Maggie Felisberto

Boardwalk 452

The only person who had ever believed in the reach of Fia’s luck was her Uncle Drew. Fia was eleven and sitting in the back of Uncle Drew’s four-by-four. Her mother was in the passenger seat, and they were all heading home from Fia’s latest soccer match in the Jackson Falls Community Center league. Fia tugged soccer cleats and shin guards off of her feet. “Something bad is going to happen,” she said. “I want to quit the team.”

“Don’t be silly, Fia mia.” Her mother turned to look into the back of the truck. “Your team needs you to keep scoring all of those goals.”

Fia pushed her tall socks down so that they piled around her ankles. “We’re just lucky,” she said. “I’m just lucky. But I know that something bad is gonna happen. I just feel it.”

Fia’s mother ignored her, but Uncle Drew listened to his niece. Later that night, he swung by Fia’s house with three scratch cards in hand. In a moment when he was alone with Fia, he slipped her the cards and a quarter. “Let’s test out this luck of yours,” he said.

Fia pushed the cards back toward her Uncle. “That’s a bad idea,” she said. “Something bad always happens. Every time I win something, something else bad always, always happens.”

“But you’re not winning,” Uncle Drew said. “You can be lucky and scratch a winning card, but you’re too young to actually pick up any winnings. So don’t worry. Just scratch them.”

“Okay,” Fia said. Quickly, with the quarter in hand, she scratched the silver film off of the boxes on the three cards. All three of them garnered prizes between 200 and 500 dollars. Drew snatched the cards away from Fia and stuffed them in his pocket.

Over the next month, Fia’s soccer team continued to win and Uncle Drew continued to bring scratch card after scratch card to his niece. Reluctantly, Fia suited up for soccer each Saturday morning and scraped the silver gunk from the cards each Saturday night until the day of her team’s final match. The team’s goalie had the flu, and Fia was sent in as backup goalie. The sky was overcast and heavy, and Fia knew that it was a sign. She tried to feign illness, but her mother was a nurse and couldn’t be fooled. Fia had to play.

The other team, one they’d barely managed to beat before, came hungry for blood, and then it began to rain. At the end of the game, Fia’s team had lost, she was covered in mud and her arm was broken from sliding in the muck while blocking a powerful shot on goal. As the teams lined up to say Good Game and high five, thunder peeled through the air. With hardly a second’s delay, Fia’s Uncle Drew was struck by lightning. Their hospital bills combined equaled the amount of money that Drew had won forcing Fia to play his scratch cards. Even though Drew’s insurance picked up most of the bill, he saw the numbers and believed in Fia’s curse. Fia began to build a theory and vowed never to compete again.

By the time Fia graduated from college, she had read dozens of books on balance, the yin and the yang, polarities, binary dualism. She even read the I Ching and learned to toss three coins and predict her future, something she incorporated into her life that she thought couldn’t be affected by luck—and they all seemed to validate her theory that for every luck, there is an equal and opposite unluck. This was the law of Fia’s life. Unlike most people who are occasionally lucky and thus unaware of the opposite unluck, Fia had always been cursed with luck. The unlucks weren’t always related to the lucks. After she won the state poetry prize—1000 dollars—she had her first fender bender ever in her mother’s car. The repairs were 1000 dollars. Equal and opposite unluck.

Fia had two hitches in her theory. Sometimes, the unluck felt much greater, much more overwhelming than the previous luck had been. Everything she had studied leaned toward balance as the end result, so that even luck should end in the karmic settling of unluck. Yet sometimes, like when she won a seventh grade history review game and then missed the test resulting in an overall lower class grade, Fia felt the balance of her luck tipping toward chaos. Similarly, the cycle never seemed to start with unluck and end in luck. Luck acted, then unluck reacted, and always in that order. If she could avoid being lucky, Fia knew she would always be safe.

