Dumb Luck

by Lesley Choyce

  DUMB

  LUCK

  Lesley Choyce

  Luck never gives. It only lends.

  — Swedish proverb

  contents

  chapterone

  chaptertwo

  chapterthree

  chapterfour

  chapterfive

  chaptersix

  chapterseven

  chaptereight

  chapternine

  chapterten

  chaptereleven

  chaptertwelve

  chapterthirteen

  chapterfourteen

  chapterfifteen

  chaptersixteen

  chapterseventeen

  chaptereighteen

  chapternineteen

  chaptertwenty

  chaptertwentyone

  chaptertwentytwo

  chaptertwentythree

  chaptertwentyfour

  chaptertwentyfive

  chaptertwentysix

  chaptertwentyseven

  chaptertwentyeight

  chaptertwentynine

  chapterthirty

  chapterthirtyone

  chapterthirtytwo

  chapterthirtythree

  chapterthirtyfour

  chapterone

  It all started the day I fell out of the tree.

  Yes, a tree. I loved climbing trees. Big trees. Tall trees. Difficult to climb trees. I’d been climbing trees for as long as I could remember. Even though I was now seventeen, I still had a thing about climbing high up into the branches of a good tree. It was two days before my eighteenth birthday. School had just started and I was hating it. I’d never been very good at school. I’d failed grade seven and had to repeat it, so I was a year behind everyone else my age.

  Most kids my age were in their last year of high school, but I had two years to go before I could get on with my life—my real life. I guess you could say that September and school combined to make me feel depressed. This is why Kayla asked me if I wanted to climb this giant old oak tree she’d discovered in a field not far out of town.

  In my home town of Greenville, it seemed like they were cutting down all the trees to make way for shopping centers and strip malls and wider roads. I had counted twelve trees that used to be my climbing trees cut down with chain saws—just in my neighborhood. Nobody but Kayla and I seemed to care. And I just figured it was all part of the bad luck that had been dogging me all my life.

  But Kayla grabbed me after school, took one look at my face, and said, “Let’s go climbing.” I knew immediately what she meant.

  So, while other kids from school went to the mall or hit the coffee shop or hung out in the park, toking up or otherwise looking for trouble, my best friend and I took the Number 12 bus to the end of the line and then we hiked through somebody’s pastureland until we came to the most amazing tree I’d ever seen around here.

  Kayla and I had been climbing trees together since we were five years old. Kayla was my friend. Not a girlfriend. Just a friend. But a good friend. She had a habit of calling me Brando instead of my real name, Brandon. Nobody did this but her. She was smarter than me, but you could tell she didn’t think very highly of herself. Even at seventeen (and a year ahead of me at school), she dressed like a boy, never combed her hair or wore makeup, was a little overweight, and had no boyfriends. She had what they call on talk shows “low self-esteem.” But she was a fearless climber.

  The sunlight was sending these amazing knives of light through the branches of the huge tree. It was unreal. It was very difficult to get up to the first branch, which must have been ten feet off the ground. I gripped my hands together, then Kayla put her foot in and lunged upward until she grabbed onto the branch. Then she pulled herself up, wrapped her legs around the branch, and reached down. I took her hand and she hoisted me up. The girl was strong.

  We were laughing and joking around as we climbed higher and higher. My September blues were gone. Kayla’s self-esteem was improving by the minute. We were like little kids again and it seemed impossible that in two more days I’d be eighteen. If I wanted to, I could now vote and I could join the military. But I didn’t want to do either of those things. Right then, all I wanted to do was climb trees for the rest of my life and forget about school, forget about the world, forget about whatever lay ahead in my life.

  Kayla kept going higher and I kept following her. I’d never seen her so full of spirit and so happy. I don’t know how high up we were, but we were way up there. I mean way up there, and the branch we were sitting on together swayed a bit in the wind. I didn’t look down. We were both breathing kind of heavy.

  And then she did the weirdest thing. She leaned over, took my head in her hands, and kissed me.

  Not on the mouth. Just on the cheek.

  It came as a complete shock to my system. Kayla had never ever done such a thing in all the years we’d been hanging out together. I think I stopped breathing.

  I guess I must have let go of the branch and leaned a little. Just then a gust of wind shook the tree and, before I realized what was happening, I fell.

  Oh, I’d fallen out of trees before. But not a tree like this.

  I remember screaming on the way down. And Kayla shouting out my name.

  I remember scraping my ear on a branch and hitting another big limb with my shoulder. I even remember the impact when I hit the ground. Chest first—knocking the wind out of me. And then my head immediately connected with something very hard.

  And then it went black.

  And that was when my luck began to change.

  chaptertwo

  Through most of my life, I (and everyone else) had considered me unlucky. I almost never won any games. I was not good at sports so I didn’t go out for any teams. I had a habit of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I showed up late when I should have been on time. I showed up on time when it would have been better to show up late. I ended up at the end of long lines. I lost things. I never had any spending money. I’d had a couple of crappy part-time jobs that I’d been fired from and, of course, no girlfriends.

