Just My Luck Read online

  She’s right. And maybe there’s something she doesn’t want to say but we all know. Lisa isn’t the only person Dad has been weird around. He’s now spent the day with both sets of grandparents and both times he’s cried in embarrassing ways. None of us could watch it, he looked so much like a kid. So, no. We love Dad and we’re doing this for him, but we don’t want him to be there, embarrassing himself and the rest of us.

  But where can he go? The rehab center where he spends most of his weekdays isn’t open on the weekend. Some people stay there all the time, but we can’t check him in for nonmedical reasons, Mom says. She thinks about her two best friends, who have already been over. One is Polly, our old kindergarten teacher, who Mom says is like the sister she never had. When she came over, she sat next to Dad and didn’t mind at all when he put his head on her shoulder and fell asleep for a few minutes.

  “We’ll just have Polly spend the day with him,” Mom says. “She’ll bring him over to her house. She’ll be happy to do that. It’ll be good for him actually. The doctors are saying we should alter his routine so he learns to adapt to schedule changes.” She sounds like she could be talking about George.

  Martin and I look at each other, but we don’t say anything because there’s too much to do and having a plan like this puts us all in a pretty good mood.

  We need to start organizing the game part of the carnival. We need to start collecting old clothes and toys for the tag sale. We need to start baking a zillion pies that Martin thinks people will pay a lot for. It’s funny. Now that Martin’s being so nice about doing this so I don’t have to sell my minifigs, I want to do a really great job. I want to have a real games arcade and design the best games I can think of. I want to bake great pies and have people say things like, “Here, why don’t I give you fifty dollars for this pie.” I keep imagining moments like that.

  We spend a week getting ready. We pull out our old toys and clothes. Martin gets some of his old friends to help, and I have to say I’m surprised. It’s been years since I’ve seen most of them do anything besides play a video game, but now they all bring over their best old toys and on Friday we have a pile of Nerf guns in our living room that’s higher than our coffee table.

  “They all work, too,” Martin says when he catches me staring at them.

  I wonder if I could withdraw birthday money from the bank and buy them all up or if that would defeat the whole point of this fund-raiser.

  “I look at that and I think a hundred bucks, easy,” Martin says.

  I have thirty in the bank so never mind.

  Mom and George and I spend every afternoon making pies with homemade crusts, which is easy once you get the hang of it. By the end we have fourteen and have to stop because we have no room to hold any more.

  Martin stares at the table on the screened porch where they’re all laid out with little place cards on top, saying what kind they are. “I look at this and I’m thinking another hundred and twenty dollars easy.”

  When Mom looks surprised, he says, “You think anyone’s gonna give us less than eight dollars a pie?”

  The Friday before our carnival is the last day of the C.A.R.E. footprints program. It turns out our class didn’t win the pizza party. We didn’t even come close. Ms. Shiner’s fifth grade class won with sixty-seven footprints and we had only nineteen. Three for Jeremy, one each for almost everyone else. As Mr. Norris passes each person’s footprint back to them, here is the biggest surprise: there are none for Rayshawn, who I think of as the nicest guy in our class.

  I almost can’t believe it. It makes me wonder if he really was inviting me to play basketball with him, not just trying to get a footprint. Because if Rayshawn cared about footprints, he would have one.

  Mr. Norris tells us we should keep our footprints as important artifacts from this year (we just learned the word artifact in social studies a week ago), which makes them seem a little cooler, except I can’t stop looking over at Rayshawn, who doesn’t have one.

  “You should have gotten about five,” I whisper to him. “It’s not fair.”

  “Nah,” he says, smiling like I’m being funny. “What for?”

  I look down at my footprint, which means a lot to me because it’s one of the only ones with Mr. Norris’s handwriting. I thought for sure I’d keep this in my special treasures drawer at home, but suddenly there’s something I want to do with it more. I turn it over and write: I appreciate how Rayshawn invites terrible players like Benny B. to play basketball at recess. Someday Benny B. might actually do it.

