The Higher Power of Lucky Read Free Page A

of Lucky before. Plus she had her own French life going along, full of plans, and her old French mother. That terrible thing was the thing that happened to Lucille when Lucky was eight, the morning after the storm in the desert.
    Lucky loved rainstorms because of how wild and scary they are, when you are safe inside your trailer with the wind whooshing and blowing like crazy and rain pouring down so hard it turns the dry streambed into a river. Her favorite part was afterward, when it smells like the first day of the history of the world, like creosote and wild sage. The sun comes out and you look around at all the changes the storm has caused: the outside chairs blown away, the Joshua trees plumped up with water, the ground still a little wet.
    That is what Lucky imagined her mother was doing—sniffing up the morning and feeling the cool ground with her toes—when she stepped on a downed power line, was electrocuted, and died.

    And this is how Lucky became a ward, which is the person a Guardian guards. A ward must stay alert, carry a well-equipped survival kit at all times, and watch out for danger signs—because of the strange and terrible and good and bad things that happen when you least expect them to.



4. Graffiti
     
    Even though it was only Friday afternoon, and her report on the life cycle of the ant wasn’t due until Monday, Lucky got out her notebook, thinking she could finish by dinner. Then Lincoln phoned.
    “Hi, Lucky,” he said.
    “Hey.”
    Silence. Lucky knew Lincoln had a hard time talking on the phone because he needed both hands for tying knots on a string or a cord. When he was about seven, Lincoln’s brain had begun squeezing out a powerful knot-tying secretion that went through his capillaries and made his hands want to tie knots. He’d learned how to tie about a million different ones, plus bends and hitches.
    She heard a crash when he dropped the phone and then a jostling while he got it cradled between his ear and his shoulder. This was the usual thing that happened when they called each other.
    “Listen,” he said. “Do you have any of those thick permanent-marker pens? A black one?”
    “I think so. What for?”
    “It’s that sign Miles asked about, the one he noticed on the way back from school today.”
    “‘Pop. 43’?”
    “No, after that. Right when the school bus pulls into Hard Pan.”
    “Yeah,” Lucky said. It was a diamond-shaped orangy-yellow traffic sign. Miles was in kindergarten and was learning to read, which made him interested in finding out what every sign said. Lucky was glad that there were only a few signs on the long highway to and from school in Sierra City. “What about it?”
    “I’ll explain later. Bring the marker and meet me there in a few minutes.”
    “This doesn’t have anything to do with Knot News , does it?” Lincoln got a newsletter every month from the International Guild of Knot Tyers, which he was one of the youngest members of. It was a fairly boring newsletter to Lucky, but Lincoln read every page minutely, like he was memorizing it, and then he told Lucky all about things like what makes a good fid (which is some kind of knotting tool). Lucky knew that the latest Knot News had arrived recently.
    “Nope,” Lincoln said. “It’s about the sign . Just meet me there. You’ll see.”
    HMS Beagle was already standing at the screen door, looking out. A lot of times she knew what was going to happen even before Lucky did. “Okay,” Lucky said, thinking she could also capture a few ants and glue them to her report for extra credit.
    She hung up and went to look at herself in the little mirror on the door of the cabinet by her bed. The trouble about Lucky, and this was a big problem she couldn’t solve, had to do with being all one color.
    Her eyes, skin, and hair, including her wispy straight eyebrows, were all the same color, a color Lucky thought of as sort of sandy or mushroomy. The story she told herself to explain it was that on