Dumb Luck (3 page)

chapter
six

No way was I going to school on Tuesday. I needed some more time on this. I had finally fallen asleep near dawn and woke up around noon. The first thing I saw was a squirrel on a branch of a tree outside my window. He was looking right back at me, curious, as if he, too, knew I'd won some big money. He seemed to be saying, “So, you're the lucky bastard.”

I got up out of bed and looked at myself in the mirror and answered, “Yes, I am,” out loud, but then suddenly felt rather silly.

And then a voice in my
head slammed out a question. “Now what?”

Yeah, now what?

I laughed right at that lucky bastard in the mirror.

Downstairs, I discovered my dad had taken his second day off from work. No selling silver
SUV
s for him today. “Welcome back to the world of the living, Brandon,” he said, lowering the newspaper he was reading. I knew he'd been sitting there in the kitchen all morning, waiting for me.

“Morning, Dad,” I said.

My mom appeared as if on cue. “What would you like to eat?”

There were the usual options. None of which particularly appealed to me. I thought for a minute. “Let's order out for something,” I heard myself say. “It's on me.”

My father gave me his as-if look, but my mother shushed him before he could say anything. Ordering out for any kind of food in my father's book had always been considered frivolous and too expensive.

“Sure,” my mom said. “What would you like?”

I thought for a long minute about what someone who was rich and famous would order out for on Tuesday around noon. But I hadn't a clue.

“I want the most expensive pizza we can buy,” I said. “And I want everything on it. And I do mean everything.”

My dad gave me a hard look. I gave that look right back at him. Then he dropped the paper on the table and slapped me on the back. “You want pizza, we'll call for pizza.” But it was my mother who made the phone call.

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and the three of us sat there at the kitchen table.

“We need to talk,” my father said.

“I know,” I answered.

“We have to come up with a plan.”

I didn't like the sound of the word, “we,” but I let it go. I knew that something like this was coming. “I know that, too.”

“I've been thinking of
opening up my own car lot,” my dad said, suddenly
not sounding like my usually grumpy dad. “This would be
my chance.”

Technically, of course, the money was mine, not ours. Who was he, to start thinking about how to spend my money? I was going to blurt out something but I decided to keep my mouth shut. I knew what he could be like if I pushed the wrong buttons. It was beginning to sink in that I was going to have to learn some things about what it was like to have a pile of money. And I guessed it might have to start with my parents. I decided to sidestep my dad for a minute.

My mother had been hovering, standing by the sink, looking a little nervous. I turned to her. “What about you, Mom? What do you want?”

She looked at me and blinked a couple of times. “I want a dishwasher,” she said. Then she swallowed hard and added, “and a new sofa for the living room.” And then she seemed embarrassed to have said these things out loud.

This was all so weird. My mom had always wanted a dishwasher but my father, of course, had considered it extravagant. It was one of those family issues that never went away but surfaced from time to time and created tension. I realized I could suddenly snap my fingers and solve many of my family's biggest problems.

“Mom, let's get you the dishwasher today. And whatever furniture you want.” That was easy enough.

My dad looked a little annoyed that I had addressed her first, but he tried not to show it. I turned to him. “I thought you hated the used car business,” I said.

“I don't love it but it's what I know. I just hate having to work for some asshole who gets to keep most of the profit.” My father was the world's expert on assholes who get rich while poor slobs like him work their butts off.

I decided that I would try to play this like I was wise beyond my years. “How much you reckon it would take to get this project off the ground?”

“Fifty should do it,” he said, looking away from me toward the door, as if he was checking to see if the pizza guy had arrived.

Now, I'd be the first to admit I have trouble with numbers. Up until last Saturday night, I didn't even know how many zeros there were in three million. Now I knew there were six zeros and one big three. But I didn't know what “fifty” meant to my father. Certainly not fifty dollars.

“Fifty?” I asked.

“Yeah. Fifty thousand would allow me to lease some land, get some inventory, hire maybe one other guy.”

Maybe my father's dream was to become the asshole who gets rich on the hard work of the poor slob he hired. But he was my father. I was trying to do the math in my head. Three mil, take away $50,000. A dent but only a small dent. “And this would make you happy?”

“All my life, I've dreamed of being self-employed.
Having my own business.” His voice was different now. He
wasn't talking to me like I was his kid. He
was telling me the truth. And I'd heard him fantasize
about having his own business before. It was his dream.

“Then I think you should go for it,” I said.

He reached out and gave me a high five, the first one he'd ever given me in my eighteen years of life. But it felt damn good.

We made small talk after that until the pizza arrived. My dad had to pay for it because I didn't have any cash.

The pizza did have everything on it. Way too much of everything. The anchovies did not work well with the pineapples. In truth, it was one of the crappiest pizzas I ever ate but I didn't say it out loud. And no one complained in our kitchen.

In the afternoon, we drove to the bank where I got myself a couple of credit cards. Then we went to the shopping center and picked out a dishwasher, a sofa, and a couple of overstuffed chairs for the living room. My mom was in heaven. On the way home, my father drove by a couple of potential properties for his car lot. Maybe I should have been feeling good about being able to help out my dad, but I still didn't know what I was going to do with
my
money and I wanted some time to think it through. Why did he always have to be so pushy? But, yet again, I kept my mouth shut.

I guess I was pretty quiet on the way home. “You still alive back there?” my dad asked, sounding lighter and happier than I'd ever heard him.

