The Higher Power of Lucky

“Yes, she is! Your grandmother said so.” Lucky leaned over Miles, her meanness gland pumping. “And I’m not your mother either! I’m not taking care of you! So go home!”

Miles looked up at her with his eyes full of tears. He threw the book on the floor and kicked it. He started crying hard. “I’m never coming back!” he shouted, and ran out into the wild brown wind.

Good, thought Lucky. Then for no reason she got a sudden exploding idea. She rushed to Brigitte’s trailer and flung open the closet. The perfumy smell of Brigitte wafted out of it. There were jackets and a couple of dresses, and neatly folded piles of surgical pants and shirts. At the very end of the rod was Brigitte’s red silk dress, in a clear plastic dry-cleaner’s bag.

The dress felt like a pile of feathers, almost too light and silky to touch. It made Lucky feel she should wash her hands. It was a dress you would wear only for something very important, like coming to California to become someone’s Guardian. The tag said “La Fortune, Galleries Lafayette, Paris.” Brigitte hadn’t worn it since the day she arrived, but Lucky still remembered the dancy twirly shimmeringness of that dress.

Lucky yanked off her jeans and top and left them on the floor. She pulled the silk dress over her head. The hem came to the tops of her socks. It was too loose to really fit her, but it felt different next to her skin, not at all like her regular clothes. It turned her into someone else, someone beautiful and sophisticated, who could make a dessert that had flames coming out of it on purpose. Her regular clothes were faded from many washings and from the sun, but the redness of this dress was the same thing for your eyes as a sonic boom is for your ears, or a jalapeño pepper is for your mouth.

She felt herself through the fabric and twisted like when you do the hootchy-kootchy, to move the silk against her skin. She felt sort of French and sort of lit-up and wished suddenly that Lincoln were there to see her. This was so strange to her, the flash-thought of Lincoln out of nowhere, that she made the thought go into a place inside that wasn’t her brain, so she wouldn’t have to think about it.

Lucky spread Brigitte’s sunscreen on her hands, arms, face, and neck, carefully not getting much of it on the dress. Outside the wind was stronger, whooshing noisily. She rummaged through the kitchen tool carton until she found a dust mask that you used when you sanded the curved wood walls inside the trailers. She wasn’t thinking in the same careful Running-Away-Project way as before, because now she had turned into a Brigitte-type of person.

The phone rang. It was Miles’s grandmother, Mrs. Prender.

“Is Miles there?” she shouted. “I seen the school bus come back early.”

“No,” Lucky said.

“I want him home—the wind’s getting bad. You seen him?”

“No,” Lucky lied.

“Well, you do, make him stay put and call me so I can pick him up in the car.”

“Okay, Mrs. Prender.” She hung up.

Lucky considered swiping Brigitte’s passport, because that was another way to stop her from leaving. But it wasn’t the best way. The best way would be if Brigitte made her own decision to stay because she loved Lucky. And in order for Brigitte to realize how much she loved her ward, the ward had to run away. Then Brigitte would feel sorry and worried and abandoned, and that would make her understand exactly how Lucky felt.

The phone rang again. Lucky glared at it. She was way too busy for a zillion phone calls. This time it was Lincoln. She put one hand on her silk hip.

“Everyone’s looking for Miles,” he said.

“He’s probably at Dot’s or at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center.”

“You think—whoa!—our power just went out. Is yours on?”

“Yeah. Listen, I have to go.”

“If you see Miles, tell him his grandma wants him.”

Lucky held the receiver and felt Lincoln waiting at the other end. She realized she was probably talking to him for the last time, unless they allowed the orphans in the L.A. orphanage to make phone calls, which she doubted. Everyone was so worried about Miles, when it was she who would soon be gone forever.

“Lincoln,” she said, and struggled around in her mind to figure out what she wanted to say. “You are…the best knot artist I ever met.”

Lincoln was silent, either because he was too infected with shyness or because it was another Sign and he was guessing the truth. Very gently and sadly, she hung up.

17. Hms Beagle Disobeys

A part of her mind was telling Lucky that if she ran away she would lose her job at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center. That certain brain compartment also worried about getting in deep trouble and being sent away.

But a bossier, louder crevice of Lucky’s brain argued that she had already decided about running away. There were already all of her plans and all the supplies, and all the hard work of running away. All that would be wasted if she gave up now.