It takes me a second to brave a sideways glance at him. The need to know what he’s thinking is nearly overwhelming. But as soon as Leo puts a hand on the doorknob, I feel a surge of panic at the thought of being alone with him and decide maybe it’s best not to know after all.
“Sure you don’t want to wait a bit?” I ask, my voice strained. “I bet the roads aren’t great, and you don’t even have your glasses.”
“I’ll be fine,” Leo says, then spins around and bumps into the coatrack, grabbing it to steady himself and squinting at it in mock confusion. “Teddy?”
“Very funny,” I say as he takes a little bow. Then he gives us a wave, opens the door, and walks out into the hallway. And just like that we’re all alone.
As we stand in the kitchen tossing cups into a garbage bag, neither of us mentions what almost happened last night. Even so, it hangs in the air between us.
“Here,” Teddy says, stepping in just as I bend to grab a paper towel that’s fallen to the floor. He picks it up, then drops it into the bag with an overly solicitous smile. “I got it.”
“Thanks,” I mutter, turning my attention to a different corner of the room, but again he’s right there, following me around, offering to take over even the simplest tasks, hovering and helping and just generally trying way too hard.
This only makes it worse.
Nothing even happened and, still, something has changed.
This isn’t how we are together. And this certainly isn’t Teddy. Teddy is the guy who teases me about my do-gooding and throws snowballs at me and never bothers to help clean anything up. When he gives me a hug, he always lifts me off the ground so that my toes dangle a few inches from the floor, and sometimes he draws little alligators in honor of his nickname for me, which matches mine for him: Al E. Gator.
He isn’t careful with me. And I’m not polite with him.
Until now.
And it’s driving me nuts.
“What in the world,” I say, exasperated, as we try to pass in the small kitchen, sidestepping like shadows of each other, moving this way and that at the exact same time, hopelessly out of sync, “are you doing?”
He looks surprised at my impatience. “I was just gonna help—”
“Why don’t you work on the living room and I’ll finish up in here?”
“Okay,” he says with a shrug.
But the apartment feels too small even for this. The kitchen is open, so I can see him over the counter, flopping down onto the couch, remote control in hand.
“How is that helping?” I ask, and he swivels around with a grin.
“I’m double-tasking,” he says. “I clean better when the TV’s on.”
I roll my eyes. “I bet.”
As he begins to flip through the channels, I straighten up the kitchen, rinsing glasses and wiping down counters. Every so often I stop and glance at the back of his head, willing him to turn around, to say something, to look me in the eye. But he doesn’t. The room feels charged with an awkwardness so foreign that I want to cry, and I almost wish I could take it back, what nearly happened last night.
Almost.
In the next room Teddy pauses on the local news, which is showing pictures of cars that have skidded off the road and snowdrifts nearly as high as the reporters.
“Look at this,” he says, gesturing at the screen. “A foot and a half. We should go sledding when we’re done.”
“I have to leave when we’re done.”
Teddy gives me a wounded look. “But it’s my birthday.”
“Not anymore.”
“Well, it’s my birthday weekend.”
I shake my head. “I’ve got homework.”
“It’s senior year.”
“And applications.”
“You’re a shoo-in.”
“Not if I don’t apply.”
He laughs. “Fair enough.”
On the screen the focus has shifted back to the newscaster, who announces that they’ll return with the results of last night’s lottery drawing right after the commercial break. I turn back toward the kitchen, and Teddy tips his head to look at me.
“Don’t you want to watch? We could be rich.”
“You could be rich.”
“Maybe, but if it’s a winner…”
“Yeah?”
“I hope I can find the ticket.”
“You lost it already? That was quick, even for you.”
“I mean, I’m sure it’s here somewhere,” he says, waving a hand, and I glance around at the place, the tables and counters cleared off and wiped down, the floors mostly spotless and the garbage bags lined up near the door, ready to be taken out.
“It’s fine,” I say with a shrug, because ticket or not, the odds are against us. “Do you have any idea what the statistical probability of winning the lottery is?”
He shakes his head.
“I don’t either,” I admit. “But I once read that you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning or being attacked by a shark or becoming president one day.”
Teddy laughs. “So…pretty likely.”
“You have a better chance of being killed by a falling vending machine too.”
“Now, that seems totally possible,” he says, turning back to the TV as the weekend anchor, a young woman with close-cut dark hair, returns to the screen.
“Lottery officials have confirmed there were three winning tickets sold in last night’s four-hundred-twenty-four-million-dollar Powerball jackpot,” she begins, and I find myself walking over to the living room so I can hear better, feeling kind of ridiculous even as I do. “And you could be a winner if you bought yours in Florida, or Oregon, or right here in Chicago.” The image changes to show a small shop with a red awning. “The lucky local has yet to come forward, but the winning ticket was sold at Smith’s Market in Lincoln Park.”
My mouth falls open.
“Isn’t that place right by you?” Teddy asks, turning around, and when he sees my face, his eyes widen. “Wait, that’s where you bought it? Whoa. Maybe we really are millionaires.”