Even still, Fia’s diligence couldn’t protect her. The history review game that caused her to fail her test had been mandatory. The poetry contest that resulted in the fender bender had been entered for her by her teacher. Fia’s daily school life was constantly a threat—every other gym class was a minefield of lucky circumstances that would always result in some small miserable thing, usually finding sweaty or broken machines in the weight room on opposite days. After her soccer fiasco, Fia refused to play any sports or join any teams. When the school’s gifted program pressed her to join the Scholastic Scrimmage team in tenth grade, she eventually told them that competing was against her religion. This became her lie of choice for years until she realized that it had become the truth; she truly did avoid competition with a religious dedication.

She applied to colleges all over the country and won full rides at almost all of them. Her grades were immaculate and she deserved the scholarships, but Fia began to fear that they were coming due to her luck. She picked the only school to offer her less than half in scholarships—CSU Chico, the opposite side of the country. If she could escape her cyclical luck and unluck, she would escape it there.

For four years, Fia studied and worked to pay the rest of her tuition without having to take out too many student loans. She avoided student clubs and activities that involved competitions, disengaged from classes, and ignored all of the sports teams. Competition was a sin. If she did nothing that required luck, she would never suffer the consequences of the unluck again. In her last term, Student Life sent her a survey for all graduating seniors. Fia buzzed through it, reporting “Mostly Agree” to questions of campus security, bathroom etiquette, RA training and the like without reading anything too closely. Two and a half weeks before finals, she received an email from Student Life that she had won the survey raffle and to please come to their office in the campus center. Her prize was a new car.

It was an ugly brown Prius and she named it Harold.

Two days after graduation, her apartment building three blocks off campus was condemned and she was forced to move out and into her car.

At first, Fia tried to stay in California, but after just a month of apartment and job hunting from the front seat of Harold, her savings had dwindled enough to make her worried. So, parked in the far end of a Wal-Mart parking lot, Fia rooted through her overfilled trunk until she found her copy of the I Ching. From the cup holder where she stashed coins, Fia grabbed three quarters and began tossing them. Her question was simple: should I call my mom? If not for Fia’s relationship with luck, she would not have been the kind of person to believe in fortune telling, but the process resonated with her. She felt she could receive accurate results, even if she was bad at interpreting the messages sometimes. Tossing the coins made her think of probabilities and percentages and gambling, but since no result was a bad result, there could be no such thing as a lucky toss. Most importantly, the I Ching gave her something to believe in that was unaffected by her luck and could never be affected by her luck, unlike the Protestant faith that she’d been brought up in. Fia had liked the story of Jesus growing up, but once he said that the last would be first and the first would be last, and that whoever seeks his life will lose it, it sounded too much like her experience with luck. Fia didn’t need more complications; she needed reliable answers.

She noted the results of her tosses on her phone and then flipped to hexagram 25 in the book, Remaining Blameless. She read the judgment, Innocence. Supreme Success. Perseverance furthers. If someone is not as he should be, he has misfortune, and it does not further him to undertake anything. Apart from being homeless and jobless in Chico, Fia couldn’t think of herself as being not how she should be, so she decided to call her mother.

“Fia mia,” her mother’s voice poked through the earpiece of her cell phone. “How are you?”

“Hi, mom,” Fia said. “Fine. I was just wondering.”

“Yeah?”

“If you had to pick between having a house and having a job, which would you choose?”

Fia’s mother sighed. “Well, if I were you, I’d pick the job, because you already have a house you can go to. Are you gonna fly home or take the train?”

“What? I’m not going back to Pennsylvania.”

“Then you’re not just jobless and homeless, you’re a jobless homeless idiot. I’ll make the bed up for you.”

“Who said I was jobless and homeless?” Fia asked. 

“Just tell me if I’m aiming for the train station or the airport.” Her mother was smug, or maybe the smugness was just Fia’s imagination giving her more reasons to avoid Pennsylvania. But the older woman did know what she was talking about. The voice on the line picked up again. “You know what, fine. If you want to flounder on your own, go ahead. But if you want to just come visit, maybe for a couple of weeks—that’s possible, right? It wouldn’t offend you.”

  “Offend? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Fia paused. Up until the past two months, she had been mostly safe from the vicious unluck, but perhaps the unluck had been biding its time, waiting for her to be comfortable, and it would just continue to make her life a living hell until she died or ran away from it again. Even though the unluck had poisoned everything about Jackson Falls, maybe its arrival here meant the town had been purged of the evil. Maybe it was safer than she thought. “You really want me to come visit?”

