Dumb Luck Read online

  I could tell she wasn’t sure how to answer. When your own life has gone completely down the toilet, the last thing you want to hear from someone else is how well their life is going. Yeah, maybe I wanted her to tell me what a lost soul she’d been without having me around school and hanging out with her more often. Instead, she answered with one word. “Better,” she said sheepishly.

  “I’m glad,” was all I could muster. I looked at her face for a few seconds. I studied her. The glasses, the hair, the clothes. My advice and gifts had made a difference in her. But it wasn’t just that. She was a different person. The schizzy look in the eyes was gone. The slouch was missing. Beyond her concern for me was an air of confidence. Someone who was not afraid of the world. I now didn’t want to hear any more about how things were “better.” I was afraid it would open up a wider chasm between us. And, right now, I needed her badly.

  “So what do you do now?” she asked. “Today?”

  I decided it was time to stop wallowing. I’d have to face up to all the crap ahead eventually. But for now, I had to get on with my own life, see if I could pull myself together, and begin to repair whatever damage I had done.

  “Come back to the apartment with me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Do we have to go there? What if there are people from the party still crashed out there? What if the party is still going?”

  I knew I couldn’t face going back there on my own and I was starting to feel panic rise up in me. I just wasn’t ready to face any sort of new problem today on my own. I needed Kayla. I guess my face said all that. My lips didn’t need to move.

  “Okay,” she said. “I guess I can. But I’ll have to go in the library first and make a phone call. I didn’t bring my cell. I need to tell someone I can’t make it for what we had planned.”

  “John Gardner?”

  “Yeah. He’ll understand. I won’t tell him why. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  Kayla walked into the library and again I was alone with my thoughts, tangled and convoluted as they were. Just get through today, I told myself. Don’t think about the future. Not even tomorrow. Find one small thread to hold onto for now. Hang onto that until you’ve had a rest and can think straight.

  And that one small thread was Kayla.

  The condo had been royally trashed. There was water from the hot tub all over the place. Bottles and cans scattered around the floor. Leather furniture stained and ripped. The refrigerator door was open. In the bedrooms, it looked like a war had taken place. But the partiers were all long gone. There was a foul smell to the place, and I discovered the toilet had been plugged up and that, too, had flowed out onto the floor. I wanted to cry again. But didn’t.

  I went to the sink and poured myself a large glass of water. I realized I was dehydrated and feeling nauseous. As I stood there, leaning against the kitchen cabinet, Kayla went into the smelly bathroom and grabbed some towels. She threw them onto the water on the floor, pulled the drain plug on the tub. Then she started picking up bottles from the floor and putting them into a box. “Nice friends you have,” she said, letting some real hostility slip through in her voice. Mad at them, yes. But also mad at me for being such a stupid shit to let my life come to this.

  The look on her face was fierce determination and anger. She picked up garbage, mopped the floor. I started stuffing leftover food and garbage into a garbage bag. I found a couple of used condoms just lying there on the floor. My new life, I was thinking. My new, stinking life. Kayla watched with disgust as I picked them up with a paper towel and threw them into the garbage bag.

  I really wanted to just crawl into bed and fall asleep. I wanted Kayla to lie there and hold me until I woke up and could begin to piece myself back together. But the bedroom was a disaster. Everything was a disaster. When Taylor and Chelsea and all the rest had left, they obviously had no thoughts in their head about me and what I’d come home to. They would not have known I was in jail. Maybe they thought I’d sneaked off with that young woman, Stephanie, and deserted my own party. Maybe Chelsea or Taylor was really pissed at me and this was done on purpose.

  Or maybe no one had noticed I was even gone and they partied until the place was trashed. I tried to stop thinking about it as I yanked the sheets off my bed and found another used condom.

  At that point, Kayla and I were working away at the chaos in different rooms. I needed to stop and talk to her before the silence between us made me crazy. When I left my bedroom, I found her in the bathroom with rubber gloves on, hauling full rolls of toilet paper from the shit-dirty water of the toilet bowl and putting them into garbage bags. The look on her face said it all.

  I swallowed hard and said, “I’m sorry. I should have cleaned this all up myself.”

  Kayla flushed the toilet then and it worked. She grabbed some more towels and threw them onto the dirty, wet tiled floor and then ripped off the rubber gloves. “Brandon,” she said with a new fierce edge to her voice, “if you don’t make some hard decisions in the days ahead, that’s going to be you, flushing your life down the toilet. When you started hanging out with Taylor and then Chelsea, I felt really hurt. Those two had always treated us like we were dirt. And then things changed for you. I got over it but I felt abandoned. I watched you let them draw you in, attach themselves to you, change you, mold you, use you.

  “And you accepted it all without question.” Kayla’s eyes were wild now. “You claimed to still be my friend and maybe you were. But, for me, it was like I’d lost the one good thing in my life. And recently, even though you and I still talked to each other, still hung out, everything kept shifting. And I tried to go along with it. I really did. Taylor’s remake of you. Then you, having learned from the expert, trying to remake me. Into what? Something more acceptable to them? Maybe I liked being me. Sure, the whole world scared me. I was trying to hide out from it. But maybe a smart part of me didn’t really want to be part of that shallow, mindless world.”

