Chapter 10: Rob

Art came knocking on the door to my dorm room Thursday morning. Pounding on it, in fact. At three a.m.

I stumbled out of my bedroom, sure for that moment that it was the police there to arrest me for something I hadn’t done but looked guilty for, because of my lack of luck. My parents would get me out of it, but not before I was thoroughly embarrassed. And the truth would come out at last, even without Laura’s blackmail.

Colin was still sound asleep. He could sleep through anything, I think. Lucky son of a gun.

I stumbled over clothes, dirty plates on the floor, and stacks of paper that might or might not have homework on them. I think I got a paper cut, too. On my foot. Bad luck again.

When I saw it was only Art at the door, I was pretty annoyed. “What?” I snarled at him.

“I need your help,” he said. He put his hands together like he was praying. “Please. I’m desperate.”

“You sure you don’t want to go talk privately to Trudy instead?” I asked. “If it’s really important, I’m sure she’s the one for it.”

“Look, I’m sorry about that. I talked to Trudy because I figured she understood what life was like for people who have no luck in a way that neither of us ever can.”

“Huh?”

“Because of her parents. And all the people she grew up with. Her life was really different from ours, Rob.” He glanced around. “Can we get some lights on in here?”

I’d hesitated turning on the lights because I wanted to go back to sleep, but it seemed there was no help for it.

“So what’s up? This is something about luck and you think I can help because I have so much of it?” I asked, conscious of the irony here. Art was willing to tell me his secret now, it seemed, but only because he didn’t know mine.

“I don’t know,” said Art. “I don’t know if there’s any help for it now.” For the first time since I had known Art, he seemed truly distressed.

He moved into the front room and I gestured to the couch. Unfortunately, it was covered with what looked like Colin’s photo album. There were pictures everywhere, and glues, and scissors of various kinds.

“Floor?” I said, and sat down on it. “What do you need, Art?” I was hoping it wasn’t really going to require luck, since I had none. I should tell Art the truth. I really should. And I would. Soon.

Art sat down heavily. “It’s gone,” he said, his head in his hands. His voice was so muffled, I could hardly hear him.

I felt suddenly sick, thinking of Laura and the key I’d given her. I’d thought there couldn’t be anything that valuable in his room. At least nothing he couldn’t just reproduce. But then again, Laura wouldn’t have asked for the key if she hadn’t had some evil plan in store. And I’d let her do it. I hadn’t had any choice. But I wasn’t sure Art would agree with me.

“All my work. The whole lab was gutted. I didn’t think anyone knew it was there except for—well, except for Trudy.”

“Lab?” I asked, feeling sick inside.

“My lab. Where I’ve been working on my experiment. In my basement apartment.”

“You never told me about an experiment,” I said faintly, feeling a stab of pain in my throat.

“I thought I left it locked, but I don’t know if I did now,” said Art. “Could I really be so stupid? Apparently, I could. And now I’m going to lose everything that matters to me.”

“Art, I’ve got to tell you something,” I said. I felt my bones start to ache, like they did when it was really cold outside.

“It’s going to have to wait,” said Art. “I really can’t think about anything else right now. I need to know who did this and why. And I need to know how to get everything back. If the whole world knows about my experiments on—” he shook his head.

“Experiment on what?”

Art considered.

“You’re going to have to tell me if you want me to help you find it,” I said.

Art ended up looking around the whole dorm room, checking to make sure Colin was really asleep by poking his foot with a pin (Colin still didn’t wake up) and then finally writing it down on a piece of paper. “Luck.”

“What do you mean luck?” I asked.

Art shook his head, and mimed locking his lips. He took back the piece of paper and wrote down: “How to get more, how to get less.”

Wait a minute. That was what had been in his lab? Why hadn’t he told me? No wonder Laura had stolen it. I could see the potential immediately. And I wished Art had suggested I be one of the experimental subjects. To live with lots of luck, even for a little while, would have been so much relief.

“You should have told me,” I said. If I’d known I would never have let Laura—or maybe I would. If I’d had more luck, she wouldn’t have been able to get away with it. Because it wouldn’t have been the truth anymore, for one thing.

