The Higher Power of Lucky (11 page)
Miles sat by the window, took
Are You My Mother?
out of the plastic sack, and held it on his lap. He had an almost-healed scab on one knee and a new-looking scrape on the other. One sneaker had a hole in the side where his little toe poked through. The sun shining through the window glinted on his coppery hair, which was mashed down on one side.
The bus climbed up and out of the valley, then turned and joined the highway to Sierra City. Miles swiped the dusty window with his hand, wiped his hand on his pants, and pointed to the forest of Joshua trees. “Is this Short Sammy’s adopted highway?” he asked.
“Not yet. Wait, here comes the little sign,” Lucky said. Then it flashed by:
ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY
SAMMY DESOTO
Adopting a highway is not like adopting a child. Lucky planned to adopt seven or eight highways when she got old enough, if she had time. What it means is that you take care of this certain stretch of road by picking up all the litter every week. Also you get an official orange vest and hard hat, and special trash bags,
plus
you get a sign on the highway that people can admire as they drive past.
“Was that it? Sandi should stop so we can read it,” Miles complained. “Some people need more time to sound out their words.”
Lucky and Lincoln eye-smiled at each other without letting Miles see. That, thought Lucky, was the First Sign. The way she and Lincoln understood right then what each other was thinking.
“She can’t stop or we’ll be late for school,” Lincoln said. “Check out how the highway along here is so clean, though. Short Sammy cleans it.”
“In his orange vest?”
“Yeah.”
Miles began making frog croaking noises. Lincoln immediately put on his headphones. He didn’t have a player for them to plug into, but by wearing them Lucky figured he could concentrate better on his knots. Finally Lucky couldn’t stand any more frog croaking, so she told Miles a story of how the Joshua trees were playing Statues, and when they thought you weren’t looking they changed their weird positions.
“If you stare at them very quietly you’ll see them move,” she said. Miles rested his forehead on the dusty window and stared out for about three minutes. Then he said, “Lucky?”
“What.”
“Do you have an extra Fig Newton?”
“Oh, Miles,” she said, and dug a Fig Newton out of her tote bag. “Doesn’t your grandmother ever comb your hair?”
“Sometimes,” said Miles, lightly kicking the seat in front of him as he ate tiny bites of the cookie.
and the Third Sign
Lucky felt excited and impatient all day at school. Ms. McBeam read a thin book to the fifth grade about Charles Darwin, the scientist Lucky most admired. The totally amazing thing about Charles Darwin was how much he and Lucky were alike. For instance, in the book there was a part where Charles Darwin found two interesting beetles. To capture them, all he had was his hands, so he caught one in each hand.
Then
—and this was the great part—he found a third interesting beetle, so he popped it into his mouth! That was
exactly
something Lucky would do, except for the constant fact that
she
carried her survival backpack full of specimen boxes with her at all times.
Then Ms. McBeam showed pictures of polar bears in the snow and explained that Charles Darwin figured out that animals survive by adapting to their environment. Polar bears are white like the snow so they will be harder to see and they can sneak up on their next meal. (And also to make them harder to be spotted by other animals or people who hunt
them
.) The same with insects who look like the plants they eat—except they’re hiding from the birds that want to eat them, Ms. McBeam explained.
At that exact moment, Lucky looked at her sandy-colored arms and realized, finally, why her hair and eyes and skin were all one color! Charles Darwin had a very good point. She was like those lizards and sidewinders—exactly the color of the sand outside.
She
blended in too.
She, Lucky, was perfectly adapted to her environment, the northern Mojave Desert, and she knew that the sameness of her coloring was exactly right. It was the Second Sign, as significant and thrilling as the secret eye-smiling First Sign on the bus.
Just after lunch, when Lucky thought she could not bear to wait until three fifteen for the school bus to arrive for the ride home, the principal came to Room Four. Lucky sat forward in her seat to stare at Ms. Baum-Izzart, who was eight months pregnant and wore black pants and a tight-fitting flowered shirt that showed exactly the shape of her pregnant stomach. Ms. Baum-Izzart smiled at Ms. McBeam and at the fifth graders. She put her two hands on her shirt, holding the sides of her stomach. Lucky noticed that there were slightly darker marks where Ms. Baum-Izzart put her hands, like the dark stains on the sides of Miles’s pants where he wiped his hands. She figured Ms. Baum-Izzart spent a lot of time feeling the interesting huge round ball of her stomach.
