Lucky Breaks Read Online Free PDF

girl,” she said, and stroked one of the silky golden ears. “Wow, she’s big. What’s her name?”
    “HMS Beagle.”
    “HMS Beagle?” Paloma made her face very serious. She put her hand on Lucky’s shoulder. “I have to tell yousomething, Lucky,” she said. “Which, brace yourself. That dog is not a beagle.” Lucky could see that Paloma was working hard to hold in her smile.

    “I know,” Lucky said in the same serious voice. “She’s named for Charles Darwin’s ship.”
    Paloma couldn’t hold it any longer. She collapsed into herself on the bed, snorting and choking and holding her stomach. Lucky hadn’t meant for naming HMS Beagle to be funny, but now she saw that it was, unbearably. It had been transformed into unbearable funniness. Her bones melted and couldn’t hold her up anymore. She rolled onto the floor.
    HMS Beagle wrinkled her forehead and looked at Lucky, who was gasping and crying and trying to explain about Charles Darwin. Lucky looked back at her dog, pointed, and spewed laughter into her hands. Paloma did the same, while HMS Beagle padded out toward the kitchen, her head low. This made Lucky and Paloma burst out in a new wave of laughing.
    Lucky discovered that hard laughing was like crying in the sense that sometimes you cannot stop. And it’s a catching disease, because when another person is spurting and gasping it makes you start again even after you have taken deep gulps of air and stopped looking at the other laughing person. The laughter muscles in your stomach ache because they’re not used to it. Lucky calmed herself and cleared her throat and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
    Lucky loved having to laugh so hard that she couldn’t stop, and she loved teetering on the tightrope of keeping much,much more laughter inside, and she loved making Paloma get hysterical. But now her face and her torso were achy from laughing, and she felt wrung out. She could see that it was the same for Paloma. They both sagged onto the bed.
    Suddenly they heard a tugboat outside the trailer, coming closer and closer. Lucky blotted her eyes with her shirt and blew her nose into a paper towel.
    “Lucky,” Paloma said, making her voice very calm and low.
    “Yes, Paloma,” Lucky said in the same controlled, TV-broadcaster voice.
    “I believe there is a tugboat coming this way, although I didn’t notice any ocean in the area.”
    So just when they thought they were laughed out, exhausted, and completely dried up, wanting something else like a Gatorade and a Pixy Stix, they were off again. Their humor ducts opened up and spewed laughter into their bodies.
    When Miles knocked and then came into Lucky’s trailer, he stared at them for a while, boneless and writhing and hiccuping and gasping. Then he made more tugboat noises until they begged him to stop, and flung themselves outside, screaming with the craziness and strangeness of Miles and HMS Beagle and weird magazine ads and tomato worms, their arms looped around each other’s shoulders, smiled on by Brigitte and the pack of geologists, matching their steps without even meaning to.

7. a plan
    Uncle Rocky and the geologists had promised to stop by for coffee and brownies the next day, Sunday afternoon, before the long drive back to the San Fernando Valley. Early that morning Paloma called Lucky from the hotel in Sierra City.
    “So how did they like their gift?” Paloma said.
    Lucky thought she’d missed something in the conversation. “Who?”
    “The chickens!”
    Lucky laughed and said in her fake British-queen accent, “Oh, superb, you know, especially with the garlic and butter sauce.” In her regular voice she added, “I wish you could come back next weekend.”
    “Me too. I wish Hard Pan wasn’t so far. It’s like two hundred miles.”
    “Yeah, but the geologists love it here. Maybe your uncle will come back and bring you.”
    “We need a plan,” said Paloma. “Let’s each try to think of one and compare notes when I get