Dumb Luck
Authors: Lesley Choyce
DUMB
LUCK
Lesley Choyce
Luck never gives. It only lends.
â Swedish proverb
contents
chapter
one
It all started the day I fell out of the tree.
Yes, a tree. I loved climbing trees. Big trees. Tall trees. Difficult to climb trees. I'd been climbing trees for as long as I could remember. Even though I was now seventeen, I still had a thing about climbing high up into the branches of a good tree. It was two days before my eighteenth birthday. School had just started and I was hating it. I'd never been very good at school. I'd failed grade seven and had to repeat it, so I was a year behind everyone else my age.
Most kids my age were in their
last year of high school, but I had two years
to go before I could get on with my lifeâmy
real life. I guess you could say that September and
school combined to make me feel depressed. This is why
Kayla asked me if I wanted to climb this giant
old oak tree she'd discovered in a field not far out of town.
In my home town of Greenville, it seemed like they were cutting down all the trees to make way for shopping centers and strip malls and wider roads. I had counted twelve trees that used to be my climbing trees cut down with chain sawsâjust in my neighborhood. Nobody but Kayla and I seemed to care. And I just figured it was all part of the bad luck that had been dogging me all my life.
But Kayla grabbed me after school, took one look at my face, and said, “Let's go climbing.” I knew immediately what she meant.
So, while other kids from school went to the mall or hit the coffee shop or hung out in the park, toking up or otherwise looking for trouble, my best friend and I took the Number 12 bus to the end of the line and then we hiked through somebody's pastureland until we came to the most amazing tree I'd ever seen around here.
Kayla and I had been climbing trees together since we were five years old. Kayla was my friend. Not a girlfriend. Just a friend. But a good friend. She had a habit of calling me Brando instead of my real name, Brandon. Nobody did this but her. She was smarter than me, but you could tell she didn't think very highly of herself. Even at seventeen (and a year ahead of me at school), she dressed like a boy, never combed her hair or wore makeup, was a little overweight, and had no boyfriends. She had what they call on talk shows “low self-esteem.” But she was a fearless climber.
The sunlight was sending these amazing knives of light through the branches of the huge tree. It was unreal. It was very difficult to get up to the first branch, which must have been ten feet off the ground. I gripped my hands together, then Kayla put her foot in and lunged upward until she grabbed onto the branch. Then she pulled herself up, wrapped her legs around the branch, and reached down. I took her hand and she hoisted me up. The girl was strong.
We were laughing and joking around as we climbed higher and higher. My September blues were gone. Kayla's self-esteem was improving by the minute. We were like little kids again and it seemed impossible that in two more days I'd be eighteen. If I wanted to, I could now vote and I could join the military. But I didn't want to do either of those things. Right then, all I wanted to do was climb trees for the rest of my life and forget about school, forget about the world, forget about whatever lay ahead in my life.
Kayla kept going higher and I kept following her. I'd never seen her so full of spirit and so happy. I don't know how high up we were, but we were way up there. I mean
way
up there, and the branch we were sitting on together swayed a bit in the wind. I didn't look down. We were both breathing kind of heavy.
And then she did the weirdest thing. She leaned over, took my head in her hands, and kissed me.
Not on the mouth. Just on the cheek.
It came as a complete shock to my system. Kayla had never ever done such a thing in all the years we'd been hanging out together. I think I stopped breathing.
I guess I must have let go of the branch and leaned a little. Just then a gust of wind shook the tree and, before I realized what was happening, I fell.
Oh, I'd fallen out of trees before. But not a tree like this.
I remember screaming on the way down. And Kayla shouting out my name.
I remember scraping my ear on a branch and hitting another big limb with my shoulder. I even remember the impact when I hit the ground. Chest firstâknocking the wind out of me. And then my head immediately connected with something very hard.
And then it went black.
And that was when my luck began to change.
chapter
two
Through most of my life, I (and everyone else) had considered me unlucky. I almost never won any games. I was not good at sports so I didn't go out for any teams. I had a habit of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I showed up late when I should have been on time. I showed up on time when it would have been better to show up late. I ended up at the end of long lines. I lost things. I never had any spending money. I'd had a couple of crappy part-time jobs that I'd been fired from and, of course, no girlfriends.
Some of that was my own fault, I
know. Some of it was bad luck.