A part of Lucky wished the principal would suddenly start having the baby so they could all watch. Maybe Lucky could even help in some very important way, like if they needed mineral oil and only she had some at the last minute.
Instead of going into labor, Ms. Baum-Izzart said, “There’s a pretty big dust storm coming off the dry lake. We’re sending the children from outlying areas home early. I want those of you who ride the school bus to take all your belongings and meet your bus outside right now.
Walk
, please; do not run.”
The kids who lived in Sierra City groaned because they had to stay till the normal end of school. But for Lucky this was the Third Sign that of all possible days to run away, today was the exact right one.
“…fifty-five-mile-per-hour winds in high-desert areas…” the tinny voice of the radio announcer was saying as Lucky climbed on the bus. “…trailers and campers should avoid Highway 395 in the passes due to high winds.” Sandi jerked her head, to show Lucky that she should hurry up to the rear, which Lucky already knew from having Sandi as her bus driver since kindergarten.
Miles and Lincoln followed her down the aisle, past a few kids who got off at Talc Town, and Sandi started up. Usually Lucky worried about dust storms because all you could do was go inside and close all the windows, no matter how hot it was. Dust came inside anyway, and when the storm was over, she and Brigitte had to vacuum and wipe down everything. Brigitte always said the devil left his back door open and let all the dust of hell blow into her kitchen.
But today Lucky
loved
the dust storm. She would be home early and have more time for running away before dark.
“Lucky,” said Miles as he flung his plastic bag on the seat. “When is Ms. Baum-Izzart going to have her baby?”
“Pretty soon,” said Lucky. “Maybe in about three weeks.”
“Will the storm be over when she has it?”
Lucky clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes at him. “Of
course
.”
“What about Chesterfield’s baby?”
“What about him?”
“Well, where will Chesterfield and her baby go during the dust storm?”
“Oh, probably to the dugouts, where they’ll be nice and protected. They’ll wait there till it’s over,” said Lucky.
“My grandmother said you could die in a dust storm,” said Miles.
“But not Chesterfield or her child.” Lucky peered out the window. The sky had turned brownish and seemed lower, like a giant dirty blanket drifting down to cover everything. It was growing dark because the thick dust blocked the sun. She turned back to Miles, who was looking up at her worriedly. “Burros help each other. They stand head to tail with another burro and each one’s tail swishes the flies from the other’s face. In a dust storm they all stay close together. Besides, they have long thick eyelashes to protect their eyes. Chesterfield is totally adapted to her desert habitat. Do you want me to explain about habitats?”
“No,” said Miles, and opened
Are You My Mother?
He turned the pages slowly, reading it aloud from memory, his small dirty index finger more or less following the words.
Lincoln rolled his eyes at Lucky, which she considered Part B of the First Sign. She knew he meant that listening to Miles sound out
Are You My Mother?
again, after having heard him do it eight thousand times on the bus ride to school and back, was too boring to bear. He put his headphones on and got out a piece of rope.
Even though she was tempted to tell Lincoln about her decision to run away, the valve that kept secrets locked up in Lucky’s heart was clamped shut. Lucky’s heart would have liked to share her secret with Lincoln, but his knowing could wreck everything. So the heart-valve stayed closed, and Lucky kept her dangerous secret to herself.
to Run Away
Lucky’s original plan had been to
pretend
to go to her job at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center early, right after coming back from school, rather than her usual time of late afternoon. But instead she’d run away. Then when the bus arrived hours before the regular time and Lucky saw Brigitte’s Jeep and Short Sammy’s Cadillac parked at the Captain’s house, she decided to leave right away. Brigitte wouldn’t miss her for a long time. But first there were important supplies to get at home.
Even though the bus had come back way earlier than usual, HMS Beagle was waiting in the usual place. It was too windy for Lucky to explain about the Three Signs, and anyway, they had to watch out for things blowing around, like dead bushes and pieces of trash. Lucky knew that it could get so windy that even roofs blew off houses, and you couldn’t tell what direction you were going because the sun was blotted out. Tiny twisters of sand rose up from the ground, as if miniature people were throwing handfuls in the air. A loose flap of tin banged on someone’s roof, and the wind tugged the tamarisk trees sideways.