  “Kayla, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that’s how you felt.”

  She took a deep breath. “Brandon, I’m not going to say anything more. I’ve said too much already. When I came here today, I promised myself I would not get mad at you, but I couldn’t help myself. I know you’re feeling weak right now, but you needed to hear it. And I’m not sure anything can be the same between us again.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I felt a hollowness well up within me.

  Kayla was washing her hands now. “You need to sleep,” she said. “You’re exhausted.” Then she went into my bedroom, kicked at the pile of dirty sheets on the floor, found some clean ones and made the bed. She nodded to the bed. “I’m going to just sit out on your balcony for a bit and get some fresh air until you get to sleep. Then I’m going to head home. I’m having a hard time just being here. I’ll let myself out after you’re asleep. When you wake up, find something to eat. Then call your parents. I think you need to tell them what happened. The sooner the better.”

  As I climbed into bed, I felt a great wave of sadness and defeat wash over me. I wondered how my good luck could lead to so much loss and hurt. I beat myself up for screwing things up so badly. I cursed myself over and over.

  And then I eventually just stopped caring and gave myself over to the blissful unconsciousness of sleep.

  chapterthirtyfour

  My parents were still at our old house on Sunday, and when I arrived there, they were packing dishes in the kitchen into boxes.

  I told them a short version of my story as I stared at the floor.

  My dad went through the roof. To him, driving an automobile was like breathing or eating. “You’re old enough to drive and now you’ve already maybe screwed that up for your entire life,” he said.

  My mom was a little kinder. “At least you didn’t hurt anyone,” she said. “But why didn’t you call us to come pick you up?”

  “You need to mov
e with us to the new house,” my father insisted, once he began to cool down. “You obviously need someone to rein you in, keep you from messing up your life even further.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m moving back here. This is where I want to be.”

  My mom looked really worried. She looked to my father. “Maybe we should put off moving into the new place until things settle down with Brandon.”

  But my father shook his head. He looked at me as he spoke to my mom. “No. Brandon wanted to have his freedom—he needs to learn about responsibility. And he needs to do it the hard way, I guess.”

  My father was right, but he hurt me deeply by saying what he said just then.

  I felt like leaving but I didn’t. My mom unpacked a couple of pots and plates and made a Sunday dinner for me and my dad. It would be the last meal we’d have together in the house. The silence was broken after a bit by my mother reminiscing about good times we’d had in this home. My father dropped the anger and joined in with his own memories. And so did I. And then I said this: “At least the old place will always stay in the family and you guys can come over once in a while and I’ll cook for you.” It was a way of telling them I would forgive them for moving on to a new home. I may not have known it then, but I guess I was beginning to realize that if I wanted people to forgive me for screwing up I was going to have to learn to forgive them, too.

  I knew I had to get a lawyer to help me do whatever I needed to do about my legal problem. I wanted to keep my dad out of that though, so I called Mr. Carver at home and asked him to give me some advice. He said he was sorry I’d got myself into so much trouble but that he wasn’t surprised. “It’s not just you, Brandon. It’s human nature. You moved into a new way of living too fast. You need a plan. A good plan. But first you need a good lawyer. You going to try to fight this?”

  “No,” I said. “I was guilty.”

  “Good. I like that. First thing anybody needs to do is own up to the truth. Pay your dues and move on.”

  “I just don’t know what to move on to.”

  “That’s not going to be easy to figure out. But use this thing. Use this problem as a way of starting to move on.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will, I think. You’re not the first person on earth to screw up badly. The trick is the recovery. It ain’t easy but it builds what we used to call character.”

  So Mr. Carver referred me to a lawyer, an expensive lawyer. “You might as well put some of that silly money to good use,” was his way of saying it.

  I’m not even sure I needed a lawyer because I was pleading guilty, but Josh Kellogg was probably just what I needed. He explained everything I needed to know. He answered every question and when the time came to go to court with me, he stood beside me as the prosecutor described the arrest and the judge asked for my plea. “Guilty,” I said. And guilty I was. Mr. Carver was in attendance that day and so were my parents.

  The fine was hefty. The lawyer’s fees were insane. And I wouldn’t have a chance to even have a learner’s permit for a long time. But I could get on with my life. If I had a life.

  Chelsea had seen me leave the party with Stephanie and that really pissed her off. She told Taylor and then Taylor was equally pissed off at me. She had lost control of her pet project. I was a wild card, a free man who had just walked away on them for an older girl. Who the hell did I think I was?

  Which helped to explain the state of my apartment. And aside from a couple of really nasty cell phone conversations from both girls, that was the end of that. Suffice it to say that whatever positive reputation I may have had at school was trashed as successfully as was the condo. I had the wrong notion that one or the other of them might cool off and want to hang out with me again, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  Taylor’s final e-mail to me was this: You got what you deserved.

