Dumb Luck Read online

  It was a Friday. The lottery draw was the next night. I stashed the ticket in my now-empty wallet and walked home, thinking, yeah, the weekend. Two days off from school already. Two more off and I wouldn’t have to be sitting in a classroom until Monday morning. Not such a bad deal.

  Nothing much happened that day. Or the next. My headaches were gone. Doc Yates had e-mailed the funny photo of me and him and the X-ray of my head. I printed it out and put it on my wall. I got a weird e-mail from Kayla:

  Brando,

  I realize I kind of made a mess of our friendship. I’ll never do that again.

  I promise. I just want us to stay friends. Happy belated birthday.

  Kayla

  What’s with girls anyway? Yeah, she had kind of mucked things up by kissing me but I just wanted to forget it and get on with my so-called life. So I just e-mailed back:

  K,

  All is well. Pretend it never happened. And next time we go climbing, remind me to bring a parachute.

  B

  I honestly didn’t know if I’d ever climb a tree again but, hey, you have to have a little fun in life.

  My Saturday night was about as dull as a Saturday night could be. Dinner with a grumpy dad, who complained about his job selling used cars to people he referred to as “losers and dimwits.” I helped my mom wash the dishes and listened to her complain about my dad and how unhappy she was with the old house we lived in. (Doesn’t get much more exciting than that.) And then I holed up in my room and watched some reality shows on TV.

  I guess I could have actually watched the lottery draw on TV but I had forgotten about the ticket. Instead, I watched a show about a very unhappy family that had let cameras come into their lives to show the world how unhappy they were. There was a lot of screaming and slamming doors and it made me feel like maybe I didn’t have it so bad.

  I almost went to bed. When I was taking off my pants, my wallet fell to the floor and the ticket fell out.

  So I picked it up.

  And I sat down at my desk and Googled the lottery site.

  And there were the winning numbers. 3, 12, 21, 29, 33, 41.

  chapterfive

  I felt dizzy and light-headed. My eyes went kind of funny and my throat went dry. Was the room actually spinning or was it me? This just wasn’t possible.

  No way.

  So I Googled another site that also had the lottery winning numbers and I stared at them again: 3, 12, 21, 29, 33, 41.

  I looked at the little yellow piece of paper in my hand.

  No freaking way.

  I wondered if I was dreaming. My hands were sweating now. I stood up and walked in a small circle around my room and looked at my lottery ticket and the screen again.

  I checked a third site and then went back to the official lottery Web site. It all checked out.

  I thought about calling Kayla but everything was swimming in my head. I had to think this through. How much was it? Three million dollars. Right. In a few days, I would have three million dollars. My life would be totally different. My heart was racing now.

  It was eleven o’clock at night and I was, of course, wide awake. I hid the lottery ticket at the bottom of my sock drawer and I went for a walk.

  I can’t even remember much about the walk. I ran into some kids drinking from a bottle of wine who said something to me—some kind of insult. But it didn’t stick. I remember almost walking out into the street in front of a car. The driver hit his horn and yelled something to me about being retarded. I just smiled. I remember coming across the stump of what was once one of my favorite trees to climb in the neighborhood and I thought that, one day, I’d start replanting trees in places where they’d been cut down.

  And then I was back home. My mom had heard me leave. Although my dad was asleep, my mom was still up and wanted to know where I’d been.

  “Walking.”

  “Everything okay?”

  I guess I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Just hang on,” I said, and ran up to my room to bring the ticket back down.

  I held it out. “I won,” I said.

  She smiled. She didn’t believe me.

  I went over to her laptop and turned it on. “I really did,” I said.

  She smiled some more.

  The computer screen lit up. “Check it out.”

  She checked it out.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, her hand over her mouth.

  “Oh, my God,” I repeated calmly.

  And then she burst into tears.

  Lo and behold, when Monday morning rolled around, I did not go to school yet again. I was in the car with my mom and dad, headed to the lottery headquarters. Nobody in my family was in a bad mood. Nobody was crying.

  On the way there, I got a text message from Kayla:

  BRANDO,

  WHERE R U? U OK?

  KAYLA

  I texted back:

  K,

  I’M VERY OK. NEVER BETTER.

  YULE NEVER BELEEVE WHAT HAPPENED!

  STAY TUNED.

  B

  At first, the people at the lottery corporation were very, very formal. They took the ticket, scanned it with something, looked at my ID, checked some records, and finally a smiley-faced bald guy in a suit, named Bradley Sweet, came into the room.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “We were afraid you might not come forward so soon. Some people hang back for days, even weeks.”

  I didn’t really know what he was talking about, but he just kept shaking my hand and patting my father on the back. And then they gave me one of those big-ass cardboard checks. Three million dollars made out in my name.

  Pictures were taken. Reporters asked questions. At first I just kind of blathered away, saying stupid stuff that probably didn’t make any sense. But then, when I got myself straightened out and tried to sound normal, I just ended up laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. After that it was all a blur.

