Chapter 7
When Mitch finally gets around to going out with Lola again Sunday night, and Mom and Dad are out the door, I try to sneak into Mitch’s room to find out about the number thirteen. The real deal about the number thirteen. Because after yesterday, it seems like I’m having the most unlucky year of my life.
I sneak up to Mitch’s room and guess what? His door is locked tight. I try every combination of numbers to get inside, but I don’t hit on any of the ones I need to open his door.
Brian is always dorky when I need stuff, like his help. He always wants me to do something in return. There’s no free lunch with Brian. So when I walk downstairs to the basement where he’s watching some lame cartoon where they swear all the time, I hit him up for his computer. It’s not too bad for a basement. It’s all carpeted and homey. It’s where we all used to watch TV together before we all grew up.
I so wanted a laptop for my birthday, but no way was it going to happen. Not this year. Mom just found work again and Dad’s never worked harder in his life. So Brian and I go through the whole routine.
“Hey, Brian?”
“Mow the lawn for me this week,” he says.
I say, “OK.”
He hands me his laptop. Life’s so unfair. Brian got his computer when he was thirteen. I grab it and walk up the two flights of stairs to my room. I love being alone in my room with a computer. But that’s exactly what my mom doesn’t want me to do. It’s like she thinks gun-wielding ninjas might jump out of the screen and take me hostage or something. But, after my birthday, I guess I really think anything is possible. So I google, “lucky number thirteen.”
And I find out it is a lucky number in lots of other places besides America. In China, it’s considered lucky because they believe in something called numerology, which I have no idea what that means so I have to look that up too and I find out it’s basically what the arrangement of numbers say about whether something is lucky or not. Like a person’s address or phone number. I read: The digit 1 when positioned in tens sounds like the word 'definite' (shi) in Mandarin and dialects such as Cantonese; while the digit 3 sounds like life, living or birth. As a result, the number 13, which is pronounced as shisan in Mandarin, can mean 'definitely vibrant' or 'assured growth.’ Which is good news for a new thirteen-year-old like me. My first year of being a teenager is going to be definitely vibrant and that I’ll be assured growth, long-story-short I’d live to see fourteen.
But then, when I google some more, I find just the opposite. And it’s like that for most things. Most lucky charms have someone, somewhere in the world thinking they are unlucky in certain circumstances, under certain conditions. And in the end I, after promising to mow the lawn for my brother with a huge headache from being on the computer for so long, don’t know what to believe. I get dizzy and fall asleep on top of Brian’s computer.
When I wake up in the morning to go to school on Monday, joy, I still have a lot of the good luck-slash-bad-luck stuff spinning around in my head. And so I spend all day looking for signs. Signs about how lucky this year is really going to be for me.
At first it seems like the luckiest year of my life––all the peacocks came to my birthday party, I astral projected for the first time and I got the coolest, strangest present ever, a bottle with a message that only appears in the moonlight. A message for my eyes only.
But then my birthday isn’t lucky at all and everything sucks. And nobody talks to me because of some stupid oath of secrecy and Adrianne moves into the creepy house on my street and I have to be nice to her. And my feet get sliced up pretty good and it’s super hard to jump on Ally’s trampoline, my favorite thing in the whole-wide world.
And so, I spend every day after the Adrianne Catastrophe doing every lucky thing I can think of. I put my shamrock necklace on even though it’s not quite half a year away from St. Patrick’s Day. And then I put on my lucky outfit. The one I wore when the last normal, extremely lucky thing happened to me. I have to think hard to remember, and when I do it’s totally lame. I mean, it awakens me to levels of luck. So I pull out my pink jeans, yes I said pink, but they really make my butt look good, and I pull out my gray sweater and I put on my yellow polka-dot socks, I love yellow polka-dots, and slip into my blue converse high tops. I stare at myself in the mirror, wearing my luckiest clothes, remembering.
The last time I wore this outfit I found Techno music, this sort of dance music. Mom gives me a certain time to use Brian’s computer for school and stuff and I have to sit in the kitchen while she watches over me. Like I said, she’s convinced flying monkey-ninjas will hop out of the screen and kidnap me, or something, if I ever use it by myself.
Anyways, so I was sitting there at the table, which I’d already set for dinner but I slid one of the placemats into the center of the table to give me room to work. Only I wasn’t working. I was messing around, you know, playing with flying ninjas, and I was on iTunes. My nanna gave me a gift card for iTunes for Christmas and that was the first time I ever downloaded dance music on my iPod. Its rhythm made the suckiness of school disappear at the touch of the screen because even in the hallways of Oakdale Middle School I could hear the fabulousness of the music that would quicken my heartbeat and make me feel special in the place most kids feel so incredibly stuck, school.
So anyway, I’m wearing my super lucky dance-slash-techno outfit to school because it will be a sort-of armor and might ward off the bad luck what’s turning out to be my unluckiest year. My thirteenth year.
We all have our quirks. Mitch has a rabbit’s foot he keeps with him and he doesn’t believe in anything. Mitch told me something that put me off rabbit’s feet forever. He said that only a left rabbit hind foot, carried in the left pocket after having been removed from a rabbit that was killed during a full moon by a cross-eyed person is truly lucky.
The full moon. Some people think it’s lucky. Some people think it’s unlucky. I’m not taking any chances with an unlucky rabbit’s foot, even though I saw a ton of fake ones hanging at Claire’s at the mall.
