The Higher Power of Lucky

Lucky sat on her bed thinking this over. Some tears came out of her eyes, and she wished Brigitte would come—not so she could sit on her lap and let herself be hugged, but so that Brigitte could see what a sad and abandoned child she was, an orphan whose Guardian was too busy for hugging. As soon as she began imagining the shocked and concerned look on Brigitte’s face if Brigitte were to see her crying, Lucky cried some more. HMS Beagle, who slept on the round rug beside the bed, came to lay her head on Lucky’s pillow.

“Poor, poor HMS Beagle,” Lucky whispered. “When Brigitte goes back to France you will have to go live with Short Sammy, or with Miles and his grandma. I doubt the orphanage in L.A. will admit dogs.”

Sadly, lonesomely, she got into her hot bed, kicking the sheet away.

Lucky lay on her back, her pillow feeling as hot as if it had been baked in the oven. She decided to run away very soon. If she ran away, Brigitte would have to call the police, and the police would call her father and tell him he had better have a talk with Brigitte about doing her Guardian job a little better than that. Lucky liked the idea that by running away she could make people do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.

Brigitte was entirely wrong as a choice for a Guardian, Lucky decided. Even though she had come to California right after Lucky’s mom died to take care of Lucky, she was just too French and too unmotherly. She should have had lessons or some kind of manual on how to do the job. If they had online courses in how to manage restaurants, they should at least have courses on how to be a good Guardian or even how to be a good actual birth mom, which was a more important job than restauranting. Lucky thought that writing this manual would be a good project for her once she was grown up.

The manual would be called,

Certificated Course in How to Raise a Girl

for Guardians and Actual Mothers

with Diploma

When she ran away, everyone would be worried and sad, and Miles would miss her horribly. The thought of how much Miles would miss her made Lucky cry again. And Lincoln! Probably Lincoln would be so sad his brain would quit sending knot-tying secretions. Tears ran down the sides of her face and into her ears, which felt strange. She needed to blow her nose but sniffed hard instead. The mucus she swallowed tasted like the biggest sadness in the world. Even the crickets outside sounded mournful.

Drying her face with the sheet, Lucky turned on her side and flipped the soggy pillow over. Running away takes very good planning. She already had her survival kit. She thought of a few more items to take that most people wouldn’t consider necessary for survival. They were not things you can eat or drink or use for protection or to get rescued or to keep from being bored. They were things that Lucky’s heart needed in order to stay brave and not falter.

She would run away to the old miners’ dugout caves and stay about a week, then she would see what next. If the rescuers and the police still hadn’t found her, maybe she would sneak back into the town on a Saturday morning and hide under the porch of Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon at the back of Dot’s house to find out what people were saying about her disappearance while they got their hair done.

Lucky arranged some permed curls over her ear to keep bugs from crawling in, and she was almost asleep when she heard Brigitte tiptoe to her open doorway.

“Are you asleep, Lucky?” she whispered.

Lucky pretended to be sleeping. She’d given Brigitte a chance to talk, but Brigitte had had more important things to do. Now it was too late. Lucky breathed deeply and slowly, in and out, and waited for Brigitte to tiptoe away, but she must have stayed there in the doorway for a long time. Lucky had not heard the sound of her leaving when she finally did fall asleep for real.

14. The First Sign

Lucky didn’t realize that she would get Three Signs telling her that it was the exact perfect day to run away. Her running-away idea was even more definite Monday morning, and it was very thorough, rather than being just a whim where you could make mistakes or do something tragical. She had told HMS Beagle that they would probably take off as soon as she got home from school.

She had to jog uphill, her survival kit slapping her back, to meet the school bus in time. She saw Lincoln waiting in the very back of the bus and Miles skipping—he had just learned to skip—down from his house. At the wheel, her elbow sticking out the window, Sandi, the bus driver, glowered at Lucky. She looked at her watch and shook her head. The exhaust from the bus drowned out the fresh smell of the new morning.

“Hurry up, Miles,” Lucky yelled as she waited by the front door of the bus, panting. “He’s coming,” she called up to Sandi, who shook her head again.