  I was on the TV news that night. I was in the papers. There were all kinds of weird phone calls and we had to unplug the phone. I had a ton of e-mails but didn’t look at any of them. I was rich and I was the king of the world.

  I had the big-ass check in my room. It was just for show. The money was already in my bank account. Yesterday my savings account had $43.76 in it. Today it had $3,000,043.76. I could go to my online banking and just sit there staring at the numbers. What next?

  I didn’t have the foggiest clue. All I knew was that I was feeling damn good. I could wake up tomorrow morning and pretty much do whatever I felt like doing.

  My room phone was unplugged and my cell phone was off, but at two in the morning, I lay sweaty and fidgety in my bed, so I called Kayla. She answered after only one ring. I told her the story.

  “This is real?” she asked.

  “It’s real.”

  “What even prompted you to buy a lottery ticket?”

  “I don’t know. It was my first one.”

  “But why now?”

  “Because I’d turned eighteen. Because I fell out of a tree.” I had almost said, because you kissed me and I fell out of a tree. But I didn’t.

  What followed was one of those incomprehensible conversations that was made up mostly of one- and two-syllable words. And as I got more excited trying to tell her about all the possible things I could do in my life, she suddenly screamed in my ear (in a good way) and said, “You are so damn lucky, Brando, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

  And I think it was the first time anyone had said something so positive about me. Not only was I a multimillionaire but I was (corny as this sounds) a nice guy. And I liked that.

  But there was no sleep for me that night.

  chaptersix

  No way was I going to school on Tuesday. I needed some more time on this. I had finally fallen asleep n
ear dawn and woke up around noon. The first thing I saw was a squirrel on a branch of a tree outside my window. He was looking right back at me, curious, as if he, too, knew I’d won some big money. He seemed to be saying, “So, you’re the lucky bastard.”

  I got up out of bed and looked at myself in the mirror and answered, “Yes, I am,” out loud, but then suddenly felt rather silly.

  And then a voice in my head slammed out a question. “Now what?”

  Yeah, now what?

  I laughed right at that lucky bastard in the mirror.

  Downstairs, I discovered my dad had taken his second day off from work. No selling silver SUVs for him today. “Welcome back to the world of the living, Brandon,” he said, lowering the newspaper he was reading. I knew he’d been sitting there in the kitchen all morning, waiting for me.

  “Morning, Dad,” I said.

  My mom appeared as if on cue. “What would you like to eat?”

  There were the usual options. None of which particularly appealed to me. I thought for a minute. “Let’s order out for something,” I heard myself say. “It’s on me.”

  My father gave me his as-if look, but my mother shushed him before he could say anything. Ordering out for any kind of food in my father’s book had always been considered frivolous and too expensive.

  “Sure,” my mom said. “What would you like?”

  I thought for a long minute about what someone who was rich and famous would order out for on Tuesday around noon. But I hadn’t a clue.

  “I want the most expensive pizza we can buy,” I said. “And I want everything on it. And I do mean everything.”

  My dad gave me a hard look. I gave that look right back at him. Then he dropped the paper on the table and slapped me on the back. “You want pizza, we’ll call for pizza.” But it was my mother who made the phone call.

  I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and the three of us sat there at the kitchen table.

  “We need to talk,” my father said.

  “I know,” I answered.

  “We have to come up with a plan.”

  I didn’t like the sound of the word, “we,” but I let it go. I knew that something like this was coming. “I know that, too.”

  “I’ve been thinking of opening up my own car lot,” my dad said, suddenly not sounding like my usually grumpy dad. “This would be my chance.”

  Technically, of course, the money was mine, not ours. Who was he, to start thinking about how to spend my money? I was going to blurt out something but I decided to keep my mouth shut. I knew what he could be like if I pushed the wrong buttons. It was beginning to sink in that I was going to have to learn some things about what it was like to have a pile of money. And I guessed it might have to start with my parents. I decided to sidestep my dad for a minute.

  My mother had been hovering, standing by the sink, looking a little nervous. I turned to her. “What about you, Mom? What do you want?”

  She looked at me and blinked a couple of times. “I want a dishwasher,” she said. Then she swallowed hard and added, “and a new sofa for the living room.” And then she seemed embarrassed to have said these things out loud.

  This was all so weird. My mom had always wanted a dishwasher but my father, of course, had considered it extravagant. It was one of those family issues that never went away but surfaced from time to time and created tension. I realized I could suddenly snap my fingers and solve many of my family’s biggest problems.

  “Mom, let’s get you the dishwasher today. And whatever furniture you want.” That was easy enough.

  My dad looked a little annoyed that I had addressed her first, but he tried not to show it. I turned to him. “I thought you hated the used car business,” I said.

  “I don’t love it but it’s what I know. I just hate having to work for some asshole who gets to keep most of the profit.” My father was the world’s expert on assholes who get rich while poor slobs like him work their butts off.

  I decided that I would try to play this like I was wise beyond my years. “How much you reckon it would take to get this project off the ground?”

  “Fifty should do it,” he said, looking away from me toward the door, as if he was checking to see if the pizza guy had arrived.