  When he turns around to get his math book out, I put the footprint on Rayshawn’s desk.

  Here’s the best part—he laughs for about thirty seconds when he reads it. He laughs so hard his forehead touches his desk, then he looks back at me. “Thanks, man. I might just keep this,” he says.

  I watch him put it in his backpack and I think, That feels better than getting the stupid thing myself.

  Maybe I really am growing up because that afternoon Mr. Norris reads us the last Zen short story and I sort of understand it. Or I think I do.

  “Let’s see what you think,” he says ahead of time.

  The story is about a mother whose baby has died. She is so sad she goes to Buddha and says she’ll do anything to bring her baby back to life. Buddha says he’ll grant her wish if she brings him a mustard seed from a house that has never known death. The woman accepts the challenge. She starts in her own village and then moves across the countryside, knocking on doors and asking strangers if anyone in their family has died. She figures out that every house has lost someone. The last line of the story explains the point the way a lot of the other ones haven’t. “She loses the challenge but discovers a community to share her pain with.”

  When he finishes the story, Mr. Norris looks up at me. When he did this before, I wanted to say, Don’t look at me! I don’t understand! But this time it’s a little different. This time I think I do understand it. I’m not sure I can put it into words, though. Just like he had a hard time writing up a footprint for me. George and Aaron aren’t always easy to be around, but we still love them.

  That’s it, I guess. That’s what we share.

  When you put it into words it doesn’t seem like much, but we both know it’s a lot.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE CARNIVAL IT’S hard to sleep because we have no idea what’s going to happen. We’ve put flyers around town and a notice on our school’s website calendar. I told Mr. Norris and Ms. Crocker and on Friday they made a joint announcement over the PA, which really surprised me.

  At first I thought that was embarrassing, especially when Jeremy said, “What, like a kiddie carnival? Are you serious? We’re in the fourth grade now, remember?”

  Then a bunch of kids came up and said they wanted to come. Our house is on a pretty busy street, so it was easy to tell them where it was. Rayshawn said he’d come after basketball practice, which made me happy and nervous and exaggerate the number of Nerf guns we have for sale. (“There’s like a hundred,” I said. “Seriously. You should get some.” He laughed like I was kidding, the way he always does.) At the end of the day, walking back from our math class, Olga asked if there were any jobs she could help with. I couldn’t picture her helping little kids drop their pennies—I’m not sure if she could see a penny or the place they were aiming—so I said she was welcome to bring any old toys or desserts, or anything else she wouldn’t mind selling.

  The next morning we wake up to the first bad surprise of the day: Polly, my mom’s friend, has shingles and can’t take Dad to her house for the day. I think of shingles as the things on the roofs of houses but apparently it’s also a very painful sickness. “It’s fine,” Mom says, blowing out in a way that makes me pretty sure it’s not fine. “We’ll set Dad up upstairs, with the TV on, and we’ll check on him every half hour or so.”

  “Right,” Martin says. “I’m sure that’ll work. He won’t wonder at all why there’s a million people in the ba
ckyard.”

  For a second, Mom gets seriously mad. “I don’t want him to know why we’re doing this. He’ll feel terrible if he knows this is about his medical bills. Promise you’ll help me, boys.”

  We promise her and then, a few minutes later, we get the second surprise of the day: Olga shows up an hour early, bringing her own table and a box filled with her comic books. Each one has a cardboard cover and is stapled together with her drawings on the front.

  “Are you sure you want to sell these?” I say. “Don’t your parents want to save them or something?”

  Because of their homemade covers, they look a little like the books I made back in kindergarten. My parents’ favorite is still on display on our family room bookshelf. It has two pages: one with a picture of a hill with a face on it, the next with a sentence a teacher helped me write: This is me, dressed up as a hill. I remember my dad reading that one and saying, “Books don’t get much better than this, Benny.”

