Orwell's Luck by Richard W. Jennings Read Free Book Online

paid, if anybody had held the winning lottery ticket, which, according to the next day's newspaper, they did not.
    I could have been that winner.
    Just as I'd expected, the numbers that Orwell sent me through my horoscope that morning were the very numbers that were drawn by lottery officials that evening. I shall never forget them. Four. Nineteen. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-seven. And twelve. These numbers will follow me for the rest of my days.
    And to think, I came that close! What rotten luck!
    I suspected that Orwell shared this view. Bearing an inconclusive half-light, half-dark moon, his latest message to me read
LUCK MARKET IS CLOSED
TRY AGAIN LATER.
    The rabbit, it seemed, had had enough for now.
    I tried to get my poor overwrought brain to change the channel. That's when I remembered that Valentine's Day was coming up soon.
    Valentine's Day is a holiday whose purpose, like so many things, remains a mystery to me. At my old school, the kids all exchanged little printed messages of affection, usually with cartoons on them and frequently in rhyme, heartfelt stuff that they bought by the bagful. At my new school, it seems, it's more important to be cool. I was halfway thinking of giving a valentine to the tousle-haired boy who had spoken to me after class, but what if the entire episode turned out like the lottery?
    How much disappointment can one kid stand?
    There was no point in asking Orwell for advice. Clearly, he was off duty. I decided to ask my parents instead.
    "Think low-key," my mother suggested after a moment of thought. "Seventh grade is an awkward time in a boy's life. He probably wants to be noticed, but he may not appreciate being noticed being noticed."
    "Huh?" I said.
    "Give him a valentine, but don't do it in front of other people," she explained.
    "And make sure it's not too fancy," my father chimed in. "You've got to have deniability."
    "Deniability?"
    "You have to be able to claim that what you gave him was the same as you gave everybody else, even if you didn't give anybody else anything at all. Just in case what you gave him doesn't go over."
    "Just in case," I repeated, nodding my head as if I understood.
    And to think they call this a holiday!

My comic valentine
    No sailor would attempt to cross the sea without a compass. No farmer would plant his seeds without first consulting his almanac. No weatherman would set foot outside his door without consulting his gauges. But with Orwell off his feed, my horoscope messages were completely blank. I had entered the dark ages, condemned to face each day without a clue.
    People say that life has its ups and downs, a popular point of view implying that if you just wait, bad luck, like bad weather, will eventually turn to good. But there's another less common homily that can also apply to fortune's erratic direction, namely, that things will go from bad to worse before the cycle repeats itself.
    Outside my school are soccer fields that stretch from the parking lot to the subdivisions in the distance. Flat, treeless, and close-cropped like a lawn, the soccer fields are of little use for anything but band practice and that single, frantic imported sport for which they were created. No bird, no squirrel, no rabbit can inhabit this empty space.
    But deep beneath the ground, under a row of bright yellow warning posts, ingenious engineers have laid a pipeline, a highway for natural gas, extending from the oil fields of Oklahoma to the car factories of Detroit. Millions of tons of volatile, explosive energy surge beneath the feet of children at play, and no one's worried. No one, that is, but me. I think about it every time I stand there.
    I think that I am standing on a bomb.
    This is where I was standing and what I was thinking when I handed the handmade valentine to the tousle-haired boy from class.
    "Here," I mumbled. "This one's yours."
    "For me? Thank you," he responded as he climbed into a mini van waiting at the curb.
    I had constructed it the night