  Some of that was my own fault, I know. Some of it was bad luck.

  So it seemed strange that the first thing the doctor in the hospital said to me when I woke up was this: “You are one lucky son of a bitch.”

  My head hurt like hell. “Ouch,” I said out loud.

  “Head hurt?” Doc asked. For some insane reason he was smiling.

  “Yeah,” I answered. He shook his head. He looked like he was about to laugh. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m Dr. Yates. You’re Brandon, right?”

  “I think so,” I said. Someone had a hammer going inside my skull.

  “I hear you fell out of a tree.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, your head hit a rock. That will explain the discomfort you’re feeling.”

  Discomfort was not the word. I also now realized that I had a serious pain in my shoulder and it hurt when I breathed. “I don’t really remember much. How did I get here?”

  “Ambulance. The paramedics told us it didn’t look good. You were in pretty rough shape. We could talk about all this later if you like.”

  I took another breath—pain, but nothing I couldn’t live with. The head was still pounding but I wanted to hear more.

  “Maybe I should bring your parents in,” Dr. Yates said. “They’re just outside.”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.” I really didn’t want to see my parents just now. My dad would have that look. My mom would be ... well, Mom. “What do you mean by lucky?”

  Dr. Yates grabbed an X-ray that was in a
folder at the end of my bed and held it up to the sunlight coming into the room. I tried to focus on it. He pointed to a spot on the shadowy thing that was the image of my skull. “Right there. That’s where you connected with the rock. If ever there was a bad location to take impact on the head, that would be the place.”

  “Just my luck,” I heard myself say.

  “But that’s the thing. You were lucky. Your skull did fracture a bit but it somehow fractured so that it distributed the force of the impact and it didn’t really do any lasting damage.”

  “But it still hurts like hell.”

  He waved his hand in the air as if it was nothing. “We’ll get you some Tylenol. Didn’t want to give you any heavy meds. We wanted you back with us and conscious. You’ve got a fractured skull, Brandon, and a concussion, but the good news is you will be one hundred percent okay in no time.”

  “My father always said I had a thick skull,” I said and started to laugh, but could tell that if I laughed, everything would hurt worse. Still, it was starting to sink in. It was good to be alive.

  “He was right, I guess,” the doc said. He was still smiling and seemed to find me and my situation strangely amusing. And then he said this: “You are about the luckiest person I ever met. If I had your luck, I’d go out and buy a lottery ticket as soon as I was out of here.”

  It was a funny thing for him to say, but it stayed with me.

  My mom was crying when she saw me. But then she cried a lot. She hugged me and that hurt, but I tried not to show it. After a minute, I could feel her warm tears seeping through the hospital gown. My dad looked very concerned at first. “You gonna be all right, Brandon?” he asked.

  “Yeah, the doctor says I’ll be fine.”

  He almost held back and, at first, I thought he wouldn’t go there.

  But he did.

  I watched his lips tighten and then he said, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  I’d learned a long time ago not to answer his questions. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest or safest thing in the world to be way up there in the branches of an old oak tree. But it made me happy.

  And not a lot of things did.

  That’s when I remembered the kiss. And Kayla.

  “Is Kayla here?” I asked my dad.

  My dad just shook his head. He never liked Kayla. She had never been very polite to him and I knew she thought he was too pushy and bullheaded. But then she never had much in the way of social skills. And, of course, my dad didn’t like most people anyway.

  My mom stopped sobbing and looked at me.

  “The doctor says I’m okay, really. Saved by a thick skull.”

  “That, I believe,” my old man said.

  “What about Kayla?” I asked my mom.

  “She was here but they sent her home.”

  “She must have been the one to get me here. I was with her. We were way out of town.”

  “I know,” my dad said. “Climbing trees, for God’s sake. What are you? A moron? You’re not ten years old anymore.” His hands were in the air.

  “I need to talk to Kayla,” I said to my mom, trying to avoid my father’s stare.

  “I think you should rest,” she said.

  The head was still pounding, the shoulder and ribs sore, but I needed to hear the part of the story I didn’t remember. How did she get help? How did I get here?

  The doctor popped back in. “Family reunion going well?” he asked.

  My father just glared at him.

  “When can I go home?” I asked.

  “I want to keep you overnight. Just in case. You can probably go home tomorrow morning. But I’d like you to take a couple of days off from school.”

  That made me smile. Yeah, a couple of days off from school. Just what the doctor ordered. Maybe my luck was changing after all.

  chapterthree

  The hospital food was much better than I expected and I ate like a horse. I tried calling Kayla at her home but no one was answering. I tried her cell phone a couple of times but no luck there either. Her battery was probably dead. I was worried that she was blaming herself for what had happened. It was kind of her fault. What was she thinking? She’d never done anything like that before. We were just friends. Good friends don’t kiss in trees.

