Lucky Girl by Jamie Pacton (novels for beginners txt) 📕

the boat back up. Rain beats against the pontoon boat, making a metallic staccato that sounds like gunfire. I grip one of the side poles as Holden spins the boat around.

“Please don’t let us die on the lake,” I mutter to myself as another fork of lightning illuminates the sky. From downtown, the tornado sirens roar to life, screeching above our heads. My phone beeps in my pocket with an emergency warning. I read the alert quickly, swiping rain out of my eyes.

“Severe storms and flash floods!” I shout to Holden over the noise of the sirens and rain. He nods grimly, steering us toward the dark shoreline. The clump of boats where our classmates were hanging out has broken up, and other crafts zip across the lake, making the conditions like trying to cross a freeway during rush hour.

Somehow, we make it back to the dock. I jump out of the boat as soon as it pulls up, grabbing the rope on the bow. Holden is a step behind me, turning off the engine, and then he leaps onto the dock as well. Rain pounds into us, and the thunder crashes above.

“My car’s over there!” shouts Holden above the noise of the storm.

We get the boat tied up and run for the car. The rain still pours from the sky, unrelenting. The water is already accumulating in the parking lot, but Holden unlocks his car, and we clamber in.

A great well of laughter rises up in me as another crack of thunder rips through the night.

“That was terrifying!” I say, catching my breath. I turn toward Holden, adrenaline pulsing through me.

He’s looking at me, his blue eyes lit up by another crack of lightning. My hands cup his face, reaching out for skin/human/something/anything to remind me that I’m not dead on the water.

I pull him toward me as he leans over to kiss me.

“Jane,” he whispers against my mouth as our kiss deepens.

It’s so familiar. So sweet. So much heat and intensity.

Holden’s hands slip under my sweatshirt, finding my skin, and I start to pull off my shirt, but then the glare of red-and-blue lights fills the car.

“Shit,” I mutter as a cop runs up to the window. He knocks twice, and Holden and I jerk away from each other.

Holden rolls the window down an inch or so, and rain blows into the car.

“What are you two doing?” the cop shouts. “Get home now! It’s a flash-flood warning.”

And then he runs back to his car.

Holden turns to look at me, and I shrug, not sure what to say, but giddy from the rain, our kiss, and the fact that the cop didn’t arrest us for making out in public.

“I think I need a ride home,” I say, gesturing toward the road. “I probably can’t walk there in this weather.”

Holden laughs and starts the car, and slowly we drive through the rain-sliced world, past the wreckage of the Harvest Festival, and toward my house.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WHEN I FINALLY MAKE IT HOME, I CHECK THE TOWN’S FACEBOOK group. No one has posted about the lotto winner, though there is a long thread about the Harvest Festival (the town is rightfully shocked that a toilet-seat wreath caused so much trouble).

A door opens somewhere in my house, and Mom moves around. She doesn’t knock on my door, which is a relief. My head is full of Holden’s lips on mine, our conversation, the terror of racing across the lake in a storm, and a general unease about the lotto ticket.

I let out a long, slow breath and twist the strings of my sweatshirt around my fingers. The cold dampness of the shirt—I’m still wearing the one Holden gave me—hits me. I really shouldn’t be sitting around in this. Stripping off my wet clothes, I slip into dry pajamas and wrap myself in the comforter from my bed.

Then I do what I always do when I’m feeling too much: go to Facebook and find my dad’s profile.

Yes, he’s been dead for five years, but before that, he used social media like the rest of us. Mom never deleted his page—I don’t even know if she knows the password—so it’s out there for anyone to see. He’s there, in a ghostly digital sense, whenever I need him. I wonder if in a hundred years no one will use Facebook or Instagram, but all our accounts will still be there, long after we’re dead, like a great digital ship, full of our ghosts.

With a shivering breath, I click onto my dad’s profile—Daniel Belleweather—and suddenly there he is: glasses, curly dark hair, lopsided smile like mine. His cover photo is of him, Mom, and me at Disney World, shortly before he died. Behind us, the Epcot ball rises like an enormous full moon. In this picture, I’m twelve, wearing glittery gold Minnie ears and grinning. Mom’s got a hand on Dad’s shoulder, and her hair is in a neat bob. There’s nothing of the scattered, desperate, lonely collector of other people’s memories in her face. There’s nothing that hints at the fact that Dad would be dead a month after this picture was taken.

That Disney trip is one of my happiest memories with my parents, but these pictures are always hard. I scroll through my dad’s Facebook feed, where all the posts are a few years old. There are a bunch of grief posts from people we used to know in Nashville. Neighbors, his college buddies, fellow firefighters. But I skip those and go back to the last post he made. August 10, 2016: He put up a picture of me and him on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I’m grinning, and he’s giving me bunny ears. Mom took the picture from the seat in front of us. His caption: YO-HO-HO, sailing the seven seas with my favorite ladies!

I can still feel that small boat underneath us, bobbing along the ride, floating past towns that were fake burning and animatronic pirates guzzling booze, shooting