“Fia,” her mother said, “I want you to move back home.”

“Fine. I’ll be there in about a week.”

“So you’ll take the train, then?”

“No,” Fia said. “I’m going to drive.” She ended the call and grabbed her three quarters again. Aloud, she asked, “Should I move back to Pennsylvania?” Six times, the coins clinked into place. Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart. It does not further one to go anywhere. But it was too late; Fia had already promised her mother.

Fia was on the highway just outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, when she saw the girl with her thumb in the air on the side of the road. If traffic had been heavier, or if the hitchhiker had been a man, or if Fia had felt more pressed for time, she never would have pulled over. But she was hoping that an act of kindness would show whoever controlled her luck that she was deserving of a little more peace and a little less upheaval in her life, so Fia followed her instinct and pulled off to the side of the highway about a hundred yards past the hitchhiker. The girl came running toward her car. Fia lowered the passenger window.

The girl was about Fia’s age, tall and brown, with her thick black hair locked into dozens of braids. She bent into the window frame. “Picking up passengers?” she asked.

“Yeah, I guess. Where you headed?”

“Anyplace east of here.” The girl swung a green backpack off her shoulder, opened the car door and jumped in the passenger seat. “This must be my lucky day.” She stretched her arms above her head. “Where are you headed?” she asked.

“Pennsylvania.”

“Cool. I’m going to Ohio, so I guess that makes us sort of neighbors. I’m Mel.” She arranged the backpack at her feet and then turned to offer the driver her hand.

“I’m Fia.” Fia shook the outstretched hand. “The car’s name is Harold.” She then pulled the car back onto the highway.

Mel smiled. “That’s funny,” she said. “Harold. I’ve always wanted to name a car Maude.”

Fia nodded to hide her ignorance; she was unsure of Mel’s reference. She checked her mirrors before moving over to the left lane. On her right, a slower moving Mazda drifted behind her. “Ohio is pretty lame. You’d have to pay me to stay there.”

“I’ve never been,” Mel said. “But my grandmother lives in Akron, and I wanted to get out of Laramie for a while, you know.”

“I know the feeling,” Fia said.

Mel pulled a smartphone from her pocket and checked the time. “Plus my ex won’t leave me alone.”

“Right.” After that, the conversation between the two faded. Fia moved back into the right lane of traffic and reset the cruise control at 80. She understood Mel’s problem, having once wanted to escape Jackson Falls, though leaving Jackson Falls was more about escaping her luck than escaping the town itself or an ex boyfriend.

The other girl coughed. “So what’s in Pennsylvania?”

“Trouble.”

Mel laughed. “You might as well just stay where you are, then. Trouble’s not worth the drive.”

“Yeah, I know.” A second silence filled the car until Fia began to fidget with the radio. After finding three country stations and one Christian rock, she finally tuned to a classic rock station. She clicked the volume to a place that was just loud enough to communicate a desire for silence without offending her passenger or prohibiting necessary conversation.

The music muted the two girls for the next hour and a half until it fizzled and bled into a soft static. Fia searched again for another station and landed on the sixties. Near five thirty, Mel turned toward Fia and said, “How do you feel about McDonald’s?”

“Fine, I guess,” Fia said. “You wanna stop?”

“Only if it’s McDonald’s.” She reached into the front pocket of her backpack and removed a wallet. She checked the space behind her Wyoming ID then snapped the wallet shut again. “I’m kind of on a mission,” she said.

  Fia didn’t ask what kind of a mission involved stopping at McDonald’s and McDonald’s alone, but when she did finally pass a sign directing them toward the fast food chain, she followed it. She parked near the door. Inside, the menus were plastered with the monocled face of the Monopoly man. Instantly, Fia felt her stomach flip.

Mel jumped to the register and ordered a Big Mac with large fries and a medium drink. Fia followed Mel to the register and after a few minutes also decided on a Big Mac. She stood next to her passenger while they waited for the food.

