Chapter 1: Trudy

Technically speaking, I’m not the luckiest girl in the world. I’m only number eighteen worldwide according to the Princeton standardized luck test, and number seven in the United States. But I’m only a sophomore in high school, so I have time to grow into more luck. Some people do, though some people also lose luck as they get older. No one knows exactly why. There are lots of self-help books written about how to get more luck, but I always wonder if the people writing them had so much luck, why do they need to make money by writing a book about it?

I grew up in poor, rural Tennessee, and I’m now on scholarship to St. James Academy, which is the most prestigious luck school in the country and located in Northern Vermont. My first day here, I was in awe of every little detail that had to do with luck, the old statues of the founders in the courtyard out front, the lucky lights that turned green when you stepped into the school (hokey, but the administrators keep them anyway), the photos of all the most famous graduates of the school in a row in the commons, including a bunch of movie stars. Even one President of the United States. (You’d think there would be more, but it turns out that it’s not such a great job and the really lucky people stay away from it. After the first time, anyway, and the word got around.)

Rob Chiltern was one of the first people I met that day.

“Nice to meet you, Trudy,” he said as I walked out of the office with my arms full of books, trying to figure out where my locker was.

My knees went weak at the first sight of him, peeking out from on top of the books. He was incredibly handsome, with brown hair that curls around his ears, dimples, and great eyes that are a deep green color. I guess green goes with luck and all that.

I babbled something about how overwhelmed I was at St. James.

“But I’m really the one who should be impressed by you,” said Rob. “I’ve heard about those luck scores of yours.”

I found out later all the other stuff about him, which maybe should have scared me away. Junior Class President and the descendant of the oldest luck family in America, tracing their magic back to the days of the Mayflower, when it was forbidden. He also had a girlfriend at the time, Laura Chevely, who is considered the most dangerous girl in school. But I didn’t know that then. I just sort of stood there with my mouth wide open. It seems luck doesn’t prevent you from looking like a fool every once in a while.

“You want to sit at our table at lunch?” asked Rob. Then he held his hands up. “No pressure. Just trying to make sure you’re comfortable at the new school.”

“Thanks,” I said. At my old school, I’d always sat at one of the popular tables. I guess I was popular, but it hadn’t felt that great. Mostly I felt like people had no idea who the real me was.

Before I was officially tested, the other kids at school had no idea that the reason that they were always drawn to me was because of my luck. All our conversations were about trivial things, and if they called me up after school or asked me to sleepovers, it was always the same chatter. I had hoped that at least at St. James I would meet people who understood about luck, and who were my friends for real reasons.

“I think you must be the least talkative girl I’ve ever met,” said Rob, smiling at me.

“Uh,” I said, not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Well, that’s all right. I can do the talking for you. Ask any of my friends. Talking is what I’m best at. It’s what all the girls love about me,” he said.

I could feel my face turning red. And when I turn red, it’s really red. I’m one of those people with skin like a red-head, even though I don’t have red hair. I’m kind of mousy brown, but I’m lucky enough that I usually get nice highlights from the sun, which happens to come out whenever I step outside. One of the perks of being lucky: You never have to carry an umbrella.

“Not all the girls exactly,” Rob went on. “Just a few of the really interesting ones. And by the way, did you know how pretty you look with your head tilted to the side like that?”

I held my head straighter.

“Actually, you look pretty with your head like that, too. But I probably shouldn’t keep telling you how pretty you are. You will think that I’m one of those shallow guys who only cares what a girl looks like instead of what she thinks and feels,” said Rob.

I smiled broadly at that.

“Oh, boy,” he said. “I think I’m in trouble. You don’t already have a boyfriend in Tennessee who is waiting for you to come home for the summer, do you?” Rob asked.

“No,” I said. Not by a long shot.

“That is the best news I think I’ve heard all year,” said Rob. “That means we have time to get to know each other before I have to make my move.”