On the screen, they’re now showing footage of the man from the store, the one who helped me fill in the numbers just last night. But too quickly they switch back to the newscaster. “Elsewhere, the owner of a winning ticket sold in Oregon has chosen to remain anonymous, and a third ticket holder in Florida has yet to come forward. Last night’s jackpot was the seventh-largest in Powerball history at a whopping four hundred twenty-four million dollars. The winners will split the pot three ways for a pretax total of 141.3 million dollars each, which can of course be taken as a lump sum or split into annual payments.”
Teddy is standing up now. “There’s no way.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head.
“I seriously have no idea where the ticket is,” he says, half-laughing as the shot pans out on-screen to include the weatherman, the two of them bantering about how they wished they’d thought to buy a ticket. “Do you remember the numbers?”
I don’t answer, my eyes still glued to the TV. It would be easier to tell him they were random, that they didn’t mean anything, that none of this did. The only way he’d find out is if we won. If he won. And the odds of that are absurd.
But I don’t want to pretend anymore. And so I nod.
“Yes,” I say quietly, just as the newscaster turns back to the camera.
“And those numbers, again,” she says, “were twenty-four…”
Teddy raises his eyebrows. “My lucky number.”
“Eight…”
“Your birthday.”
“Thirty-one…”
He looks a little pale now. “And mine.”
“Nine…”
Before he can even ask, I say, “When we met.”
“Eleven…”
At this he crinkles his brow.
“Your apartment,” I whisper, my heart racing.
“And the Powerball,” the newscaster says cheerfully, “was a very unusually lucky numb
er thirteen.”
This time there’s no need to say anything. We both know the significance of that one. I bow my head, unable to look at him.
My parents died thirteen months apart from each other.
My mom, after a short battle with breast cancer, on July 13.
And my dad, just over a year later, in a car accident on August 13.
Thirteen.
Thirteen.
Thirteen.
It’s a cliché, of course: the unluckiness of that number.
But for me it’s more than that too: it’s a trip wire, a land mine, a scar.
And now, maybe, something more.
As a kid I won the worst kind of lottery possible. The odds of that had to be almost as long as these, the chances at least as unlikely. But now here I am, staring at the television screen, where the numbers I chose are laid out across the bottom like a math problem I can’t possibly begin to solve.
Teddy is staring at me. “Thirteen?”
“Thirteen,” I repeat numbly. My mouth is so dry it’s almost hard to say the word. I blink at him several times, then—in as calm a voice as possible—I say, “You can still find the ticket, right?”
He steps around the couch, walking over to me, but not the way he normally does, not with his usual Teddy strut. There’s something tentative about him now, something a little jangly. I notice for the first time that his shirt has a shamrock on it, the word LUCKY stamped in faded white letters just beneath it. “Are you saying…?”
“No,” I say quickly.
Teddy breathes out, looking almost relieved. “No.”
“Except…yes.”
“Al, come on,” he says. “Yes or no?”
I swallow hard. “I need to check to be sure. I don’t want to…I don’t want to get your hopes up. But…”
“But?”
“I think…”
“Yeah?”
“We might’ve…” My heart is thundering. “I think you might’ve won.”
Teddy stares at me for a second, uncomprehending, then his eyes get big and he lets out a loud whoop, pumping his fist and whirling around. “Are you kidding?” he asks, punching at the air again. “We won?”
“I think—”
Before I can finish, his arms are around me and he’s lifting me off the ground the way he always does, both of us laughing as he spins, my face pressed against his lucky green T-shirt, which smells of sweat and detergent and sleep, and I fold my arms around his neck and let myself go dizzy.
When he sets me down again, his eyes are shining the same way they were last night.
“We really won?” he asks softly.
I smile. “Happy birthday.”
And then, before I even quite realize what’s happening—before I have time to memorize the look on his face and the shape of his lips, all the things I know I’ll want to remember later when I replay this in my head—he leans down and kisses me, and all the dizziness of before, of last night when his face was so close and a moment ago when I saw those numbers on the screen, of the way the world tilted when the newscaster said the word thirteen and the way all the colors of the room blurred when he twirled me around, they’re nothing compared to this.
My heart is a yo-yo, whizzing up and down, and he’s the one pulling the string. Only I didn’t ever know it could go this high.
In all the times I imagined this, I didn’t know.
He’s all electricity right now—like a balloon about to pop or a soda about to fizz over—and I can feel it in his kiss, in the way he presses his lips against mine, the way he tightens his arms around my waist, pulling me as close as possible.
Then, just as quickly, he lets go.
I take an uneven step backward, still reeling.
“This is crazy,” he says, practically skipping away. He lopes over to the kitchen, then paces back toward the TV, running his hands through his hair so that it stands out all over like someone has shocked him. For a second I think he’s talking about the kiss, but then realize—of course—he means the lottery.
I stare at him, still somewhere else entirely.
He just kissed me, I think, my head too crowded for anything else, even something as big as millions of dollars. Teddy McAvoy just kissed me.
