Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) by L B Gschwandtner Read Free Book Online

Why did you let me muck it up so bad?”
    “Why did I let you?” Morgan
chuckled as he eased his cab out of the line and started to drive.
    “You still think I’m God, don’t
you?” Morgan glanced at them in the rear view mirror. “I’ve never been entirely
comfortable with that word. It seems to make people so nervous. And besides, if
I was God, Transition
would
have to be Heaven, wouldn’t it? And is that where you think you were?”
    “Not exactly,” Alanna
muttered. She’d never really pictured the afterlife as harps and angels but
even so, it had to be more ethereal than bars and taxi cabs .
    “Okay then, Morgan, what now?
We granted her wish. Or at least part of it. Is she going to win the Lotto? She
still has 2499 tickets in her purse.”
    “It’s not quite that simple,
Joe.”
    Joe winced. “Somehow I didn’t
think it was.”
    Morgan turned the cab onto a
busy street with strip malls on either side. “I thought this would be a good
opportunity to let you see how Shelly got to be Shelly. There are some things
you don’t yet understand.”
    “What things?” Alanna asked
and, as soon as the words hit the air the little taxi video screen in front of
them—the kind you could watch the news on or pay for your cab fare—came to life
with an image of Shelly superimposed over a grid of her life so far.
    “See that chart?” Morgan
asked, his voice deep and resonant. Not expecting an answer, he continued, “The
grid over it represents all the choices and consequences of Shelly’s life to
date.”
    “Wow,” Joe leaned in to the screen
to study it closely. “She was fourteen when she bet on a horse with her father.
And look here,” he pointed to three overlapping grid blocks. “On her twenty-first
birthday she lost every cent she had on a poker hand at a girls poker night party.
This is unbelievable.”
    They sat and watched Shelly’s
story play out before them like a movie. The smart girl from the poor family,
the girl who grew up watching her daddy wait for the big hit that never came.
They saw the math scholarship to college. They watched how the credit card
companies had lined up along the sidewalk leading to where the freshmen
registered for classes. A sweatshirt if you apply for this card. A teddy bear
for that one. And Shelly had stopped to pick up every form.
    They saw the car loan and the
clothes she needed to buy to feel that she fit in. The bank loan for sorority dues,
another loan to pay for spring break in Cancun. All the other girls were going.
All the other girls had daddies at home to pay the bills.
    “She was always trying to be
something she wasn’t,” Alanna murmured.
    “Why didn’t she want her
friends to know she was on a scholarship?” Joe asked. “It’s like she was
ashamed of being a math whiz, and hell, she should have been proud. She’s been
dumbing it down her whole life.”
    Before the words were barely
out of his mouth they saw the large data analysis company offering Shelly a job
right out of college. She accepted, thinking she would make enough money to pay
off her loans and get her head above water. It was one of those quirks of fate
that Shelly could create a spreadsheet or graph, plug in thousands of numbers,
predict the outcomes of numerous sets of data, but could not keep enough money
in her own bank account to cover her bills. Even though she’d gotten multiple
raises in the six years since she’d been out of college, bonuses at Christmas,
and even a large reward for figuring out a way to save a client millions of
dollars. Still, somehow she was always broke. Even her interest in the lottery
was based on a mathematical model she’d worked out. The fact that she hadn’t
won a big prize only made her more certain that she was due. To Shelly, it was
a mathematically predictive outcome.
    “It’s so weird,” Joe said.
“She didn’t get into this mess because she’s stupid. She got into it because
she’s smart.”
    “Do we all have grids