  Olga lays her books out in a rainbow shape on her table. “These are all copies. We’ve got originals at home.” She pulls out a coffee can with a sign taped to it: Olga Yashenowitz Comic Series for Sale. All Profits to Benafit Benny’s dad’s Medicle Expenses.

  I know some of those words are misspelled, and I feel embarrassed for her and sorry that I said she could bring anything to sell. I should have been clearer. I should have said, You can bring either old toys or desserts. I can’t help worrying that she’ll sit here all day without selling a single book, because why would anyone want to buy a little kid’s book?

  Then I pick one of them up and I’m a little surprised. The graphics are great. The pictures are all divided into real panels with great drawings. I start to read the first one and I’m even more surprised. It’s about a blind girl who discovers she has the superpower of going into other people’s minds and changing what they think. At first she plays tricks with her power. She goes into minds of kids she doesn’t like and makes them forget all the words on the spelling test. Then she makes everyone in the class fail a math test just so she’ll look smart. In the end she realizes it’s not that fun to be the smartest person in the class and that day at lunch, she goes into everyone’s mind and makes them all share their lunches with one girl who forgot hers.

  Okay, so it’s not The Indian in the Cupboard, but it’s good enough that I pick up the next one to see what happens. This time Blind Girl is trying to get strong enough to change grown-ups’ minds. She works and works to get her parents to pick Disneyland for their next vacation instead of some boring historical site with battlefields and museums, which they always do. She almost does it. She hears her mother humming “It’s a Small World” and then: Tragedy! Blind Girl breaks her arm! Her parents feel so bad about it they tell her she should pick their next vacation spot. Disneyland, here they come!

  It’s weird reading these because I remember Olga coming to school in second grade with a cast on her arm. Those were the days when boys really didn’t talk to girls so I don’t think I ever asked how she broke it.

  Over the rest of the morning, when I’m not busy running my games arcade (which, I have to be honest, probably makes the least money of all our setups), I go over to Olga’s table and keep reading her books. In one, Blind Girl goes to camp and saves a drowning boy by teaching his mind how to swim. In that one, Blind Girl also helps a friend at camp not be afraid of the dark. I like how Blind Girl controls people’s thoughts. Usually she whispers something like You can do this. It makes me think about Olga with her fingers on her knees teaching me multiplication. I look over her titles and wonder if I’m in one of these books somewhere.

  “You could buy one,” she says, after I’ve read four. “But you don’t have to. It’s up to you.”

  A few people have bought some, but there’s still a lot left.

  Now that she’s said this I realize I really want to. I want the whole series. I want to figure out how she did this on the computer when she can’t see print very well. I want to talk to her about making an animated movie version of one of these stories using one of my girl Lego minifigures like Poison Ivy or Cat Woman. Maybe she won’t like that idea, but maybe she will.

  I borrow money from my game arcade coffee can, which I can pay back with birthday money from the bank, and I go back to Olga’s table. I offer to pay one dollar each for the first six books in the Blind Girl series. She pulls an already-tied-together stack of books out of a box at her feet and says, “Here you go. Put the money in the can.”

  After that, I watch her table and it turns out she’s selling a lot more than it looks like—she’s leaving the same ones on the table and pulling other copies out of the boxes under the table. One little kid gets done with my game circuit and asks if he can read the copies lying on my chair. “My sister bought them, but she won’t let me look at them until she’s done.”

  By this point we’re getting a little busier, so I say fine. I’ve had about ten kids come through my game arcade, which isn’t a lot but is enough to keep me busy. Overall we’ve had about forty people come, most of them to look over the tag sale and the bake sale. Then I look up the street where more cars are parked and—this freaks me out for a second—I see Mr. Norris and Ms. Crocker get out of his car, then open the back door so Aaron can get out.

  I look around the yard and try to decide how this will look to them. A lot of people have come and gone. There’s about twenty people right now, standing around in clusters. A line of parents and toddlers are at Martin’s roller coaster, which is going even better this year because there are three vehicles (cardboard boxes) and two friends to help with the pushing that is everyone’s favorite part. Even his friends have gotten into it, making sweaty faces while the babies laugh in their boxes.