I wanted to yell at Art. I wanted to kick him. Instead I kicked the ugly green dorm wall behind him. I had always hated that color. And that wall. There was a satisfying sound of a thud, and an even more satisfying, hot sensation of pain in my feet. I might have broken several bones, but I didn’t care. They don’t set broken toe bones anyway. I knew that because it was one of the things I had looked up when I was a kid. I’d looked up lots of stuff about first aid, in case I ever had to do it on myself, without telling my parents I’d been in an accident. I’d also tried hard not to get in accidents.

Obviously, Laura had known what Art was working on, long before I did. And I’d just been one piece of her plan. “So did you take away your own luck or something?” I asked.

Art wrote his answer: “I did decrease my luck recently.”

“What? Why would you ever do that?” I understood why you might want to decrease luck for someone else, but for yourself?

“You’d be surprised how luck can mess up your life,” said Art, finally giving up the paper and talking in a whisper so sleeping Colin couldn’t report our conversation to anyone. Talk about locking the barn door after the horse was stolen.

“You think having luck has messed your life?” I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. It was a short, harsh sound.

“You must know what it’s like,” said Art. “You’re always getting what you want. It spoils you. Makes you have expectations. And makes you lazy.”

I suppose Art was lazy in certain ways. And he expected life to be easy. It wasn’t like that for me, but I’d never really considered it an advantage.

“There are other, less drastic solutions to laziness than figuring out scientifically how to get rid of your luck,” I pointed out. “Self-control, for one. It is possible to develop self-control even if you are lucky.” I said it off-hand, but then I thought about it. I had self-control. I had it in buckets. But that was because I’d learned it years ago, as a kid without any luck.

“So you want to be less successful? You want to be rejected more?” I asked.

“Right,” said Art. “Or—well, I think I should be.”

“And you’ve figured out how to do that with your experiment. Wow, that’s pretty powerful stuff. No wonder someone wanted to steal it from you,” I said. I was pretty sure Laura had other plans for Art’s experiment than learning self-control.

Art’s head jerked up. “You don’t understand.”

“It’s true. I don’t understand.”

“You have Trudy,” said Art. “You’re—you have character.”

I sighed. Yeah, that was you got when you had no luck. Character. Lots and lots of character. “Do you know if the experiment for more luck works even on someone who has no luck at all?” I asked.

“Well, no one really has zero luck,” said Art. “Even the tests have a wide variety of scores for the low end of the scale. The lowest reported score on the standardized Princeton test is actually about a three, and that was from someone who was extremely unlucky. Such that it was almost impossible to test her, because she almost died of a paper cut.”

Art could go on and on like this, and I knew it. “Just tell me if it works on the luckless,” I said impatiently. My score was actually a 4, so it was pretty close to zero.

“It should work on what we colloquially call the luckless. Though I haven’t done a lot of testing. My understanding of the mechanism seems sounds enough.”

“You haven’t done a lot of testing?”

“Well, it’s mostly been on myself. I take away my luck and then get it back.”

“You haven’t tried it on anyone else?” What if it didn’t work? What if it was only because Art was born with luck, and it was his natural state to have it, so it was easy to give it back? What if I was still doomed?

“I’m not a big research lab, Rob. I’m just a student. I’d have to worry about the ethics of human testing, and get wavers signed and all that. I just don’t have the resources yet. I thought I would wait until college and try to find a big research institution that would sponsor me and maybe a professor to guide me.”

“You didn’t try it on Trudy?” I asked. “She’s not without luck right now, too, is she?” If all three of us had no luck, and Laura had access to something that would give her more luck—we were all doomed.

He shrugged. “She’s a little lower than she was.”

“How low?” Was that part of the reason that she and I hadn’t been able to work things out or was that just because we’d both been stubborn and stupid? You can’t blame everything on bad luck.

Art gave me a number that put him just above average on the Princeton tests. “That’s about where I am, too,” he said. “It’s been very instructive.”