“Yeah, I'm still here.” But I was somewhere else. I don't know where I was. I kept thinking I should come up with a list. What did
I
want?

A sweet car.

A dirt bike.

A big honking
HD
flat screen
TV
for my bedroom.

And a girlfriend.

Yeah, I really, really wanted a girlfriend.

chapter
seven

Those photographs they took at the lottery headquarters ended up not only in the papers but all over the Internet. And there was that dumb interview I did for
TV
, where I stuttered a little and just laughed when the reporter asked me how it felt to be a winner. Somebody posted that on the Internet, too, with the title:
Losers Sometimes are Winners.

I was getting a ton of e-mails from kids at school and from people I didn't even know. There were even e-mails from girls that included pictures. All my life I had wanted people to like me. I had wanted to be popular. And now. Bingo. Like magic. This was going to be the way my life would go from now on. I felt a warm glow all over.

The phones were all unplugged in the house so no one could get through. I turned on my cell phone and saw two text messages from Kayla:

U ALRIGHT?

K

and

CALL ME.

K

So I called her on my cell phone, which had been off all day.

“Your home phone isn't working,” she said, sounding a little miffed.

“I know,” I said. “People kept calling. Weirdos wanting to congratulate me.”

I heard Kayla take a deep breath. “Things are going to be different, aren't they?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean with you. With us.”

I guess I was still a bit thick. A bit overwhelmed by it all. “What do you mean,
us
?”

Kayla didn't answer. “When are you coming back to school?”

“I'll be there tomorrow,” I said. “But I'm thinking of quitting.” The words just kind of jumped out of me.

“Brando. Why would you quit school?”

“I always hated school. I was never good at it. Now I can just quit if I want to. Why bother staying?”

“But I thought you were going to finish high school and then train to be an electrician.”

“But I don't have to do that now.”

“Brandon, this is so unlike you.” Now she sounded like she was lecturing me. I wondered why I had even bothered to call her.

I was feeling annoyed. And defiant. I don't know why. “Well, now everything
is
different. I'm different.”

And she hung up on me.

When I got to school the next day,
everything
was different. My mom drove me there. She said maybe I shouldn't take the bus for my first day back. “Why don't I rent a limo?” I had said, smiling. But she just tapped me gently on the forehead with her knuckle. Point made.

So I got out of my mom's car and looked around the front of the school. Everyone was looking at me. Some young geeky kid ran up and took a picture of me with his cell phone. My mom drove off and I was left standing there with all those faces, those eyes turned in my direction. I had my books under my arm and a paper bag with my lunch in it. I don't know why, but it was the lunch bag that made me feel self-conscious. Me. I had three million dollars in the bank and I'm standing there in front of everyone with a ham sandwich that my mom had packed. How humiliating.

I tossed the bag into a trash can and headed for the school door. I waved to a couple of the guys I knew—Josh and Derek—who were madly waving back. And then I saw Taylor smiling at me. Taylor never smiled at me. She had never given me the time of day. Taylor was Taylor—always attached to one cool guy or another, never for long. Taylor owned the male population of the school and could have any guy she wanted. Now she was smiling at me.

I smiled back.

Get real, I kept telling myself. You've just walked into a little fantasy world. You'll wake up soon. Taylor will have stopped smiling, the money will be gone. My head felt a little dizzy. Maybe this was some kind of hallucination. I had fallen out of a tree, after all.

The bell rang and everyone started heading in. There were kids all around me and I kept hearing my name.

“Yo, Brandon.”

“Hey, Brand.”

“How'd you do it, dude?”

“What's it feel like?”

“Hey, man, ya wanna hang out?”

Some of them I knew. Some were just faces from around school.

And then Kayla was alongside of me. She grabbed my arm. “Brandon, you look like you're about to faint.”

“I'm a little dizzy.”

“Sorry I hung up on you.”

“I must have deserved it”

“Not really. I overreacted.”

“No, you didn't. I heard myself. I sounded like an asshole.”

“Well, maybe a little,” Kayla admitted.

“Like my grandfather used to say, ‘There's more horses' asses in the world than there are horses.'”

“Your grandfather really said that?”

“Yeah. It was his explanation for just about everything.”

“I would have liked your grandfather,” Kayla said, guiding me to my locker. I'd been away from school for a few days and everything did seem different. It was like unknown territory to me. And everyone kept looking at me. I was feeling pretty spaced.

At my locker, I swallowed hard and looked
at Kayla. “What do I do?” I asked. “I'm not
sure I know how to handle this.” I really was
nervous about all the attention. And it might only get
more intense.

“Just be yourself.”

“I'm not sure who that is anymore.”

I looked at Kayla. We'd been friends for a long time.

She looked worried. “Just go to class. Try not to draw too much attention to yourself.” She nodded at the masses swirling around us. “They can't help themselves. You're their hero now because you won.”

Hero? What the hell had I done to be a hero? All I did was get lucky. Nonetheless, I found myself smiling at those who were walking by. Especially the girls who were eyeing me. This was too much. I smiled and nodded at the girls from some of my classes who probably hadn't even known my name until this past weekend. Smart girls. Hot girls. And there I was, standing by my locker with my pudgy-faced girl buddy who liked to climb trees.

That was when I discovered I could actually give
eye contact back to some of those young women walking
by. I mean real eye contact. I was beginning to
think that I'd turned some kind of corner in my
life. I had stayed away from school for a few
days and returned to an alternate universe where Brandon the
Invisible had turned into Brandon the Magnificent. Maybe I was
going to like this after all.