“Make your move?” I said, teasing.

He wiggled his butt in a ridiculous way. It made him look like a drowning caterpillar. It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Not his butt, but the fact that he was willing to look ridiculous to make me feel more comfortable.

“And now I will escort you to your locker, and help you find your first class. If you don’t mind.” He offered his arm and did just that. He made me laugh twice more before we got there and he had a spot waiting next to him at lunch, just like he said. Laura Chevely was on his other side of course, staring daggers at me. But I didn’t realize she was his girlfriend. I think they broke up that afternoon.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty about that. I didn’t try to steal him away from her, but I suppose that is what happened. The one time I asked him about it, Rob said that it just looked that way. He said that he and Laura hadn’t really been together-together for months before I came along. They’d just been putting on a show for the sake of everyone else.

But I wonder if Rob was the main one putting on a show and Laura was angry at me that I’d stopped him from doing it anymore.

Not that Laura showed any signs of being upset that she and Rob had broken up. She had a new boyfriend the very next weekend. They didn’t last very long, only a month or so, but then she had another hot and heavy boyfriend after that, and so on. Always one of the tallest, strongest, most handsome guys at school, football players, basketball players, the lead in the school play. She didn’t date low profile people. I’m not sure she even knew who they were. Everyone has luck at St. James, but Laura went for the cream of the cream and I’d never seen her thwarted. If she wanted to date someone, she dated someone.

But I do feel sorry for her, in a way, because however flashy her dates, it’s Rob who’s the ideal boyfriend, thoughtful, kind, attentive. I can’t imagine someone sweeter or more loving. He defends me when people treat me like a nobody because I don’t come from a luck family—even his own parents. He kisses me tenderly. He walks me back to my dorm room. He turns around in the hall and waves at me, as if he has a sixth sense that I’m there.

But we fell in love so fast that sometimes I wonder—did it have anything to do with luck? Lots of people at St. James end up falling in love and having messy break-ups. So luck doesn’t make you immune to dating problems. Maybe that should be proof that luck doesn’t have anything to do with love. I just don’t know. I didn’t grow up around luck the way everyone else here did. I don’t learn the rules from birth.

There were certainly signs of luck from the beginning. When I was a kid, I never went to the hospital or even the doctor for anything but routine visits for checkups and immunizations. I never got sick, not once in my life. I never got a scrape or a cut that even needed a bandaid. I guess Mom didn’t notice because I liked to put bandaids on anyway, whenever I could get away with it. But Mom and Dad had no luck and it wasn’t the first thing anyone would guess. Luck is usually so strongly genetic that I still wonder if there is some hidden ancestor with luck in Mom and Dad’s genealogy, if we went back far enough. Maybe on both sides, and it’s some kind of hidden recessive gene that came together when they got me.

In elementary school, I got straight A’s in everything, even without doing homework. I sometimes studied because I felt better about getting good grades by actually learning something. But even if I didn’t, I happened to guess the right answer almost all of the time, first try. The books that I wanted to read were always in the school library. I was always the hall monitor when I wanted to be. No one bullied me on the playground or made fun of me in class. I won contests whenever I entered them.

I even liked school lunch, because it happened to be just what I wanted a lot of the time. One month, we had my favorite lunch, which was BBQ sandwiches, every day except for one. The other kids started to get sick of it and complain, but the lunch ladies didn’t know what to do. They kept being shipped the same thing for some reason, even when they complained to the head office. But everyone wrote it off as a coincidence. The whole county was low in luck, which makes sense when you consider how poor everyone was. The people who’d had luck had moved away from that section of the world long ago. No one had tested lucky in that school district in all the years of the standardized test. Luck just wasn’t in the air or water around there.