I was glad he hadn’t gotten rid of all his luck, but it was amusing in a sad way that he thought slightly above average would teach him so much. The real question was what Laura was going to do with his experiment. Destroy it? Keep it for her own personal use? Sell it?

“Was there any sign it was just destroyed?” I asked, feeling nauseous at the thought of such an amazing discovery being gone forever. But surely Art had made notes. Surely he was a good enough scientist to recreate them.

“I don’t think so. The lab was carefully emptied, not wrecked. I suppose the thief or thieves could have taken it somewhere else and then destroyed it. But what would be the point? I have to figure out who it was and then maybe I can figure out what they might do with it.”

“It’s Laura,” I said abruptly. “Laura Chevely.”

“What? Why? How can you be sure?” asked Art.

I told him about the key. I felt horrible. I had spent most of my life postponing the hard stuff. I guess that was proof right there that it wasn’t just about whether you had luck or not. It was about whether people around you treated you as if they expected you had luck.

“You gave her my key? Why would you do that?” said Art.

“I thought it was—I thought she was going to ask you out or something,” I said, lying. “I was stupid. I should have asked more questions.” There was a simple reason I hadn’t, but I postponed telling him about that for now. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

“You should have told me,” said Art.

“Obviously. You can yell at me all you want later. But right now, we need to find her. Talk her into giving everything back.”

“Laura Chevely?” said Art. “No way. She’ll never do it. She is going to enjoy making us eat dirt and crawl on the ground.”

“So we do a lot of that. And then we get it back.”

“Why would she give back something that could be worth billions of dollars? It’s not like she’s in love with you anymore.”

Or like she ever really had been. “Is it really worth billions?” I asked.

“Well how much do you think unlucky people would pay for luck?” he asked.

“Unlucky people usually don’t have much money for anything,” I pointed out. I was the exception to this rule, and that was only because I had access to my parents’ money. Or at least, I did until they found out the truth.

“Some of them do and some of them don’t. And there are lucky people who would pay not to have luck.”

“Yeah, I’m sure there will be a huge killing there,” I said sarcastically.

“Then there are lucky people who want to take luck away from their rivals,” said Art.

Right. I started to realize how big this was. It had nothing to do with us, not anymore. This wasn’t a high school problem now. I wished I felt more confident of our ability to face it.

“It was kind of dumb of you to give up luck at a time like this,” I said.

“I was afraid if I had too much luck while doing this experiment, someone would offer me a huge settlement for it. And then I wouldn’t be able to resist.”

“So you made sure you didn’t have any choices?”

“I thought I was managing them carefully,” said Art.

He sounded like a drug addict. “Let’s go to Laura’s dorm. See if we can talk some sense into her.” It didn’t seem very likely, I admit.

“At four a.m.?” asked Art. He didn’t say anything about the rules about boys in girls’ dorm rooms. I figured he had broken those so many times he didn’t even think about them anymore.

“We’ll wake her up. Maybe she’ll be disoriented enough to let something out,” I said.

“Laura? Disoriented?” said Art.

“Well, it’s our best chance.” It was our only chance.

“How does the experiment work, anyway?” I asked, as Art and I were walking over.

“The unlucky part or the lucky part?” he asked.

“Both.”

“You just need electricity to get lucky,” said Art. “But it’s the exact voltage that’s tricky. I’ve got a machine that does it precisely. But you wouldn’t want to just stand out in a thunderstorm hoping for lightning, though that might be how luck got started eons ago.”

“Lucky protozoas and such?” I said. This could be the answer to the question of how life first started in the universe.

“Maybe,” said Art. “And there’s a certain bacteria that takes away luck when you touch it, which is probably what has happened in people who didn’t have explanations for it. It’s an illness.”

“So people really get sick and lose their luck?” There were rumors about that, just like there were rumors that alligators lived in the sewers in New York and JFK was still alive, living with Elvis and a bunch of other really lucky people who had gotten tired of being famous, so they pretended to die—and got lucky enough that almost everyone believed it.

“They do,” said Art.