So it seemed strange that the first thing the doctor in the hospital said to me when I woke up was this: “You are one lucky son of a bitch.”
My head hurt like hell. “Ouch,” I said out loud.
“Head hurt?” Doc asked.
For some insane reason he was smiling.
“Yeah,” I answered. He
shook his head. He looked like he was about to
laugh. “Sorry,” he said. “I'm Dr. Yates. You're Brandon, right?”
“I
think so,” I said. Someone had a hammer going inside my skull.
“I hear you fell out of a tree.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, your head hit a rock. That will explain the discomfort you're feeling.”
Discomfort was not the word. I also now realized that I had a serious pain in my shoulder and it hurt when I breathed. “I don't really remember much. How did I get here?”
“Ambulance.
The paramedics told us it didn't look good. You were
in pretty rough shape. We could talk about all this
later if you like.”
I took another breathâpain, but nothing I couldn't live with. The head was still pounding but I wanted to hear more.
“Maybe I should bring your parents in,” Dr. Yates said. “They're just outside.”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.” I really didn't want to see my parents just now. My dad would have that look. My mom would be ... well, Mom. “What do you mean by lucky?”
Dr. Yates grabbed an
X
-ray that was in a folder at the end of my bed and held it up to the sunlight coming into the room. I tried to focus on it. He pointed to a spot on the shadowy thing that was the image of my skull. “Right there. That's where you connected with the rock. If ever there was a bad location to take impact on the head, that would be the place.”
“Just my luck,” I heard myself say.
“But that's the thing. You were lucky. Your skull did fracture a bit but it somehow fractured so that it distributed the force of the impact and it didn't really do any lasting damage.”
“But it still hurts like hell.”
He waved his hand in the air as if it was nothing. “We'll get you some Tylenol. Didn't want to give you any heavy meds. We wanted you back with us and conscious. You've got a fractured skull, Brandon, and a concussion, but the good news is you will be one hundred percent okay in no time.”
“My father always said I had a thick skull,” I said and started to laugh, but could tell that if I laughed, everything would hurt worse. Still, it was starting to sink in. It was good to be alive.
“He was right, I guess,” the doc said. He was still smiling and seemed to find me and my situation strangely amusing. And then he said this: “You are about the luckiest person I ever met. If I had your luck, I'd go out and buy a lottery ticket as soon as I was out of here.”
It was a funny thing for him to say, but it stayed with me.
My mom was crying when she saw me. But then she cried a lot. She hugged me and that hurt, but I tried not to show it. After a minute, I could feel her warm tears seeping through the hospital gown. My dad looked very concerned at first. “You gonna be all right, Brandon?” he asked.
“Yeah, the doctor says I'll be fine.”
He almost held back and, at first, I thought he wouldn't go there.
But he did.
I watched his lips tighten and then he said, “What the hell were you thinking?”
I'd learned a long time ago not to answer his questions. Maybe it wasn't the smartest or safest thing in the world to be way up there in the branches of an old oak tree. But it made me happy.
And not a lot of things did.
That's when I remembered the kiss. And Kayla.
“Is Kayla here?” I asked my dad.
My dad just shook his head. He
never liked Kayla. She had never been very polite to
him and I knew she thought he was too pushy
and bullheaded. But then she never had much in the
way of social skills. And, of course, my dad didn't
like most people anyway.
My mom stopped sobbing and looked at me.
“The doctor says I'm okay, really. Saved by a thick skull.”
“That, I believe,” my old man said.
“What about Kayla?” I asked my mom.
“She was here but they sent her home.”
“She must have been the one to get me here. I was with her. We were way out of town.”
“I know,” my dad said. “Climbing trees, for God's sake. What are you? A moron? You're not ten years old anymore.” His hands were in the air.
“I need to talk to Kayla,” I said to my mom, trying to avoid my father's stare.
“I think you should rest,” she said.
The head was still pounding, the shoulder and ribs sore, but I needed to hear the part of the story I didn't remember. How did she get help? How did I get here?
The doctor popped back in. “Family reunion
going well?” he asked.
My father just glared at him.
“When can I go home?” I asked.
“I want to keep you overnight. Just in case. You can probably go home tomorrow morning. But I'd like you to take a couple of days off from school.”
That made me smile. Yeah, a couple
of days off from school. Just what the doctor ordered.
Maybe my luck was changing after all.