But I knew the truth when I was ten years old. That was when I opened up a boxed cereal and found that it had the one-of-a-kind dolls in it that I had been wanting for weeks. None of the other boxes had anything but cheap plastic toys in it, at least according to the friends I asked about it. But this box—my box—had the doll with the real horsehair pig tails and the hand-painted face and the pleated skirt that matched the real princess when she got married on television. Exactly the doll that I had been hoping to get for my birthday that year, but hadn’t because Mom couldn’t afford it. She got me a cheaper doll instead, but it wasn’t the same.

There wasn’t any other explanation for how the doll had gotten into that cereal box except by luck. A lot of luck.

I didn’t show Mom the porcelain doll for weeks because I was afraid that if she saw it, she would find out the truth, too. The only explanation my kid brain could come up with for my luck was that I had to be adopted. And if I told Mom and Dad about the doll, they would admit the truth, that they weren’t my real parents, and that I didn’t belong with them anymore. They would make me go back to my birth family, where everyone had luck. It terrified me. I didn’t care about the luck. I loved Mom and Dad so much I would have given up all my luck if I could. But I couldn’t see how to do that.

I tried to get rid of the doll, but when I left it at school, I was too lucky for someone not to see me and I got it back. When I tried to throw it away, the garbage man left it on the doorstep.

So I decided that I might as well just play with the doll and enjoy it. It felt like fate, something out of my control, when Mom caught me playing with the doll alone in my room.

Here it is, the time when they tell me I have to leave them, I thought.

But instead Mom and Dad sat me down on the living room couch, a horrible floral thing that they’d gotten from Dad’s parents when he was married. It smelled like Grandma’s cinnamon perfume.

Dad knelt down on the floor by my side and Mom sat next to me.

“You know we love you, don’t you?” Mom said.

I nodded, about to burst into tears.

“There are a lot of things that we can’t buy for you,” said Dad. “The older you get, the more of them you will see. Things that other people have and don’t even care about having.”

I didn’t understand what he was saying.

“We waited a long time for you to come into our lives, a lot of lost hopes and dreams along the way. But when you were finally born healthy and whole, we promised ourselves that we would do everything right,” said Mom.

“You have,” I said. They were such great parents. They were a little older, sure, but you’d never guess it. Dad started an exercise routine when I was little, just so he could chase me around without getting out of breath and Mom had looked in catalogs to make sure she could sew me clothes that were fashionable.

“We know you deserve a lot of things we can’t buy for you. You deserve every good thing, Trudy,” Mom went on.

“But you can’t just take those things,” said Dad. “Think about how that makes us feel, knowing that we couldn’t give you something you wanted, so you had to steal it.”

Steal? Dad and Mom thought I had stolen the doll? I opened my mouth to tell them that I hadn’t taken it, then I closed it abruptly. Even though it didn’t feel like good luck for them to think I’d done something wrong, I realized it was. If I told them the truth, that the doll came from luck, even if there wasn’t some other family waiting to take me away from them, it would still mean that I had something that hadn’t come from them. It would make me different from them and change everything between us.

So I handed Mom the doll and told her I was sorry for stealing it. Later that week she tried to take it back to the store she thought it came from, but they had no record of anyone buying it. In the end, she had to give it to good will and some other lucky girl somewhere probably got it to play with. At least it didn’t come back to me.

But after that, I tried to keep hiding my luck. It wasn’t easy. I’d find money on the street sometimes, hundred dollar bills just floating around that no one else seemed to notice. I couldn’t spend them and I couldn’t tell Mom and Dad about them, but I kept them hidden under my mattress where I didn’t think Mom ever looked. My luck became something that I was afraid of.

Then in eighth grade, Dad’s car broke down and he couldn’t afford to fix it. He started taking a bike into work every day. Mom was stuck at home until he got back, and then she’d take the bike out shopping, miles and miles away from home. She had to put the groceries in the saddlebags and on a backpack she wore, and then pedal around with all that extra weight. At her age, I wasn’t sure it was healthy. It looked scary, sometimes, seeing her wobble around as she got started.

It was just so unfair.