  Now, I’d be the first to admit I have trouble with numbers. Up until last Saturday night, I didn’t even know how many zeros there were in three million. Now I knew there were six zeros and one big three. But I didn’t know what “fifty” meant to my father. Certainly not fifty dollars.

  “Fifty?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Fifty thousand would allow me to lease some land, get some inventory, hire maybe one other guy.”

  Maybe my father’s dream was to become the asshole who gets rich on the hard work of the poor slob he hired. But he was my father. I was trying to do the math in my head. Three mil, take away $50,000. A dent but only a small dent. “And this would make you happy?”

  “All my life, I’ve dreamed of being self-employed. Having my own business.” His voice was different now. He wasn’t talking to me like I was his kid. He was telling me the truth. And I’d heard him fantasize about having his own business before. It was his dream.

  “Then I think you should go for it,” I said.

  He reached out and gave me a high five, the first one he’d ever given me in my eighteen years of life. But it felt damn good.

  We made small talk after that until the pizza arrived. My dad had to pay for it because I didn’t have any cash.

  The pizza did have everything on it. Way too much of everything. The anchovies did not work well with the pineapples. In truth, it was one of the crappiest pizzas I ever ate but I didn’t say it out loud. And no one complained in our kitchen.

  In the afternoon, we drove to the bank where I got myself a couple of credit cards. Then we went to the shopping center and picked out a dishwasher, a sofa, and a couple of overstuffed chairs for the living room. My mom was in heaven. On the way home, my father drove by a couple of potential properties for his car lot. Maybe I should have been feeling good about being able to help out my dad, but I still didn’t know what I was going to do with my money and I wanted some time to think it through. Why did he always have to be so pushy? But, yet again, I kept my mouth shut.

  I guess I was pretty quiet on the way home. “You still alive back there?” my dad asked, sounding lighter and happier than I’d ever heard him.

  “Yeah, I’m still here.” But I was somewhere else. I don’t know where I was. I kept thinking I should come up with a list. What did I want?

  A sweet car.

  A dirt bike.

  A big honking HD flat screen TV for my bedroom.

  And a girlfriend.

  Yeah, I really, really wanted a girlfriend.

  chapterseven

  Those photographs they took at the lottery headquarters ended up not only in the papers but all over the Internet. And there was that dumb interview I did for TV, where I stuttered a little and just laughed when the reporter asked me how it felt to be a winner. Somebody posted that on the Internet, too, with the title: Losers Sometimes are Winners.

  I was getting a ton of e-mails from kids at school and from people I didn’t even know. There were even e-mails from girls that included pictures. All my life I had wanted people to like me. I had wanted to be popular. And now. Bingo. Like magic. This was going to be the way my life would go from now on. I felt a warm glow all over.

  The phones were all unplugged in the house so no one could get through. I turned on my cell phone and saw two text messages from Kayla:

  U ALRIGHT?

  K

  and

  CALL ME.

  K

  So I called her on my cell phone, which had been off all day.

  “Your home phone isn’t working,” she said, sounding a little miffed.

 
“I know,” I said. “People kept calling. Weirdos wanting to congratulate me.”

  I heard Kayla take a deep breath. “Things are going to be different, aren’t they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean with you. With us.”

  I guess I was still a bit thick. A bit overwhelmed by it all. “What do you mean, us?”

  Kayla didn’t answer. “When are you coming back to school?”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said. “But I’m thinking of quitting.” The words just kind of jumped out of me.

  “Brando. Why would you quit school?”

  “I always hated school. I was never good at it. Now I can just quit if I want to. Why bother staying?”

  “But I thought you were going to finish high school and then train to be an electrician.”

  “But I don’t have to do that now.”

  “Brandon, this is so unlike you.” Now she sounded like she was lecturing me. I wondered why I had even bothered to call her.

  I was feeling annoyed. And defiant. I don’t know why. “Well, now everything is different. I’m different.”

  And she hung up on me.

  When I got to school the next day, everything was different. My mom drove me there. She said maybe I shouldn’t take the bus for my first day back. “Why don’t I rent a limo?” I had said, smiling. But she just tapped me gently on the forehead with her knuckle. Point made.

  So I got out of my mom’s car and looked around the front of the school. Everyone was looking at me. Some young geeky kid ran up and took a picture of me with his cell phone. My mom drove off and I was left standing there with all those faces, those eyes turned in my direction. I had my books under my arm and a paper bag with my lunch in it. I don’t know why, but it was the lunch bag that made me feel self-conscious. Me. I had three million dollars in the bank and I’m standing there in front of everyone with a ham sandwich that my mom had packed. How humiliating.

  I tossed the bag into a trash can and headed for the school door. I waved to a couple of the guys I knew—Josh and Derek—who were madly waving back. And then I saw Taylor smiling at me. Taylor never smiled at me. She had never given me the time of day. Taylor was Taylor—always attached to one cool guy or another, never for long. Taylor owned the male population of the school and could have any guy she wanted. Now she was smiling at me.