So today, I go old school. I wear what’s already worked before, my lucky outfit––what was my lucky outfit before I turned thirteen, that is. I pick up Ally and we walk to school, same as usual. We walk around the long way to avoid Adrianne and her creepy house. I start counting the days until Ally will be thirteen, the day we’ll suffer being teenagers together. In the middle of counting, I get all worried that the lucky clothes a twelve-year-old wears aren’t lucky for a thirteen-year-old. A teenager. Ah, maybe worried is the wrong word. I feel more like I’ve epically cursed myself by wearing my lucky outfit.
“Why did you stop?” Ally says.
“I, ah, what?”
“You were counting and then you stopped. And now you’re like, I don’t know, hyperventilating,” Ally says hitching her backpack up over her shoulder a little higher.
“Oh, well, I was counting the days until your birthday. Do you think thirteen is an unlucky number?”
“I don’t think about stuff like that. Besides, things bring luck not numbers.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, my mom always lights a candle for my dad when he’s on a trip because it will bring him luck. You know, things bring luck.”
“Like a rabbit’s foot?” I say.
“Yeah, but they’re gross. I wouldn’t carry one.”
“You can’t just carry any old rabbit’s foot. The left rabbit hind foot, carried in the left pocket after having been removed from a rabbit that was killed during a full moon by a cross-eyed person is the only kind of rabbit’s foot that is truly lucky. That’s what Mitch says.”
Ally bursts out into the biggest belly laugh evah. Bigger than when she took her first jump on her trampoline last May. “Well, I might not be a teenager like you, but,” her laughs stop her from saying anything else.
“But what?”
“Do you always believe everything your brother tells you?”
Yes. Yes I do. And in that
instant I realize how utterly uncool that is. I so don’t say it out loud. “No,” I say.
“My dad gave me this for good luck,” Ally pulls a green rock out of her pocket and hands it to me.
I twirl it in my hand. “What is it?” I say.
“Give it back. We’ve got company,” Ally says.
“Howdy girls,” Adrianne says.
Howdy? Really? I’m not what you’d call engaged in the convo Ally and Adrianne are having. Ally’s polite because she has to be, but one of the super cool things about my mom is that she doesn’t make me be friends with anyone I don’t want to be friends with. I inherited her not-so-many-friends gene.
But Ally’s mom is different. She’s super popular––if you can say that about adults, I guess adults don’t really call themselves popular. Anyway, if Ally’s mom was a teenager, she would be a peacock and if my mom was a teenager she’d be, well, a dodo. And in the background I sort of hear Ally and Adrianne talking about the moon. And inside I’m laughing because Ally and I talk about really important stuff and have never, not one time, talked about the moon.
Adrianne is so freaking weird. But, she knows how to get back to that island. And I want to get back to that island. And I actually want to come right out and ask her. Like this minute. Even though she’s totally hijacked Ally’s and my walk together. She totally ambushed us. So, she must pay. But I can’t really figure out what is a good way to make a peacock pay. All I can do on the walk is think about this. And when I drop back into their conversation, they’re laughing. Laughing. Ally has a big smile on her face and a look in her eye I thought she only got when she and I laughed about things together.
“Roxie?” Ally says.
When I look into Ally’s eyes I feel like I might have been right about my lucky outfit not being lucky for me now that I’m a teenager. And I wish I just bought that lousy right rabbit hind foot, and I don’t care if I carry it in my right pocket after it was removed from a rabbit that was killed when the moon isn’t full by a regular-eyed person, because at least then I’d have something to cling to while losing my best friend to a peacock that just moved in because her family is poor now.
“What do you think, Roxie?” Adrianne says.
I hate my brother.
“Roxie, what’s wrong?” Ally says.
“What?” I say.
“Wow, you’re a space case,” Adrianne says. Like they’d been talking about me being a space case during the whole walk. Adrianne doesn’t get to say things like that to me. I take a few steps off of Windsor Drive and head for the forest.
“Roxie, where are you going?” Ally says, like she cares.
“So, are you going to come to my house after school or what?” Adrianne says loud like the question is meant for me.
Never. And I keep trudging through the weeds. They only have a little bit of snow melted into them because the first snow on Sunday wasn’t a very big one and was a wet one and it warmed up this morning. The snow sits in little bumps in the weeds. I run for it. In the depth of the forest, in the little tiny ball I make of myself I stare out on Windsor Drive. Between the pine needles, Ally and Adrianne walk together to school. Like I don’t exist. More like I do exist, but they are happy to be rid of me. Tingles shoot up my spine as I watch them make the turn from Windsor Drive on to Chatham Lane. Without me. A doppleganger could have grabbed me, but Ally and Adrianne wouldn’t have cared. No one would ever know. I’d be doomed. So this is how it feels when you lose your best friend.
I get all choked up, like Mom says, and my eyes get teary. But then I take a deep breath and I remember all of Ally & me––our lemonade stands, playing school together, sleepovers and catching lightening bugs and swimming in the deep end of the pool and turning somersaults in the water and keeping our eyes open so we could always see each other and our burning eyes and our green hair and jumping off the high dive and me stepping on a bee and Ally being there to help me take the stinger out and making snowmen and ice skating on Tear Drop Lake. I’m not going to lose Ally without a fight.
I see a shadow in the woods beside me and I run out of the woods screaming. Ally and Adrianne run screaming too and we run the whole rest of the way to school together, screaming. All three of us start laughing when we reach the bike racks. I see the old look in Ally’s eyes and I know I haven’t lost her, yet. Adrianne’s not quite the peacock I made her out to be.