  Mom is at the pie table. It’s loaded with things other people have brought, including zucchini breads that no one will buy probably and a huge chocolate chip cookie, frosted and shaped like a football, which I really want to buy with the rest of the money in my can (which I’ll also have to pay back from my bank account).

  George is meant to be “helping” Mom at the bake sale table, which means he’s wandering around doing whatever he wants, which makes me even more nervous. I see Mr. Norris and Aaron walking up the street, coming closer. Aaron is wearing another candy necklace. If it wasn’t obvious by his outfit that there’s something wrong with him, he’s holding his dad’s hand, which pretty much makes it clear. George still holds hands with our parents, too, even though he’s in sixth grade. Not all the time though. They try to remind him holding hands is for street crossing, not walking around the grocery store.

  The main thing is, I don’t want George to run over and scare Aaron. I also don’t want him to start screeching and making Aaron’s noises back to him, thinking that’s a good way to say hello. I can tell how nervous Mr. Norris is about bringing Aaron to our carnival.

  When they first got out of the car, I assumed I was seeing something shocking, like next week he might announce that he and Ms. Crocker are getting married. I know that happens sometimes; teachers marry each other because who else do they meet? Watching them walk closer though, I’m not so sure. Ms. Crocker looks nervous, too, like she doesn’t know Aaron and isn’t sure what to do with him. That happens all the time with George. Nice people get really awkward if they don’t know him. Which makes me think they’re friends but probably not getting married anytime soon. She’s here to help, because he wanted to bring Aaron and maybe he wasn’t sure he could do it alone.

  Aaron walks toward us, chewing on the hand that Mr. Norris isn’t holding. It’s hard to tell if he’s hurting himself or not. But he’s scared. I can tell.

  All morning I’ve been wishing we had more people and a bigger crowd and now I wish there was no one else here. I bet I could get Aaron to do the Penny Drop if no one else was around. That would probably surprise Mr. Norris and make him happy.

  I feel like running over to George and saying he has to go inside the house and not come out for at l
east half an hour. He’s the one who’s most likely to do weird, unpredictable things that might scare Aaron away. I leave my post and run over to Mom. “Mr. Norris is here! With Aaron! You have to get George inside.” I’m trying to whisper and not seem hysterical, but I do anyway.

  “Benny, I can’t make George—” Mom says and then looks up and sees Mr. Norris and Aaron on the edge of the lawn. Aaron’s up on his toes. It looks like he doesn’t want to step on the grass. Mom takes it all in—the two adults trying to reassure Aaron, the big deal this is, just stepping on grass—and she says, “Okay, let me see what I can do.”

  She heads toward George, who’s sitting on our old swing set, twirling himself around. Before she gets to him, though, something happens that makes everyone on the lawn turn around in the same direction.

  I hear someone say, “Oh my God,” and I look: Dad is standing on the back porch, wearing no hat or bandanna. His bald head shines in the sunlight; his scars look like train tracks across his forehead and over his ear. My stomach tightens. He is wearing a big smile, holding up one hand to wave, like he has no idea at all how scary he looks to all these people.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “BRIAN!” MOM CALLS. SHE HAS TO run over to him. Otherwise he might try to walk down the stairs and he can’t do that without help. His depth perception is bad and one leg is so weak it buckles underneath him.

  I know this is Mom’s worst fear for today. She’s worried about Dad but she’s also worried about everyone seeing the truth about Dad and feeling sorry for us.

  Now it’s too late—people are waving and calling out hello.

  “Oh, Brian! There you are,” Carla, an old friend, calls out. “You look wonderful! Come down and say hello!”

  Dad smiles and doesn’t move. Mom is at the stairs, moving up toward him. I look around at who’s on the lawn and try to think. How many people here know that he still can’t talk? These aren’t our good friends. Our good friends came early and are already gone. The people here now are acquaintances and some strangers.