An Ideal Boyfriend

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  “Really?”

  “I guess you weren’t as interesting as you thought you were,” said Arlee.

  That’s what friends are for, right? Making you feel good about yourself.

  “Don’t worry about it. If you mess up again, they’ll be right back. In my family we have stories about the press. They have a sense for sniffing out the worst moments in your life and then spreading them all over like you never had any good moments,” Arlee continued.

  “Especially if the bad moments happen to be in pirate outfits, right?” teased Mabel.

  “I have never had a pirate’s outfit. Well, maybe an eye patch,” said Arlee. Then she had my parents in stitches, walking around as if she had a peg leg and she made Mabel play the part of her parrot.

  “You heard anything from St. James?” asked Mabel later, when things were quieter.

  “About if they’re going to let me stay?”

  “And Rob,” said Mabel.

  I shook my head. “It’s all up in the air.”

  “The way it is for most people all the time, I guess,” said Mabel.

  “Which makes us normal, right? Maybe we don’t want to be at St. James anymore, so that’s a good thing.”

  Mabel and Arlee laughed at that. “Wherever you go to high school, you are never going to be normal, Trudy, no matter how much luck you lose.”

  “She is special, isn’t she?” said Dad.

  They had a moment then, toasting me with our Cokes and we ate donuts before we tried going down to the lobby. Mabel was right. Everyone was gone and we were free.

  Chapter 18: Rob

  My parents bailed me out of jail on Friday afternoon, but they claimed they couldn’t do anything for Art. Apparently, he was the dangerous one, since he knew how to remake the experiments, and Excel Pharmaceutical had enough pull that they didn’t want him allowed out. I didn’t know how to feel about the fact that no one thought I was dangerous. Since I’d admitted I had no luck, I guess people thought that I couldn’t do anything worth anything. Maybe they were right.

  “We could have gotten you some help. You should have told us as soon as you suspected your lack of luck,” said Mom, when we were on the way out to the car. There were plenty of reporters and cameras to get past, but we were used to those. It was Trudy I was worried about, though. She and her parents had already left, but I didn’t know where they had gone. I hoped they’d found some place away from all this.

  “I still think that test you took could be wrong,” said Dad.

  I had been mad at them before, but it was fading now. I felt bad that I’d come out like that, in public, without giving them a chance to deal with it first. That hadn’t been fair. How had I expected they would act?

  “It wasn’t wrong,” I said. “I don’t have luck, Dad. I never have.”

  He got into the car and put his hands on the wheels. I thought he was going to start driving without saying anything else, but he let the engine idle for a minute or so. Then he said, “I meant that you might have luck in certain areas. The expensive, complicated tests, the ones you have to take in a hospital, can show you luck in every area.”

  So maybe I was only below average in school, money and politics—the things that mattered to my parents? And maybe I could be great in cooking? Or fashion? Or volleyball?

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mom.

  “It might, at some point,” said Dad. “I’m only trying to be precise. The test he took was a basic one.”

  “You’re not still hoping that my test scores got mixed up with someone else’s, are you? I know I thought that at first. I wanted to believe it more than I really believed it, though. I’d suspected for a long time. The test was just confirmation for me.”

  “I think your grandmother tried to hint to me something about you being different. Before she went away,” said Dad.

  “I’d like to go talk to her. See if spending more time with her would help.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Dad.

  I hoped he had changed, even if only a little.

  “We’ve disappointed you, I think,” said Mom. “You were afraid of what would happen when it all came out, and you were right to be afraid. We should have handled it better.”

  “I’m pretty sure I disappointed you, too,” I said. “Lots of times.”

  Once we got home, though, the family togetherness thing was over. Dad said he had to get back to work. Mom had an appointment outside of the house. I was left wandering around, seeing the signs of the police search. The racquetball room was empty, but there were bits and pieces of Art’s experiments left. Nothing that mattered, I was sure.

  I went back upstairs into my room and lay on my bed, doing nothing, trying to think about nothing. I had dinner that night with my parents, and tried to go to sleep. I finally fell asleep about dawn on Saturday morning. When I woke up, it was late in the afternoon and I realized that I had no idea what was going to happen with the rest of my life. No one had said anything about sending me back to St. James.

  Trudy had been bailed out before I was, and I picked up my phone, considering calling her. That when I realized I had a message waiting for me, from Art.

  It was dated from Thursday night, when I was in the midst of the reporters on my parents’ lawn, telling them about my lack of luck.

  Curious, I pressed play. I listened.

  It was Art, giving my step by step instructions on exactly how to do the electricity experiment that would give me more luck. He said that the device the police were taking was more reliable and more complex, because he’d had a chance to refine it after a few iterations. But the first time the idea struck him, about electricity maybe giving someone more luck, he had made a very simple device to shock himself. I needed a lot of current, so I had to gut our oven, and use its wires.

  It made me laugh while I was doing it, that this was Art’s idea of a “simple” experiment, what he’d try to do first. No wonder he’d been kicked out of every dorm room he’d tried to share with someone else, along with a list of fines for things he’d ruined.

