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

else in the fridge this morning because Mom forgot to go grocery shopping again.

With a resigned bite (it tastes like chewing on salty tomato-flavored Styrofoam), I try to enjoy the weather. Leaves flutter down from the oaks above my head, though the wind carries the promise of bitterly cold winter days. Just the thought of waiting for the school bus on 20-degree mornings makes me want to crawl into a volcano.

I pull a ratty green sweatshirt out of my enamel-pin-covered backpack (RBG! She persisted! Nasty Woman! Books!) and slip it over my T-shirt. Then, with a glance over my shoulder to make sure no one is looking, I take the lotto ticket from my jeans pocket and tuck it between the pages of my favorite book, Sea Change, by legendary oceanographer Sylvia Earle.

Opening to a random chapter, my eyes move over Earle’s words, but I’m not taking anything in. Usually when I read this book, I’m transported to my favorite place in the world that I’ve never actually been—the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary—but today I’m just reading the same sentence over and over.

Which is all because of this damn ticket. I shove it deeper into the book and close my eyes. If can’t read, I’ll just travel to Maui in my mind.

I’m on a boat off the coast. The deck rocks beneath me, and a salty breeze lifts my hair. Gulls screech and waves slap against the sides of the hull. Suddenly, something goes flying up from the deck—it’s bright orange, and I grab for it.

No! That’s a lotto ticket, and I’m trying to forget it for a moment. Taking a deep breath, I sink back into the fantasy of Maui.

Steadying myself, I scan the ocean for the enormous gray shape of a humpback whale. In the distance, Maui’s green hills rise, and the sapphire-blue Pacific stretches to the horizon. Suddenly, there’s a great rush of water—

“Uh-oh,” says Bran from somewhere nearby. “You’ve got that ‘dreaming about whale watching in Maui’ look on your face again.”

My eyes fly open, and I snap my book closed, making sure the Mega-Wins ticket isn’t showing. I need to find a safer place for it. Like, immediately.

“If you were really my best friend, you’d know I’m daydreaming about working with Sylvia Earle while whale watching in Maui.”

Bran rolls his eyes and plops down at the picnic table beside me. Today he’s wearing a band T-shirt I found for him at a thrift store, ripped jeans, and sneakers. Whereas I just look messy in my sweatshirt and jeans, he somehow looks like a K-pop star who’s wandered into rural Wisconsin.

Scowling at my very sad ketchup sandwich, Bran offers me a bag of grapes from his own lunch without a word. I take the grapes and shove Sea Change into my backpack.

Before Bran can say anything else, his phone rings. “It’s Sofie,” he says excitedly.

Sofie is Bran’s long-distance girlfriend. She was an exchange student at our school last year, and she moved back to Sydney in May. Somehow, she and Bran have been making it work with half a continent and an ocean between them.

“Hi, Sof,” I say as Bran answers the FaceTime call.

Sofie and I chat online frequently, but because of the time difference, we rarely manage to have an actual phone call.

Sofie grins at me. She’s wearing green pj’s with corgis on them, and her curly hair frames her light-brown face. “Jane!” she says. “So good to see you!”

I grin back. “What time is it there? Like, six in the morning?”

“Closer to four, but these are the things we do for love.” Sofie sips from a giant mug of coffee.

I nudge Bran. “I hope she calls you at four o’clock in the morning too, just to keep things fair.”

He laughs. “We’re ridiculous, I know.”

They take a minute to make googly eyes at each other, and Sofie blows Bran a kiss.

“You two are sickening.” I groan.

“Admit it,” Sofie says with a laugh. “You want to be awoken before dawn to chat with your beloved too.”

I snort and run a hand over my eyes. “Not even a little bit. But I’m also not dating again until I’m thirty.”

This resolution was formed after Holden Jones—the guy I dated since the beginning of sophomore year—suddenly broke up with me two months ago. Right now, I’m totally over love and romance. Give me humpback whales over making out any day of the week.

“You’ll find the right person someday,” says Bran, ever the romantic. Sofie nods in agreement on the screen. “Just think, the girl of your dreams could be waiting on your boat in Maui.”

“Shut it,” I say with a snort. I don’t regret telling him that Megan Rapinoe lifting her hands in triumph in the World Cup against France confirmed my suspicions about being bi, but his optimism for my love life is just too much right now.

“How are you holding up, Jane?” Sofie asks. She pauses for a moment and then presses on. “Bran told me about Holden.”

Oooof. That hurts a bit. Not that Bran told her, but the reminder that at this time last year, we were doing things like going on double dates.

“I’ve been better,” I admit.

“I’m so angry at him,” Sofie bursts out. “What was he thinking? Like, did you even see it coming?”

“Not even a little bit,” I say, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. I don’t say this, but I can’t help thinking it: In my mind, Holden and I had been like a couple in a rom-com. He wooed me back in tenth grade by writing me a song and leaving me long letters in my locker. Even after we’d dated for a while, he’d bring me flowers every week. We always danced in the rain. I went on his family vacations, and, if I spent the night at his house, his mom would make me breakfast.

He was all my firsts: first boyfriend, first kiss, first love, first (and only) guy I’ve had sex with.