  I fell asleep with a dull, throbbing drum beat in my head and a feeling of pressure in my chest, but it was a good sleep and a sound one.

  When I woke up the next morning, the first face I saw was hers. It was Kayla, smiling at me in the morning sunlight. Her hair was brushed and she looked somehow different. “Brando, I’m so sorry,” she said. “It was all my fault.”

  No way could I be mad at her. “Forget it,” I said. “Let’s just forget it.” I meant the kiss, but I didn’t want to use the word.

  “You all right?”

  “Apparently I have one thick skull and some amazing luck.”

  “I am so glad. I thought you were going to die.”

  I laughed as if it was no big deal. She looked at me directly in the eyes just then and we held the look, but then she suddenly looked away and out the window. “No more climbing trees for me for a while,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t have taken you so high.”

  “I shouldn’t have lost my balance. Let’s leave it at that.” But I was dying to know the rest of the story. The part where I was unconscious and lying on the ground and what happened after that. “Kayla, how did I get here?”

  “An ambulance,” she said.

  “I know that, but how did you get help for me way out there?”

  “After you fell, I climbed down. You were breathing but not conscious. I started to lose it. I really did. I started to cry. I didn’t know what to do. Then I pulled myself together and tried calling 911 on my cell phone. But I couldn’t get a signal.”

  “We were pretty far out of town.” I could tell she was having a hard time telling the story. She looked like she was ready to cry and I was beginning to see how hard this must have been on her.

  “So I had to climb back up in the tree,” she said.

  “How?” I remembered how we had to help each other to get to the lowest limb the first time.

  “I don’t know. I just did. When I got back up, almost to where we’d been sitting, I finally got a signal and got through. It seemed to take forever for them to get there. But the ambulance drove out across the field to us. And I came back here with you. But you never woke up the whole time. It was the worst time of my life.” She was crying now.

  I touched her shoulder. “But I’m going to be okay. I’ll be out of here today and I get to take some time off from school.” I smiled at her and brushed back her hair. It felt smooth and soft in my hands and it felt good. “So it has a happy ending,” I said.

  But it was only the beginning.

  chapterfour

  Before I left the hospital that day, Dr. Yates took a picture of him and me together with the X-ray of my skull beside my head. It was a very funny photo and he said he would email me a copy. “Just remember how lucky you are,” were his final words.

  Kayla had gone off to school and my mom drove me home and was doting on me all day. Later in the afternoon she said, “Tomorrow’s your birthday. Do you want to do anything special?”

  “Not really,” I said. Truth was I wasn’t all that excited about turning eighteen. I didn’t feel like I could possibly be that old. I was still a kid. I didn’t want to grow any older. And I sure didn’t want more responsibilities. I didn’t really know what I wanted out of life. Finish school, I guess, and get the hell out of there. Maybe go to trade school and become an electrician. My dad said electricians make good money and you could work your own hours if you wanted to. What I really wanted to be was an airplane pilot, but everyone knew I didn’t have the smarts for that. Or the luck.

  Who would want to hire an airpla
ne pilot who was not very smart, one who got left back in school and, in his spare time, fell out of trees? No way could that ever happen.

  So the birthday came and went. I stayed home from school. There was a cake and eighteen candles. My mom said she couldn’t believe that her baby was now a man. Oh God. And my dad had a couple too many beers—in celebration of my birthday—and gave me a lecture about how life is not easy. He said, “It never was and never will be for people like us. So you just need to suck it up and get on with it.”

  The next day I still didn’t go to school. I was still recovering but my head felt better. I was okay. But I was tired of hanging around my house, watching really stupid videos on the Internet, so I walked down to the corner store, a place called “Dave’s Pit Stop,” and bought some chips and a bottle of Pepsi. Over the counter, I noticed the sign that said: This Week’s Super-Lotto is Worth $3 Million.

  I’d never bought a lottery ticket in my life. I guess I could have, but legally you weren’t supposed to be allowed to buy one until you turned eighteen.

  And then I thought, Guess who just turned eighteen?

  And I remembered what Dr. Yates had said.

  No way.

  But I was bored. I had five dollars left in my pocket. I picked up one of those little paper slips where you pencil in the numbers you want. I asked Dave, “How do you do this?”

  Dave looked at me like I was stupid. “You never did one before?”

  “No.”

  “You gotta be eighteen,” he said. “They come around here checking on me sometimes. Can’t sell smokes to kids. Can’t sell ’em beer or lottery tickets.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just had a birthday.”

  He shrugged like he could care less. “Well, you take the pencil and blacken in the little boxes—pick six numbers. Any six. Who knows? You might get lucky.”

  I picked my six numbers. 3, 12, 21, 29, 33, 41.

  I paid Dave, who had not asked to see any ID after all. Dave slipped my piece of paper into a machine and handed me my first ever official lottery ticket. I stared at it. My chance to be a multimillionaire. Yeah, right.