex-smokers, plus a large tin for HMS Beagle’s water bowl

nail polish remover and cotton balls

mineral oil for the glistening of eyebrows

a survival blanket (kind of like very strong tin foil folded up into a tiny square)—not the keep-you-warm kind of blanket, but shiny so the rescue helicopter can spot it; also, if you know how, you can use such a blanket to collect drops of water to keep from dying of thirst. Lucky would figure out how this worked if the time came.

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions , borrowed in order to study more about how to find your Higher Power

pencil and notebook to describe specimens

tiny packets of ketchup from McDonald’s

can of beans

the Ten-Strand Round knot

brand-new toothbrush from a teeth-cleaning at the Sierra City clinic, still in its original wrapper so that if she started to lose heart—“to lose heart” being Lucky’s favorite sad but exquisite phrase—she could get out a beautiful never-used toothbrush and make herself feel better

half a tube of toothpaste

bottle of water and bottle of Gatorade

The survival kit had everything she would need to keep from getting bored or too lonely, which are probably the worst dangers of running away.

On the towel she laid out her jacket and a roll of toilet paper. She wished she could take her pillow, but it was too bulky.

In the fridge she found two hard-boiled eggs, four carrots (HMS Beagle loved carrots), the Government Surplus cheese, which no matter how awful it was both she and HMS Beagle could eat in case they started starving to death, Fig Newtons, and a box of dry Jell-O (in a plastic Ziploc bag to ward off ants). HMS Beagle’s kibble in another Ziploc bag.

Lucky looked around.

On the counter was Brigitte’s metal parsley grinder, which Dot had fixed so it worked like new.

Lucky put it on the towel. Then suddenly she went back into the kitchen. She reached up and grabbed the urn with her mother’s remains and her own dried-up tears inside. She added that to the pile and carefully rolled the towel up into a tight but bulky tube. She jammed it into a plastic grocery bag.

Lucky was ready to start running away when she realized that she might never return to the half circle of trailers if the rescuers took her directly to the orphanage in Los Angeles. So she was about to go one last time into Brigitte’s trailer, when she heard blasts of a tugboat coming closer and closer.

Oh, la-la, la-LA, la-LA, la-LA, she thought. I’ll never be able to run away with him here.

“Go away, Miles,” she yelled. “I’m busy!”

“Lucky, the storm is really bad! Everyone’s at the Captain’s house saying the power and the phones will probably go out. Can I come in?”

“No! Go away!”

“Why? I won’t make noises!” Miles let himself in and took short skips to the Formica table. He pulled Are You My Mother? out of his Buy-Mor-Store sack. Its spine had been freshly mended with duct tape. “My grandma fixed my book,” he said.

Lucky had no time to be nice. “That book is wrecked ,” she said. “It looks even worse now.”

Miles smoothed the duct tape. “It’s still fine inside,” he said. “Could you read it to me?”

“Miles, get a life. You already know the story by heart, and it’s boring.”

“No, it’s not! The part about the Snort is good, and so is the part where he finds his mother at the end.”

“That bird is an idiot snotwad,” said Lucky. “He doesn’t even know”—Lucky took a breath—“he doesn’t even realize that his mother is in jail !”

Miles sat still, looking down at his book. “She is not,” he said in a small voice.

“Yes, she is! Your grandmother said so.” Lucky leaned over Miles, her meanness gland pumping. “And I’m not your mother either! I’m not taking care of you! So go home!”

Miles looked up at her with his eyes full of tears. He threw the book on the floor and kicked it. He started crying hard. “I’m never coming back!” he shouted, and ran out into the wild brown wind.

Good, thought Lucky. Then for no reason she got a sudden exploding idea. She rushed to Brigitte’s trailer and flung open the closet. The perfumy smell of Brigitte wafted out of it. There were jackets and a couple of dresses, and neatly folded piles of surgical pants and shirts. At the very end of the rod was Brigitte’s red silk dress, in a clear plastic dry-cleaner’s bag.

The dress felt like a pile of feathers, almost too light and silky to touch. It made Lucky feel she should wash her hands. It was a dress you would wear only for something very important, like coming to California to become someone’s Guardian. The tag said “La Fortune, Galleries Lafayette, Paris.” Brigitte hadn’t worn it since the day she arrived, but Lucky still remembered the dancy twirly shimmeringness of that dress.

Lucky yanked off her jeans and top and left them on the floor. She pulled the silk dress over her head. The hem came to the tops of her socks. It was too loose to really fit her, but it felt different next to her skin, not at all like her regular clothes. It turned her into someone else, someone beautiful and sophisticated, who could make a dessert that had flames coming out of it on purpose. Her regular clothes were faded from many washings and from the sun, but the redness of this dress was the same thing for your eyes as a sonic boom is for your ears, or a jalapeño pepper is for your mouth.

She felt herself through the fabric and twisted like when you do the hootchy-kootchy, to move the silk against her skin. She felt sort of French and sort of lit-up and wished suddenly that Lincoln were there to see her. This was so strange to her, the flash-thought of Lincoln out of nowhere, that she made the thought go into a place inside that wasn’t her brain, so she wouldn’t have to think about it.

Lucky spread Brigitte’s sunscreen on her hands, arms, face, and neck, carefully not getting much of it on the dress. Outside the wind was stronger, whooshing noisily. She rummaged through the kitchen tool carton until she found a dust mask that you used when you sanded the curved wood walls inside the trailers. She wasn’t thinking in the same careful Running-Away-Project way as before, because now she had turned into a Brigitte-type of person.

The phone rang. It was Miles’s grandmother, Mrs. Prender.

“Is Miles there?” she shouted. “I seen the school bus come back early.”

“No,” Lucky said.

“I want him home—the wind’s getting bad. You seen him?”

“No,” Lucky lied.

“Well, you do, make him stay put and call me so I can pick him up in the car.”

“Okay, Mrs. Prender.” She hung up.

Lucky considered swiping Brigitte’s passport, because that was another way to stop her from leaving. But it wasn’t the best way. The best way would be if Brigitte made her own decision to stay because she loved Lucky. And in order for Brigitte to realize how much she loved her ward, the ward had to run away. Then Brigitte would feel sorry and worried and abandoned, and that would make her understand exactly how Lucky felt.