Dumb Luck (17 page)

chapter
thirtyfour

My parents were still at our old house on Sunday, and when I arrived there, they were packing dishes in the kitchen into boxes.

I told them a short version of my story as I stared at the floor.

My dad went through the roof. To him, driving an automobile was like breathing or eating. “You're old enough to drive and now you've already maybe screwed that up for your entire life,” he said.

My mom was a little kinder. “At least you didn't hurt anyone,” she said. “But why didn't you call us to come pick you up?”

“You need to move with us to the new house,” my father insisted, once he began to cool down. “You obviously need someone to rein you in, keep you from messing up your life even further.”

“I can't do that,” I said. “I'm moving back here. This is where I want to be.”

My mom looked really worried. She looked to my father. “Maybe we should put off moving into the new place until things settle down with Brandon.”

But my father shook his head. He looked at me as he spoke to my mom. “No. Brandon wanted to have his freedom—he needs to learn about responsibility. And he needs to do it the hard way, I guess.”

My father was right, but he hurt me deeply by saying what he said just then.

I felt like leaving but I didn't. My mom unpacked a couple of pots and plates and made a Sunday dinner for me and my dad. It would be the last meal we'd have together in the house. The silence was broken after a bit by my mother reminiscing about good times we'd had in this home. My father dropped the anger and joined in with his own memories. And so did I. And then I said this: “At least the old place will always stay in the family and you guys can come over once in a while and I'll cook for you.” It was a way of telling them I would forgive them for moving on to a new home. I may not have known it then, but I guess I was beginning to realize that if I wanted people to forgive me for screwing up I was going to have to learn to forgive them, too.

I knew I had to get a lawyer to help me do whatever I needed to do about my legal problem. I wanted to keep my dad out of that though, so I called Mr. Carver at home and asked him to give me some advice. He said he was sorry I'd got myself into so much trouble but that he wasn't surprised. “It's not just you, Brandon. It's human nature. You moved into a new way of living too fast. You need a plan. A good plan. But first you need a good lawyer. You going to try to fight this?”

“No,” I said. “I was guilty.”

“Good. I like that. First thing anybody needs to do is own up to the truth. Pay your dues and move on.”

“I just don't know what to move on to.”

“That's not going to be easy to figure out. But use this thing. Use this problem as a way of starting to move on.”

“I don't understand.”

“You will, I think. You're not the first person on earth to screw up badly. The trick is the recovery. It ain't easy but it builds what we used to call character.”

So Mr. Carver referred me to a lawyer, an expensive lawyer. “You might as well put some of that silly money to good use,” was his way of saying it.

I'm not even sure I needed a lawyer because I was pleading guilty, but Josh Kellogg was probably just what I needed. He explained everything I needed to know. He answered every question and when the time came to go to court with me, he stood beside me as the prosecutor described the arrest and the judge asked for my plea. “Guilty,” I said. And guilty I was. Mr. Carver was in attendance that day and so were my parents.

The fine was hefty. The lawyer's fees were insane. And I wouldn't have a chance to even have a learner's permit for a long time. But I could get on with my life. If I had a life.

Chelsea had seen me leave the party with Stephanie and that really pissed her off. She told Taylor and then Taylor was equally pissed off at me. She had lost control of her pet project. I was a wild card, a free man who had just walked away on them for an older girl. Who the hell did I think I was?

Which helped to explain the state of my apartment. And aside from a couple of really nasty cell phone conversations from both girls, that was the end of that. Suffice it to say that whatever positive reputation I may have had at school was trashed as successfully as was the condo. I had the wrong notion that one or the other of them might cool off and want to hang out with me again, but that wasn't going to happen.

Taylor's final e-mail to me was this:
You got what you deserved.

Chelsea just never communicated with me again.

I guess if a guy sits around in a fancy apartment long enough by himself, he'll call almost anyone to ease his loneliness. That's what I discovered late one evening when I called Stephanie. She was more than a little shocked to hear from me. “Want me to come over?” she asked, after hearing my sorry tale and realizing how desperate I was.

“Yeah,” I said.