I told Dad that he should use some of my college money, which they had been faithfully saving since Mom got pregnant with me, to pay for the car repair.

Dad was mad I even suggested it. “We can’t give you fancy things, but we can give you enough money to go to college and get out of this place, Trudy. You’re our baby and we’re not going to sacrifice your future for a little convenience for us in the present.”

A little inconvenience, that was what he thought not having a car was?

I decided I had to do something about it. I didn’t know how, but I figured my luck would pop up sometime soon with the answer.

Sure enough that very day I was listening to the radio and they had a big giveaway for a brand new car. You had to be the right number caller and you had to answer some questions.

I called in and ended up being the right number and knowing the right answers. So I won the car. I gave them our home address and they said they would deliver it within the week.

I waited in tense anticipation for the car to arrive. But when it came, one night when Mom was out shopping, Dad shook his head and told them it was a mistake. He insisted they take it away again.

I hurried out and grabbed his arm. “They want to give you a car. What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s wrong with it is that it isn’t ours. That means that it belongs to someone else. And when that someone realizes that we have it instead, there will be a reckoning.”

“But they said it was a prize. It doesn’t belong to anyone else,” I said.

Dad went over and asked about that. He was assured I was right, but then they tried to hand him some paperwork. He shook his head and came back to me. “I have to pay taxes on the full value of the new car before I can take delivery. I can’t afford taxes on something like that.” He told me the amount and it was even more than the car repair to our old car would have been.

“But that’s not fair,” I complained.

One of the men came up to me and explained that most people sell the new car and take the cash to buy something smaller and that they can pay taxes with what remained.

I suggested this to Dad, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He thought it was a scam and sure to come back to bite him. “It’s happened before, Trudy. You don’t know how bad our luck is.”

He might have been right. I had tried to help him with my good luck, but it was mine, not his. You couldn’t give away luck, and it seemed that no matter what I gave them, once it passed from me to them, their bad luck would take over.

If I pressed the issue now, I also knew that Mom and Dad would find out the truth about my luck and then where would we be? I still wasn’t ready to face the look on my parents’ faces when they realized that I wasn’t like them at all, that I had something they hadn’t given me and could never understand.

I spent another year trying to hide the truth. And then when I hit ninth grade, it was time to take the national luck test. I might have found a way out of it, but I didn’t even try.

It wasn’t like a regular test, with questions and answers. It was more free form. Part of it was about life history, questions about things that had happened that you couldn’t explain. I wrote down the things about the car from the radio station and the doll in the cereal box. I guess they must have verified those before they scored me.

There were other parts, too. Places where you had to answer a question without being able to see the answer. You’d have to guess at A,B,C, or D blindly. There were places where you wrote little essays in about whatever you thought the question should be. And parts where you just wrote random numbers down. I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I came out of the test pretty sure that I had just proved I had luck.

I didn’t know how much luck until a couple weeks later, when I got pulled out of class and sent down to the principal’s office.

I walked out of my classroom, wondering if anything would ever be the same again. I thought about my so-called friends and how little they really knew me. They would probably be mad I hadn’t told them. And then what? Would everyone want me to use my luck for them? Would I ever be anything but the girl who had luck in the small town where everyone else had none?

The principal looked sweaty and uncomfortable. He kept touching the neck of his shirt and loosening his tie, until it had practically come free from the knot. His hair was messy and he kept repeating things.

Finally, he showed me the test scores and I saw that I was nationally ranked and what my ranking was.

I hadn’t realized I had that much luck. It made me feel equal portions pleased and sick inside. With that much luck, things would change. There had to be no question of that.

“Congratulations. This is something we should all be proud of,” said the principal.

“What does it mean?” I asked him. “What happens now?”

“Well, you can certainly stay here for as long as you wish. We’ll be happy to have you, but I suspect that you will have other options. With a score like that, private luck schools will want to interview you and offer you scholarships. Of course, they will have opportunities for you that we can’t compete with. And ways to train your luck and make sure that your education isn’t short-changed by lucky guesses.”

