A Whole Lot of Lucky Read Online Free PDF Page A

block my number, but she still doesn’t answer. I hit redial. Hang up. Redial. Hang up. Redial. Hang—
    â€œHailee!” Irritation scratches across the air waves and into my ear. “What are you doing?”
    â€œWhy didn’t you answer?”
    She huffs into the phone. “If you must know, I was in the bathroom.”
    Hmm. Well, I guess certain things can take a while in the bathroom. “Okay,” I say.
    She breathes into the phone, then asks, “Well?”
    â€œWell, what?” I hadn’t prepared a speech.
    â€œWell, why did you call?” she asks. “Hurry up, too, because I’ve only got a couple of bars.”
    Liar. That’s what she tells her grandma when she doesn’t know what to say to her.
    I look at the shred of notebook paper in my hand. “Are you still spending the night this Friday?”
    Pause. “I didn’t know you invited me.”
    â€œI just did.”
    Silence crackles between us. I didn’t ask my momabout this, but I know she’ll say yes. She calls Amanda her adopted daughter.
    Suddenly, my adopted sister erupts. “You ignored me! You heard me calling you—I take back my apology! I had the worst day today and it was all your fault!”
    â€œMy
fault? You’re the one who left your skirt out for Megan to write all over, and you’re the one who didn’t notice the A when you put it back on.”
    She’s quiet, so I keep going. “You got me sent to the principal! My mom’s mad at me, my dad’s going to lecture me, and I’ll never go to college now. So I think
I’m
the one with the worst day today, not you.”
    â€œIt was just so embarrassing,” she says. “All day long.”
    â€œI know—I was the one wearing the skirt!”
    â€œWitches with a B,” she says, and I know for a fact she’s shaking her head at the thought of them.
    â€œYeah,” I say, “witches with a B.”
    We snicker into the phone. I feel the connection reaching for five bars.
    After checking with her mom, she says she can’t spend the night because her aunt’s coming over for the weekend. I’m disappointed, but when we hang up, I feel better than I did before I called. At supper, Dad asks me about my visit to the principal’s as he passes the mashed potatoes. He puts on a stern face. Between you and me, I’m 100 percent positive Mom ordered him to lay down the law.
    Dad listens to my side, says a few things that Mom nods her head to, then tells me to make sure it never happens again. He clears his plate. “I’m going out to cut back the vine,” he says. “It’s choking the gutter.”
    â€œCan I help?” I ask.
    â€œYou can hold the ladder.”
    Boring! I wanted to use the choppers. But I don’t want Dad to fall, so I spend the next hour with my palms pressed against the aluminum rails while thorny arms of green and pink bougainvillea fall around me. Dad talks to it, scolding it for scratching him and telling it to stay out of the gutter. Some people think talking to plants makes them grow better. If that’s true, Dad is only making his own life harder.
    * * *
    The next day at school, some girls come up to me and tell me how rotten I am for pushing Amanda into the car-pool lane, even though they can plainly see Amanda standing right next to me. I stick up for myself, but they turn their backs on me and cut into the stream of people rushing to class.
    I don’t ask her, but Amanda says, “I didn’t know what to say.”
    Friday and Saturday are boring without her. When I call Becca on Saturday, she’s not home, either. Becca sometimes eats lunch with us. She’s not my best friend,but she wears alien ears to school and can speak Klingon, which is a planet in the Star Trek series, so Amanda and I like her pretty much.
    I get on my bike and think about the book I’ve been reading at