She did come over and she apologized for abandoning me that night and said she really had a driver's license, but didn't own up to it because it would have meant she'd be charged as well.

And she pretended to really like me for a while until she discovered I was about to leave the apartment and move back into my old house. “That's kind of creepy,” she said. And then things went quickly off the rails. She started saying that I was too cheap with my money. That I should be having more fun with it. What she meant was that I should be spending more of it on her.

And I started doing that for a while.

And she seemed happier with me.

And then I did a little test. I stopped being quite so generous with meals and presents and guess what?

She lost interest.

And Kayla. What about Kayla?

Kayla began spending more time with John Gardner. She would still take my phone calls when I sounded desperate. And she stayed over at my apartment a couple of nights to keep me company. She even apologized for not having as much time for me as before. I missed her badly.

But it was clear she didn't miss me. “If I could have the old you back, I'd love it. But that's not going to happen.”

“I know,” I said sadly.

Kayla and I had both changed.

So it was not a particularly exciting day when I moved back into the home that I had grown up in. My parents came over and I cooked them a roasted chicken dinner. Yes, living alone had taught me to cook. But it was a little awkward. And sad. And, maybe Stephanie was right, a little creepy. When my folks left to drive home to their new house twenty minutes away, it seemed like they were leaving for another planet. I felt more alone than ever before.

Which is why I phoned a cab to drive me in the other direction out of town. The cab driver was a little surprised when I asked him to drop me off in the middle of an empty field. “It's okay,” I said. “Just going for a hike.” I gave him a big tip and he was more than pleased.

I walked off into that field, my jacket tight around me. Any warmth left in the air was now gone and, almost without my noticing, the tail end of summer had slipped into fall, and fall was headed toward winter. I could see my breath in the air. The sky was sullen with low gray clouds. The sun broke through now and then as I walked, but it was quickly swallowed up by the clouds again. At least there was no wind.

When I came to the tree, I almost didn't recognize it. The leaves were all gone; the branches looked gnarled and unfriendly. At first it seemed impossible that I could even get up to the lowest branch. But I did.

I had to jump three times. The third time I got a grip on the rough bark. And I struggled to pull myself up. I was breathing heavily at that point but I went higher. And higher. When I located and sat down on the very branch where I had once found myself sitting before, I closed my eyes and found myself hugging the trunk of the old tree. I felt panic and true fear as I stared far down at the ground.

Once my breathing calmed and I got my brain under control, I took my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Kayla's number. I wanted to tell her where I was, although I'd never be able to explain why I was there.

But, of course, there was no signal. I held the phone out and above my head. Still nothing. So I put the phone on camera mode and held it at arm's length and took a picture of myself.

A boy. A rather wealthy young man, really. But still a boy. Sitting high up in a tree.

Alone.

Many things were not clear to the boy in the photograph. All he knew was that he wanted to sit there for a long while, not thinking about the past. Not thinking about the future. And wait for just the right inspired moment to climb back down and find his way back home.

Interview with
Lesley Choyce

Your young adult novels usually feature characters who are loners, as Brandon is, but they're also usually gifted, intelligent individuals who are ahead of the game. In this case, your principal character doesn't have these qualities. What interested you in Brandon?

I was thinking about those rather average teenage guys who are just cruising through their lives—emotionally a bit immature, not great at school or sports, not terribly social, not greatly inspired or passionate about much. They don't hate their lives; they just don't have high expectations of good stuff happening to them. So Brandon was that young dude. And I wanted to see what he did if something big happened and it changed his life dramatically all at once.

So, as usual, I put myself in his shoes and did the necessary authorial thing. As I was writing, I became Brandon. The upside is that I got to win three million dollars. Yahoo. But I knew it wasn't going to be an easy ride for us. Brandon just wasn't prepared for what it would mean. How could he be?

And therein was the seed for what I thought would be a challenging but intriguing story.

Winners are not always winners –– in fact, winners can be losers. Is this what Brandon has to learn?