  Chelsea just never communicated with me again.

  I guess if a guy sits around in a fancy apartment long enough by himself, he’ll call almost anyone to ease his loneliness. That’s what I discovered late one evening when I called Stephanie. She was more than a little shocked to hear from me. “Want me to come over?” she asked, after hearing my sorry tale and realizing how desperate I was.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She did come over and she apologized for abandoning me that night and said she really had a driver’s license, but didn’t own up to it because it would have meant she’d be charged as well.

  And she pretended to really like me for a while until she discovered I was about to leave the apartment and move back into my old house. “That’s kind of creepy,” she said. And then things went quickly off the rails. She started saying that I was too cheap with my money. That I should be having more fun with it. What she meant was that I should be spending more of it on her.

  And I started doing that for a while.

  And she seemed happier with me.

  And then I did a little test. I stopped being quite so generous with meals and presents and guess what?

  She lost interest.

  And Kayla. What about Kayla?

  Kayla began spending more time with John Gardner. She would still take my phone calls when I sounded desperate. And she stayed over at my apartment a couple of nights to keep me company. She even apologized for not having as much time for me as before. I missed her badly.

  But it was clear she didn’t miss me. “If I could have the old you back, I’d love it. But that’s not going to happen.”

  “I know,” I said sadly.

  Kayla and I had both changed.

  So it was not a particularly exciting day when I moved back into the home that I had grown up in. My parents came over and I cooked them a roasted chicken dinner. Yes, living alone had taught me to cook. But it was a little awkward. And sad. And, maybe Stephanie was right, a little creepy. When my folks left to drive home to their new house twenty minutes away, it seemed like they were leaving for another planet. I felt more alone than ever before.

  Which is why I phoned a cab to drive me in the other direction out of town. The cab driver was a little surprised when I asked him to drop me off in the middle of an empty field. “It’s okay,” I said. “Just going for a hike.” I gave him a big tip and he was more than pleased.

  I walked off into that field, my jacket tight around me. Any warmth left in the air was now gone and, almost without my noticing, the tail end of summer had slipped into fall, and fall was headed toward winter. I could see my breath in the air. The sky was sullen with low gray clouds. The sun broke through now and then as I walked, but it was quickly swallowed up by the clouds again. At least there was no wind.

  When I came to the tree, I almost didn’t recognize it. The leaves were all gone; the branches looked gnarled and unfriendly. At first it seemed impossible that I could even get up to the lowest branch. But I did.

  I had to jump three times. The third time I got a grip on the rough bark. And I struggled to pull myself up. I was breathing heavily at that point but I went higher. And higher. When I located and sat down on the very branch where I had once found myself sitting before, I closed my eyes and found myself hugging the trunk of the old tree. I felt panic and true fear as I stared far down at the ground.

  Once my breathing calmed and I got my brain under control, I took my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Kayla’s number. I wanted to tell her where I was, although I’d never be able to explain why I was there.

  But, of course, there was no signal. I held the phone out and above my head. Still nothing. So I put the phone on camera mode and held it at arm’s length and took a picture of myself.

  A boy. A rather wealthy young man, really. But still a boy. Sitting high up in a tree.

  Alone.

  Many things were not clear to the boy in the photograph. All he knew was that he wanted to sit there for a lon
g while, not thinking about the past. Not thinking about the future. And wait for just the right inspired moment to climb back down and find his way back home.

  Interview with Lesley Choyce

  Your young adult novels usually feature characters who are loners, as Brandon is, but they’re also usually gifted, intelligent individuals who are ahead of the game. In this case, your principal character doesn’t have these qualities. What interested you in Brandon?

  I was thinking about those rather average teenage guys who are just cruising through their lives—emotionally a bit immature, not great at school or sports, not terribly social, not greatly inspired or passionate about much. They don’t hate their lives; they just don’t have high expectations of good stuff happening to them. So Brandon was that young dude. And I wanted to see what he did if something big happened and it changed his life dramatically all at once.

  So, as usual, I put myself in his shoes and did the necessary authorial thing. As I was writing, I became Brandon. The upside is that I got to win three million dollars. Yahoo. But I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy ride for us. Brandon just wasn’t prepared for what it would mean. How could he be?

  And therein was the seed for what I thought would be a challenging but intriguing story.

  Winners are not always winners –– in fact, winners can be losers. Is this what Brandon has to learn?

  Sometimes when you win, you lose. I know I’ve heard that line before somewhere but it is true. I did my research into lottery winner horror stories and it was quite enlightening. Winning large amounts of money or any form of coming into lots of money unearned tends to create real disasters for many people. So I was thinking about how difficult it would be for a eighteen-year-old kid who is still in high school. Once I dropped Brandon into his new role as a wealthy teenaged boy, I watched him make all the likely mistakes and followed him into his struggle to ... well, survive in the new world he was trying to create for himself. It’s a monumental struggle.