Free Lucky Breaks by Susan Patron Page A

gaze back at Brigitte, beaming a 100 percent promise that trouble was the last thing she and Paloma would get into. Brigitte let her go, and Lucky clicked on Reply. “Dear Pal, YAY!!!!!!” she typed. “P.S. Plastic bucket big enuf for both to learn to swim. Treading water until Friday. C U xxx Luck.”
    But a little later, Lucky had another e-mail. “Uncle Rocky can’t get away this weekend. I cried so hard my mom and dad decided to bring me themselves. Bad mistake!!!!!!! Now we R stuck! Xxx Pal.”
    Lucky puzzled over this message. Paloma hadn’t talked much about her parents except to say her father was in the Industry, which she explained meant he had something to do with the movies, and that her mom had been a child actress but no one famous, just commercials and parts on TV. To Lucky they sounded interesting and gorgeous, and she wondered why Paloma didn’t want them to come to Hard Pan.
    One thing she remembered was that Paloma said her mother listened in on her phone calls and wouldn’t let her have her own cell. Lucky had laughed and said cell phones didn’t work in Hard Pan because of the mountains and hills all around, so she didn’t have one either.
    Lucky resolved to make a good impression on Paloma’s parents by being conscientious, careful, and well behaved. And Hard Pan would be the most safe and perfect place for kids to be, with no danger whatsoever. That way they would allow Paloma to visit often on weekends. And if Lucky and Paloma did have some adventures, they would just be careful that no one found out.
    But deep in the crevices of her mind, worried thoughts of Paloma’s mother and father wormed around day and night.
    That was why, on the bus ride to school, Lucky imagined herself to be Paloma’s parents. Next to her, Miles was hunched over Brain Surgery for Beginners . Even though he had to sound out, aloud, some of the words (a very tedious experience for Lucky to endure), he pressed on. And he talked endlessly about brains.
    Lincoln was holding Knot News in one hand and two cords in the other. Lucky’s eyes, now with Paloma’s parents’ minds superimposed over her own mind, saw both boys in a new way. Instead of his usual comfortable self, Lincoln seemed abnormal. Maybe even sub normal. “Can’t you ever not knot?” she asked him suddenly.
    Lincoln looked surprised.
    Lucky knew that even his teachers had tried to get him to quit knotting in class ever since second grade, but they gave up when he got As in everythingwhether he knotted or not. “This issue of Knot News is about repairing tears in a net,” he said, as if that answered her question, looking straight at her in his level, open way. “And this,” he went on, “is a double fisherman’s knot. It’s handy if you need a weight-bearing knot to join two different cords.”

    “Lincoln, that’s just it. I don’t need one.” Lucky had never lied to Lincoln, but now she pretended not to know why he was reading an article about repairing tears. One of her brain crevices told her that it wasn’t really lying if you didn’t actually say anything. But right behind her eyes, Lucky felt a hot finger of shame pressing on her tear ducts.
    Lincoln raised his eyebrows at her as if she had completely missed the point. “Between you and eternity could be the right knot,” he said.
    The grown-up-ness of this answer, and the calm, kind way he said it, and the hard-to-get-ness of its meaning irritated Lucky, which was a relief because it made her stop feeling like crying. An image popped into her mind of Mount Rushmore, with its four presidents carved out of the stone mountain, looking wise and strong and forever. She pictured Lincoln’s face chiseled up there with them. Okay, fine, she thought, but couldn’t Lincoln just be a little more like other kids, just a bit more normal? Lincoln didn’t even talk like a regular person.
    Miles, in his own way, was even worse. His hair looked as if it had never been combed, which was more