Sometimes when you win, you lose. I know I've heard that line before somewhere but it is true. I did my research into lottery winner horror stories and it was quite enlightening. Winning large amounts of money or any form of coming into lots of money unearned tends to create real disasters for many people. So I was thinking about how difficult it would be for a eighteen-year-old kid who is still in high school. Once I dropped Brandon into his new role as a wealthy teenaged boy, I watched him make all the likely mistakes and followed him into his struggle to ... well, survive in the new world he was trying to create for himself. It's a monumental struggle.

One of Brandon's disadvantages is that he seems to have no enthusiasms, no areas where he feels he can excel in life. Do you think there are a lot of teenagers who suffer from this lack of focus?

I think a lot of us are “lost” at various points in our lives—young or old. I feel sad for anyone who hasn't found some strong set of passions to live by. At the beginning of the story, Brandon is floating through life. I've heard people speak about winning the lottery as solving all their problems and that it would be a dream come true. But most of us will never win big in a lottery so it's just a silly notion not worthy of pursuit.

Poor Brandon now has a number of things to cope with that he is not prepared for:

1. He has “friends”—including girls—who mostly only want to be with him for his money and his notoriety.

2. He can drop out of school and forget about even tentative plans for more education and job training. Why bother?

3. He can now almost fully be an adult—buy a car, rent his own apartment, buy whatever he wants—without having been prepared for these responsibilities.

4. And much more.

The young man is in real trouble.

Brandon wants to be part of a group, likes the idea of having acceptable friends, going with “hot girls.” Is this a major cause of his downfall?

We all want to be accepted. We all want friends and we want to be attractive to others. The best we can hope for is that people are attracted to us for who we really are. Brandon has found himself in a very false, shallow, and delusional world. He's on a downward spiral although, like many, he's having some fun along the way. The big question posed in the book is, how can he find his way out of the downward spiral? It isn't going to be easy. What skills can he learn along the way to save himself? The book hints at answers but doesn't give any easy solutions.

I'm interested in how you select names for characters in your novels. Can you tell me how you came to the names of the major characters in this story?

I've written so many novels and have used so many character names that this is not easy. This will sound like cheating but here's what I do to ensure my names are contemporary.

I figure out the year the book will likely be published and subtract the age of the character to determine the year that most teen characters were born. Then I Google the popular baby names for that year. I rarely choose the most popular ones but look at those in the 10 to 20 range and select the ones that resonate the most for the characters I am creating.

What is the significance of the fact that the two characters who really sympathize with Brandon––Kayla and the vice-principal––are both outsiders, in a sense?

I really like Kayla—she is sincere, smart, and a good real friend to Brandon. Even as older teens, they still like to climb trees. She helps ground Brandon but is losing out to the temptations of his new life. And she is definitely not part of the in crowd at school or anywhere else. But they are good together and Brandon can't truly see how important she is. So now she is even more of an outsider but she has strengths that Brandon does not have.

I have a strong affinity to outsiders and have been one myself for much of my life. We sometimes create the very reasons that make us outsiders. Truth is we don't necessarily
want
to fit in. We want to be fiercely independent. And we pay a price for it.

The vice principal, Mr. Carver, is a unique
example of a smart, compassionate man in a position of
authority who knows how to use his job in the
school to help guide young people. He knows what it
feels like to be an outsider as he is black
and he is gay. He is a good ally for
Brandon but Brandon is too caught up in his new
whirlwind to be able to recognize him as a good friend and mentor.

Could there have been an alternative story where the windfall of cash is truly a blessing for a eighteen-year-old and sets off a chain of very positive life experiences?

Perhaps there is an alternate tale to be told about how instant wealth was a truly good thing for a teenager. Maybe the winner would recognize the power of money to do good deeds and create a means of channeling it towards just that. But it would take an extraordinary person of great strength and wisdom beyond his years. Most of us don't really figure out how insignificant money is in our lives and in the big scheme of things until we are much older. The sad truth is that too much success, too much fame, or too much money at too young of an age is a very dangerous thing. Nonetheless, I do believe there are some out there who had great fortune early on and handled it wisely. And for them it would have been the result of far more than just good luck.