Maybe last night wasn’t a mistake after all. Maybe it wasn’t a fluke.
Maybe it was a beginning.
The thought sends a thrill through me.
“What are you supposed to do when this happens?” he asks, and when I simply blink at him he gives me an impatient look. “Al. C’mon. Focus. What do we do? Call a lawyer or something, right? Or hide the ticket? I think I heard you’re supposed to put it in a safe, maybe? We don’t have a safe. We only have a cookie jar. Maybe we should Google this and figure out what to do.”
“I think the first thing,” I say, snapping back again, “is to actually find the ticket.”
“Right,” he says, and stops abruptly. “Right!”
But he just stands there as if awaiting further instruction.
“Why don’t you go check your pockets from last night?” I suggest, my heart still pounding, and without answering he bounds off toward his room, emerging a few seconds later with a look of utter despair.
“It’s not there,” he says, his face ashen. He puts both hands on his head and lets out a strangled groan. “I don’t know where…I have no idea what I did with it. I’m such an idiot. Such an idiot.”
“It’s fine,” I tell him. “It has to be around here somewhere, right?”
We search the entire apartment in a kind of frenzied scavenger hunt, undoing—room by room—all the work we’ve just done to clean it up. We fish through drawers and check under his bed, tear open cabinets and toss around clothes. We dump out the garbage can in the bathroom and scan the contents of the kitchen shelves. We even sift through the trash bags stacked neatly by the door, though I’m the one who filled them and I’m certain the ticket isn’t there. We just can’t think of anything else to do.
Every now and then, we brush against each other as we move from room to room and I think it again: Teddy McAvoy kissed me. It’s all I can do not to grab his hand, drag him back over to me, stand on my tiptoes, and kiss him again.
But when he tries to look for the ticket under the fridge, a different memory rushes up and I lunge at him, practically shoving him out of the way and offering to do it myself. “I have smaller hands,” I explain, my face burning against the cool of the tiled floor as I feel around beneath it, coming up empty-handed.
Teddy frowns at me as I stand up again. “I’ll check the shower.”
“The shower?” I follow him into the bathroom. “You haven’t taken one.”
“I know, but it’s the last place I can think to look,” he says, yanking back the curtain and stepping into the tub. I can see the panic in his eyes as he stoops to pull the plug out of the drain and I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Teddy,” I say. “I doubt—”
“We’re talking about millions of dollars here,” he says, standing up fast, his face pinched with worry. “What if I just threw it away?”
Something clicks then and I thump my head against the doorframe.
Teddy steps out of the bathtub. “What?”
“I know where it is,” I say with a groan. “It’s the only place we haven’t looked.”
“Where?”
“Get your coat.”
“What?”
“Get your coat,” I repeat, already walking away. “We’ve got some digging to do.”
Outside, we stand facing the blue dumpster. A thin layer of snow has covered the plastic bags piled on top like powdered sugar sprinkled over some kind of strange, lumpy dessert. The bin itself is filthy, slick and wet and speckled with brown spots and spills. As we stare at it, neither of us quite ready to dive in yet, there’s a loud noise from above, then the sound of something banging its way down the chute. A moment later a pizza box lands on top with a thud.
Teddy takes a step
closer. “Wrong bin, you idiot,” he calls up, cupping his hands around his mouth, then he shrugs at me. “That’s clearly recyclable.”
I laugh at this, then tip my head at the dumpster. “You ready?”
“Why me?”
“Because it’s your ticket.”
“But you bought it,” he says. “And you’re the one who threw it away.”
“I’m the one who took the garbage out,” I say, aware of how quickly, how automatically, we’ve already returned to our usual dynamic. “You’re the one who threw it away. And you’re the one who’s gonna be rich if we find it.”
He blows out a sigh, his breath frosty in the bitter air. The sky is clear and bright this morning—it stopped snowing sometime in the night—but the plows haven’t yet reached the alley behind the building, where the drifts are nearly up to our knees.
Teddy wipes his nose with the sleeve of his jacket as he stares down the dumpster. “What did the bag look like?”
“It was a garbage bag. What do you think?”
“Right, but black or white, paper or plastic.”
“White plastic,” I say, walking over to stand on my tiptoes a few inches from the bin, where dozens of indistinguishable plastic bags poke out beneath the snow.
“Great,” Teddy says as he steps up beside me, “at least it won’t blend in.”
“Want a hand?” I ask, but he’s already thrown himself up and over the edge of the dumpster, dangling there like a monkey, his boots banging loudly against the metal side. He uses one arm to balance as he roots around, digging out two white trash bags and tossing them over the side. I scoot away just before one of them can hit me, and Teddy drops to the ground, scattering the snow.
Together we fumble with the ties, opening the bags and peering inside. In the first there are broken eggshells and an apple core and some torn envelopes made out to an A. J. Lynk; we don’t go further than that. The second is mostly full of shredded paper: old bills and bank statements and pieces of envelopes.
“Recycling again,” Teddy says, tossing it into the next bin. He wipes his hands on his jeans and glances back at me. “What are we even looking for?”