He didn’t want me at the school, I thought. It would be too hard for them to make sure I learned anything. And with the truth out, he couldn’t control the school situation the way he wanted to.

I figured out what that meant pretty soon. I didn’t tell anyone, but by the end of the school day, everyone knew. Some of my friends whispered that I thought I was better than they were now and they turned away from me when I tried to talk to them. Other people, friends and acquaintances, swarmed around me so that I could barely take a step alone. This came with offers to carry my books, my backpack, to drive me to and from school so I didn’t have to take the bus, and offers for dates.

This was exactly why I had kept my luck hidden for all these years. They were all acting crazy. I thought about the story of the ugly duckling who suddenly realized he was a swan. People pretend that story has a happy ending, but for the ugly duckling, he was used to being a duckling, being with other ducklings. Suddenly having to be a swan, something he knew nothing about, wasn’t such a great thing. The ducklings treated him differently now, and he couldn’t do anything the way that he was used to.

Finally I got home and cried. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, I thought. If I was lucky, wasn’t that supposed to mean that the things I wanted to have happen, happened? I didn’t want this.

Mom tried to get me to talk to her, but I wouldn’t. Then Dad came home and I came out and explained it all to them. I showed them the test results the principal had given me, complete with the ranking and the brochures he’d offered me from private luck high schools that had already come in the mail to the school.

“This is wonderful,” said Mom. But her cheeks were bright red, as if I’d slapped her and she looked suddenly older.

“Our little girl,” said Dad. “I’m so happy.” But his back hunched over more than ever as he glanced through the photos from St. James.

“You’ll have so many schools to choose from,” said Mom.

“I know,” I said.

“I don’t want you to think about us. Don’t pick a school based on how close it is to home. You want to think about yourself now,” said Mom.

“We’ll come up and visit you whenever we can,” said Dad. “Though we’ll have to do some saving.”

“I don’t know if I want to go,” I said. My little girl fear of being adopted and sent back to my birth family hadn’t come true, but this didn’t seem much different, after all. I was still going to be sent away and Mom and Dad were going to feel like I wasn’t theirs anymore.

“Of course you want to go,” said Mom. “You want to be with people like you, with luck.”

People like me. With luck. Was that what I wanted? I wasn’t so sure. It would mean so much change, and I didn’t know if I was ready.

There was a long pause. “This is wonderful, Trudy,” said Dad. “We’re so happy for you.” He put his arms around me and hugged me, but for the first time in my life, I felt like Dad was holding back, not quite putting all of himself into it.

“It’s not just for me,” I said. “I can help both of you, too.” Now that I was honest about being lucky, I thought maybe my parents would accept some of the perks. I should have known better. They might had been unlucky, but they still had their pride. And their stubbornness.

“Don’t think about us, Trudy,” said Mom. “This is your chance to make your life better. Don’t look back at us. We’ll get along fine. We always have.”

Dad moved to Mom and wiped at the tears on her face. “Tears of joy,” she said, but I didn’t believe her.

Of course, meeting Rob on my first day at St. James made a lot of things better. He really was like me, and so was everyone else at St. James. Surrounded by other people who had luck, it made my luck seem less noticeable. I sometimes wished that I had more friends besides just Mabel and Arless. Not that there is anything wrong with them. I love them and am so glad I have real friends. But there were a lot of people who didn’t like me at all. Laura Chevely had done her best to spread nasty rumors about me, and even if I had more luck than she did, I couldn’t escape all the consequences of that.

The fact that I rarely saw Mom and Dad these days, and that I didn’t know what I was going to do when Rob graduated and I still had two years left at St. James alone wasn’t something I thought a lot about. I had to believe things would work out. I was lucky, after all. And I was finally where I belonged, with other lucky people like me.