Susan Patron - The Higher Power of Lucky

Lincoln scrunched his eyes at her. “No idea,” he said, and went to pat HMS Beagle, who stretched out on her back and waved her paws in the air to show him she wanted her chest rubbed. He said to Lucky, “How come your eyebrows are kind of wet?”

Lucky smoothed the mineral oil on her eyebrows with her fingers. “It’s a new beauty product,” she explained. “For glistening.”

HMS Beagle’s ribcage looked much more huge when she was lying on her back than when she was standing. Lincoln scratched it. “Your eyebrows really go…with the rest of you,” he said without looking up.

Lucky didn’t have the slightest clue what to say to that. She was pretty sure—but not positive—that it was a compliment. She scooped five or six ants and some sand into the little bag and carefully zipped it closed. “Well,” she finally said, “what’s the deal with the sign?”

“Did you read it?”

Lucky skirted around to the front of the sign, which was bolted to a metal post, and studied the words in large black capital letters against the orangy-yellow background:

SLOW

CHILDREN

AT

PLAY

Lucky frowned. “So?” she asked.

“That sign is about us ,” Lincoln said. “Where’s the pen?”

“Lincoln, what are you going to do? It’s illegal to draw on a traffic sign. It’s probably illegal even to touch it.” Lucky worried about Lincoln getting in trouble. His mother, who worked part-time as a librarian in Sierra City, wanted him to grow up to be the President of the United States. Lucky knew that if he ran for President, during his campaign his opponent would uncover every single bad thing he’d ever done in his life. Someone would find out that when he was ten years old he graffitied SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY and Lincoln could lose the election.

Lincoln’s father was an Older Dad with a pension—he was twenty-three years older than Lincoln’s mom—and looked more like a grandfather than a father. He drove around the desert in his homemade dune buggy searching for historic pieces of barbed wire, and then he sold them on eBay. Lincoln’s dad said he shouldn’t worry about becoming the President of the United States until he was in college. Lincoln’s mom said he should worry about it every day, starting now . But the only thing Lincoln actually worried about, he had told Lucky, was how to get enough money to go to the annual convention of the International Guild of Knot Tyers in England, and then how to make his parents agree to let him go.

“Lucky,” Lincoln explained, “people see that sign and they think, ‘Huh. Slow children. Kids around here aren’t too smart.’ Or else they think, ‘Gosh, these Hard Pan kids don’t move too fast. Must be ’cause of the heat.’”

Lucky had never thought of these interpretations. She figured everyone read the sign and thought, Okay, time to slow down because there are children playing. “And?” she asked.

“Just give me the marker.”

Lucky looked around to see if anyone was paying attention. Down at the side of the dirt road that went off the main paved one, a couple of pairs of boots were sticking out from under someone’s old VW van. The wearers of the boots were pounding on the van’s stomach. She heard the soft hooting calls of an owl who’d woken up early. The little glass observation tower at the Captain’s house, where he liked to sit and watch what was going on around town, looked empty—and anyway she knew the heat in it would be too much to bear right now. There were, as usual, no cars on the road. She handed over the marker.

Lincoln put his string in his pocket and rubbed away the dust beside the word SLOW with the hem of his T-shirt. Lucky was afraid he was going to try to fit DOWN next to it, but she knew he couldn’t, and it would look bad. The sharp upside-down V of the top of the diamond came too close to SLOW.

But instead Lincoln did something brilliant. Next to SLOW, he drew two neat perfect-size dots, one like a period and the other a little above it. Lucky knew it was a colon and it made the sign mean, “You must drive slow: There are children at play.”

“Wow,” she said. “That is…presidential.”

Lincoln rolled his eyes and blushed and handed her the pen. His dark hair flopped over on his forehead in a springy, independent way. It was hair that would do whatever it wanted to, no matter how he combed it. Lucky liked that kind of hair quite a lot.

In one of her brain crevices where she stashed things she wanted to be sure to remember when she grew up, Lucky put the SLOW: CHILDREN AT PLAY episode. If Lincoln did decide to run for President of the United States, Lucky would go on TV and tell everything in exact detail: the misleadingness of the sign, the cleverness of Lincoln, the neatness of his two dots, the happy-endingness of the story. Except she would never tell the very private and lovely part about her glistening eyebrows.

5. Miles

A good way to kill a bug that you need as a specimen, without smashing or hurting it, is to capture it in a jar or a tin box. You put a little cotton ball dabbed with nail polish remover in with the bug and, presto, it dies.

Very early Saturday morning, when there was still a little leftover coolness from the night before, Lucky borrowed some cotton balls and half a bottle of nail polish remover from Brigitte’s medicine cabinet. She was making an inventory of her survival kit backpack, which you have to do regularly to be sure you haven’t used up something important for some reason besides actual survival. It was a good time for an inventory, because Brigitte had gone to the Captain’s house to pick up this month’s U.S. Government Surplus food, and Lucky was glad to be able to check out her supplies in private.

She was starting to spread all her stuff out on the Formica table in the kitchen trailer when she heard a sound like a pig snorting. Then the pig squealed and snorted again. HMS Beagle thumped her tail on the floor and padded to the door.

“I know it’s you, Miles,” Lucky called through the screen door. She sighed. “Here’s the deal. I’ll tell you one Olden Days of Hard Pan story. You don’t get to make any noises . Then you have to leave.”

From outside, Miles said, “Does Brigitte have any extra cookies?”

“How many have you had already?”

Miles stuck his head in. HMS Beagle’s head came up to Miles’s chin, and the dog was always happy when he visited because she knew she would get plenty of cookie crumbs. Miles was only five, and he was not a neat eater, plus he didn’t mind when HMS Beagle licked his hands.

“You mean since today started?” he asked.

“Come in and close the screen before the flies get in,” said Lucky, cramming her survival stuff back into the backpack. “Yes, how many cookies have you had since you got up this morning?”

Miles had to push HMS Beagle a little bit because she was smelling him very thoroughly.

“Does banana nut bread count?” he asked as he came in, taking tiny steps so as not to touch any of the cracks on the linoleum floor. He dragged a plastic Buy-Mor-Store grocery bag.

“Who gave you banana nut bread? Dot?”

Even though Dot was the bossiest and crabbiest person in Hard Pan, Miles could always mooch a cookie off her.