“I’m sorry, Mr. Shaw,” she said.
“I will be emailing your parents, detailing your lack of care. I am assuming they will mete out an appropriate consequence.”
“Of course,” Lucky said.
There was no danger of any of that happening. Mr. Shaw was often threatening to send an email, but as far as anyone knew, he never had. Lucky wasn’t sure he even knew how to work a computer. Mr. Shaw was old school. And even if he did, it was unlikely that her parents would even read it. Her mother wasn’t doing much of anything these days. And she hadn’t seen her father since the Fourth of July, when he went out to buy fireworks and hadn’t come home since.
Mr. Shaw brought a trash receptacle over and slid the once-glowing mass of . . . well, whatever that even was at this point . . . into the metal can. It was heavy—heavier than it seemed it should have been—and hit the metal bottom with a colossal crash. Mr. Shaw, as strong as he was, strained prodigiously to haul it to the back room. The lab smelled funny for the rest of the day.
Lucky missed the bus on purpose and went home on foot, skipping the whole way, her dragon safely ensconced in her lunch box (she poked holes in it, obviously), her head brimming with plans to make the most epic and magnificent dragon terrarium with her very best friend in all the world, Mrs. Hollins.
Mrs. Hollins was 101 years old and lived next door. Lucky didn’t have many—or, honestly, any—friends her own age. She sat by herself at school. She played by herself on the playground. She was never asked to be part of anyone’s group project. These things didn’t bother her—or she told people that these things didn’t bother her—but she didn’t understand it very well, if at all. Most people seemed baffled by Lucky, and Lucky was, in turn, baffled by them.
She didn’t have any of these problems with Mrs. Hollins.
Lucky loved Mrs. Hollins’s house. It was her favorite place to be. Especially since her dad left.
As Lucky rounded the corner toward her block, she marveled at what a fine day it was. Warm for mid-October, the air was sweet and pungent with fallen leaves and rotting crabapples. The sun shone bright and the sky was the same blue as a robin’s egg. The dragon scurried around in the lunch box. Lucky crooned to it. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’ll let you out as soon as we get to my friend’s house.” She tried to keep the thrill out of her voice when she said the word friend, so as to teach the dragon that it was no big deal to have a friend and that anyone can do it and it isn’t hard. Even for a dragon. She wanted to shield her dragon from life’s more vexing difficulties.
She paused as she reached her house. Although every other house on her block glistened in the clear autumn light, her own house was, once again, in shadow. Mail piled in a heap next to the door. Her mom was inside somewhere. Lucky felt her forehead crease and her stomach cramp tight. She knew her mother was likely on the couch, and crying again. Her mother was always crying. She also knew that she should go inside and sit with her mother for a while. It didn’t actually help, but like brushing her teeth and clearing off the counters when they got dirty, Lucky knew it was one of the things a person should do. But the dragon scurried about inside the lunchbox. And she wanted so much to show it to Mrs. Hollins.
“Mom!” she called from the porch, letting her backpack fall with a thud. Her mother didn’t answer. “I’m going out to play!” She didn’t tell her mother that she was going to Mrs. Hollins’s house. As far as Lucky knew, her mother had never met Mrs. Hollins, and had never really noticed the house next door.
Lucky clutched her lunch box to her chest and skipped down the steps. Surely, her mother had heard her. Surely, that was enough.
Mrs. Hollins’s house sparkled in the sunlight. It always sparkled. It was one of the things Lucky loved about it. Also, there was no distressing pile of mail because the mail didn’t even come to Mrs. Hollins’s house. Lucky assumed it was because the house number, unlike everyone else’s whole numbers, was 14251/2 , and perhaps the mail carrier didn’t trust fractions. The front door of Mrs. Hollins’s house had an eight-inch wide convex porthole lens, at just about Mrs. Hollins’s height. This was convenient, because it was Lucky’s height also. This gave her a fish-eye’s view into the house, and allowed her to watch the old woman’s slow approach to the front door, her glass-distorted figure becoming more and more garish as it approached until all that could be seen was a single, gigantic eye, blinking in the center of the door. Lucky waved.
“Hi, Mrs. Hollins!”
“Why, Lucinda!” Mrs. Hollins exclaimed through the intercom. “What a surprise!” She always said that. Even though Lucky visited every day. Mrs. Hollins had a very thick accent. She said “Lucinda” as though it was “Looceenda.” This was because she came from a place called the Old Country. Lucky didn’t know exactly where that was. Only that it was old.
“Just one moment,” Mrs. Hollins said. “Let me open the door.” This was an involved affair. The door to Mrs. Hollins’s house was thick and wide and metal and very, very heavy, and had originally been a door on a top secret, experimental submarine. Mrs. Hollins never said if she had been part of the diving team. But Lucky assumed.
“An interesting house requires an interesting entrance,” Mrs. Hollins told Lucky once. Lucky filed this piece of information away. Maybe it might help her mother. You never knew.
There was an uncountable number of different levers, latches, gears, springs, and motors that all worked together to open the door. Mrs. Hollins only had to pull a single cord (it was red and velvet and had once been part of a circus act) in order to open it, but the process took well over a minute. Finally, after a whir, a squeak, a whine, and a colossal jolt, the door rattled open. Mrs. Hollins stood in the doorway, her wrinkled mouth spread open in a smile. She had short gray hair that stuck out all over her head like shiny pins. She wore a thin cotton housedress, its patch pockets bulging with tools, a white lab coat, and a pair of thick black Wellington boots. And while her eyes were small and bright as pebbles, her eyeglasses acted as a magnifying lens, making them look like twin planets, dwarfing her face. She blinked. Blinked again. She inclined her face so close to Lucky’s that their noses almost touched.
“Something’s different.” Her magnified eyes crinkled a bit. “Are you different?”
“No,” Lucky said.
“There seems to be less of you. Is there less of you?” Mrs. Hollins asked. She pulled a measuring tape out of her pocket and measured Lucky’s skull. She frowned.
“I don’t think so,” Lucky said. The dragon scuttled in the lunch box. Lucky almost fainted with anticipation. Just wait until Mrs. Hollins saw!
The old woman grunted. Then she shrugged. “Well, I must be imagining things. Come on then.” She hobbled toward the kitchen. “Kettle’s on.”
Mrs. Hollins was a scientist and an inventor, and every room in the house hummed with mechanical activity. She had machines that opened jars and machines that told you when someone was in the bathroom and machines that closed the blinds when you cleared your throat very, very loud (this was problematic that one time when Mrs. Hollins got pneumonia). She had machines that showed her video images of laboratories around the globe (including one that appeared to be in outer space), and machines that minded her various materials labs in the basement, and a machine that crawled around the house with a feather duster and a damp rag, because you really never can do enough dusting.