  When I was finished, I checked each step three times, and finally, I deleted Art’s message.

  I stared at the wires I was about to hook myself up to. Was I crazy to shock myself with that much electricity? Or was it more crazy not to try it?

  I wasn’t born with luck. I’d lived my whole life without it. I wanted to be accepted for who I was without luck. I wanted to believe that luck had nothing to do with Trudy loving me.

  And here I was, ready to jolt myself with electricity to get more luck. Because I couldn’t see any other way for us to get out of this mess. The only way to fight Laura was to use fire to her fire. In this case, rather literally. She had tons of luck and that meant she could manipulate everything. She had made sure her family’s company Excel Pharmaceutical had all the information to do the experiments. She was going to keep coming after me and Trudy until she had her full revenge on us. And what about Art? He had given up some of his luck, too, and I wasn’t sure if he was going to try to get it back, even if he did get out of jail anytime soon.

  But what if I killed myself? It seemed entirely too likely that I had made some mistake with Art’s instructions, or that I hadn’t made a mistake and something would go wrong anyway. Art promised me that he’d figured this all out, that there was no risk to me doing this. He said that so long as I was grounded, the electricity would go straight through me. And after all, this was probably the way humans had started getting luck from ancient times.

  Art claimed that being hit by lightning strikes frequently during some weird weather early on was probably what gave the Romans the edge in terms of civilization. And the Greeks before them. Lighting might even have been the reason the first ape walked upright, or the first human learned how to use a tool. It might have caused the first human to speak a word. It wasn’t fire, Art said, and he sounded excited as he said it. It was electricity. That was what gave man the ability to touch fire without being bu
rned, to use fire. Luck.

  I trusted Art. It was myself I didn’t trust so much.

  Trudy loved me whether I had luck or not. My parents were going to come around to accepting it, probably. But what is it they say? A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I had to do this.

  I let the crude device charge up. Then when I could hear it humming, I reached a hand out for it. I started counting. Art had said to start counting first, before I touched it. He said to count to five and then let go. I hoped I made it to five. I hope I could still let go then.

  One, two. . .

  I touched it and all thought went out of my head.

  My whole body started to shake. I thought I could see stars in my eyes, and then my vision went wild. There were weird sparks and fireworks everywhere and I could hear music in my mind. Not any music I’d ever heard before. It was like the music of the universe, the music of stars shooting through the sky and mountains moving on the mantle beneath the earth, the music of the rising chaos and of black holes churning through matter, and of luck itself, the purest form of power and connection. It was luck that was at the base of the universe, luck that set life itself into motion, life that caused the Big Bang. It was luck that kept the universe from exploding, and it would keep it going until bad luck took over, and became stronger than the good.

  Five, I thought, and I let go.

  I don’t know where the two, three, and four had gone, but it felt right somehow.

  And once I had let go of the device, I knew that I had let go at just the right time, before it started smoking and jerking around the room. I must have gotten enough luck by the time I thought of letting go that I had survived what could have killed me. What should have killed me.

  What had Art been thinking? He’d survived it, but he had luck. It made me wonder how many scientific experiments were completely bogus because the person who did them had luck. Yeah, they were supposed to be repeatable, but I don’t think many people without luck went into science in the first place. It was too dangerous.

  I was breathing hard, but I felt good. Different. It’s hard to describe what the difference was. Not stronger or tougher. Not happier. Not especially sensitive. I was no super hero.

  But I felt—lucky.

  I felt like good things were about to happen to me. And when the phone rang, I was sure it was just the beginning.

  Chapter 19: Trudy

  Saturday afternoon back at my dorm room, I called Rob to tell him about Laura and the bad luck bacteria vial I’d spilled on her.

  “If she has so much luck, how could she let that happen?” I asked. He knew her. Maybe he could figure it out.

  “You surprised her,” he said. “You were stronger than she thought, Trudy. But that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve always known you were stronger than she is. That’s why I love you so much.”

  “Did she really think I would just sit there and do nothing to stop her?”

  “She was drunk with her own luck,” said Rob. “And also, she sees you at school and thinks that being nice means that you wouldn’t defend yourself if attacked.”

  “Does everyone think I am so pathetically easy to manipulate?” I asked. Being nice didn’t mean being a pushover. I’d never attacked Laura personally at school and I guess I could have tried. But so long as she kept away from me, I saw no need to do it.

  “You don’t use power the way that most people do. You never have. But that’s not the same as being weak.”

  “Well, I thought about doing it. For a couple of seconds,” I admitted.

  “Giving up all your luck for me? Did you think it would be romantic?”

  I snorted. “If I did, that would be pretty stupid. Being in love doesn’t mean making yourself into someone else’s doormat. It’s seeing the best part in the other person and being even more your own self than you were before.” It sounds cheesy to put it that way, but it was true. I didn’t want Rob to change for me, but I didn’t want to have to give up who I was for him, either.

  “And that’s why I love you, Trudy,” said Rob. “You make me more myself.” There was something he wasn’t telling me. I could hear it in his voice, but I didn’t bug him about it. We would have time to talk, lots of time. When this was all over.

  “I worry about Art, though,” he put in. “What about Excel Pharmaceutical? What are they going to do with his experiment? We can’t exactly trust them to use it for the good of all mankind.”

  “I’m not that naive. They’re a company. They’re supposed to make money.”

  “I just don’t know what we can do to stop them. I hoped that if I was lucky enough, it might just drop in my lap,” said Rob.

  Lucky? “Rob, what did you do?” I asked.

  He hesitated, and when he did speak, it was very softly. “I used the electricity treatment. Art told me how to build a device at home and I just used it, not more than an hour ago. I’m not sure what the results are going to be, other than that you called me. I consider that the best luck I could possibly have.”

  “Rob, are you all right?” What had he been thinking? Did he have any idea what my life would be like if he wasn’t around anymore? Maybe that was selfish of me to think like that, but what I’d done to Laura was for him. For us. “You must have had luck of some kind if you survived the initial shock,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s bad luck for me to get good luck,” said Rob. “After all, this is going to make my parents happy. And maybe even more interfering in my life.”

  “I’m not sure that’s possible,” I said.

  “Oh, believe me. It is.”

  While I tried to wrap my mind around that idea, I could hear my parents laughing with Mabel and Arlee. My real friends were getting along well with them, which was a good sign for them staying here for a while.

  “So now you have luck and I have luck. How could we not be happy together?” I asked.

  “Trudy, us being happy doesn’t have to do with luck,” said Rob confidently.

  “If you believed that, why didn’t you tell me before now? About you not having luck? You lied to everyone.” Including me.

  “Yeah, well,” said Rob. “I was afraid. I shouldn’t have been. That wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

  “Maybe this is all a sign that we don’t belong together,” I said, not wanting to believe it.

  “Are you trying to break up with me?” said Rob.

  I was quiet.

  “You know that’s exactly what Laura wanted, with all of this.”

  And I was supposed to stay with him just to spite Laura? “She went to a lot of trouble just to break us up.” Not that this was just about breaking us up. It had something to do with money and her family’s company, too. And proving herself to her parents.

  “But she’s Laura. She likes to do everything big and dramatic.”

  “This was big and dramatic all right,” I said. Suddenly, I had an idea. “Rob, can you email me the information about the electricity? All the voltages and photos, whatever you have on it?”

  “Sure,” said Rob. “But what are you going to do with it? Excel already has it.”

  “Exactly. But we want to make sure everyone else has it, too. The specifics for the voltage and everything seem like they would be a lot easier to give to everyone than the bacteria.”

  “I don’t—” Rob started and then he stopped. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, I see. That is genius.”

  If everyone had as much or as little luck as they wanted, everything was going to change in my life, big and small. St. James would be completely different, if it existed at all after this. And what about politics and elections? Would they be cleaner? What about Hollywood? What about science? And weather? And everything? It hurt my brain even to think about it.

  “You sure this is what we should do?”

  “You have a better idea?” I asked Rob.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Well, then, check with Art to be sure. But then you should do it, I think. You’re the luckier
one now, I think. It will work best if you do it.”

  I hung up and turned back to my parents while I waited for Rob to text me. It felt so strange now between us. Like we were really seeing each other for the first time. I wondered if that happened to other people, too. You think you’re in love, and you are. But something happens and things change, and you fall in love all over again, as if with a completely different person. Since you’re a completely different person, too.

  “Is Rob all right?” Mom asked when I had hung up the phone. Mabel and Arlee had gone home and now it was just Mom and Dad and me.

  “He’s fine.” I tried to figure out how to ask them what I needed. Once Rob and I had done this, Laura could have all the luck back she wanted. That could make her dangerous to people who didn’t choose to have as much luck, certainly. But it wasn’t Laura I was thinking about right now. It was my parents.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” said Dad.

  I sat down with relief.

  “Now, tell us what’s going on,” said Dad.

  Right. Single syllables or less for my dad. Not because he wasn’t smart, but because he had no interest in fancying things up for no reason.

  I explained Art’s experiment to them as best I could in short words and simple sentences. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

  “So you can give yourself luck with a shock?” asked Dad.

  “A calibrated one, yes,” I said.

  “And there’s a bacterial infection that takes luck away from you?”

  I nodded. “Always has been. It may be the real reason that people have bad luck. It’s just we didn’t know before. But now we can control it.”

  “So we can have all the luck we want?” asked Mom. “Anyone can?”

  I stared at her closely. Her eyes were shining and she was looking at Dad, not me. She held out her hand to him and he reached toward her. Then they sat down on either side of me on the couch and their arms were around me.

  “Isn’t that great? All your problems will be over,” I said. “No one will lack luck now. There won’t be any poverty anymore. No people starving in third world countries.” Heck, there might not even be such a thing as a third-world country anymore. Those beauty queen pageants where people talk about ending world hunger in vacuous terms, we were going to make them completely irrelevant. People would have to think of something else to worry about.