The cashier loaded the two orders onto brown plastic trays and called their numbers. Fia let Mel pick a booth and followed her. As soon as they were sitting, Mel began to pluck at a black square stuck to her Big Mac box. Fia examined her own cardboard burger box and found the same black square made of four small rectangles affixed to the lid. Splayed across them in a bright yellow were the words One in Four Wins! Two more tagged the medium drinks, and even more were plastered to Mel’s large fries. “What is all this?” Fia pointed to the black tags in Mel’s hand.

“You never played the McDonald’s Monopoly before? I used to do it with my dad when I was a kid.” She peeled the tags from her drink. “Usually they run it in the fall, but this year they pushed it up to the middle of summer, which is good for me, since I’m aiming to find at least one rare piece. So what did you get on yours?”

Fia began to slip her nail under the edge of the top corner. She stopped herself. “Well, knowing my luck, I’d better…”

“Well, don’t jinx it, just pull them off. It’s not like you’re going to win the grand prize. It’s basically impossible.”

If there was no way to win, she could be safe. It was dangerous, but with Mel watching her, she knew she must either reap the unluck or explain the unluck and sound like a lunatic. “Okay, here goes,” she said. She took a deep breath and tore the monopoly tickets from the box. “Park Place, Connecticut Avenue, Marvin Gardens and a free medium fries.” Fia had a feeling the fries would be terrible

“See? There’s usually some dummy prize on a Big Mac. Now you have free fries.”

“What about the other pieces?”

Mel popped open her burger box and lifted the dripping pile of bread and meat and lettuce. “Each big prize needs three or four different pieces. Most of the pieces are in every McDonald’s, but there are rare pieces for each prize.” She bit into the burger, which oozed special sauce onto her fingers. She chewed slowly then licked the sauce before continuing, “There might be only ten or fifteen of a certain piece. And they’re all scattered around the world, so it’s functionally impossible to win a big prize, and almost literally impossible to win the grand prize, since there’s only like, one Boardwalk piece each year.”

“But you said you were going after a rare piece,” Fia said. She dipped two french fries into a paper cup of ketchup.

“I figure,” Mel said, “that if I hitchhike from McDonald’s to McDonald’s from here to Ohio, then I’ll be able to collect a lot of pieces from a lot of places. I heard that’s how one of the big prizes was won a couple of years ago, on a road trip.”

“That’s a little stupid,” Fia said. She picked up her own burger. “You could do the same thing and take a Greyhound or the Amtrak. Hitchhiking is so dangerous.”

“I got picked up by you, didn’t I?” Mel said. “So I don’t think it was a total loss. Maybe the next ride’ll be a dud, but you’re pretty chill.”

Unsure of how to respond, Fia tore a large chunk from her burger and chewed. Mel was younger than her, less experienced, less lucky. It made sense that she felt less fear. When Fia started to picture the rest of Mel’s journey and all of the possible complications, she began to panic. Yes, Mel had found Fia, but perhaps the next person to stop wouldn’t just be a dud. Perhaps he’d be violent. Perhaps…

Fia swallowed. “Why don’t you just stay with me?”

“Hmm?” Mel’s mouth was full of fries.

“It really is dangerous to be hitchhiking, and if you’ve been lucky once, then something unlucky is bound to… Well, what I mean is that you’d be safer if you didn’t get yourself into a dangerous situation, and since Akron is on my way, I just don’t think it’s smart for you to keep going by yourself.”

Mel sipped sweet tea through her straw. She placed a finger on her pile of Monopoly tickets. “I can’t ask you to do that,” she said. “And I really can’t ask you to eat at McDonald’s and nowhere but McDonald’s until we get to Akron.”

“Do you have to play the game?” Fia asked. The thought of having to pull more Monopoly prizes from the boxes was a concern, but Fia had already convinced herself that if she left Mel, the younger girl would end up disappeared, murdered, dismembered—all on account of something related to Fia’s luck.

“Yeah,” she said. “This is something that I have to do.”

Fia held her breath for a moment, trying to dissolve both her fear of the game and the image of a dead Mel. “Well, then we can do it. We’ll do it together.”

It was their third trip to McDonald’s when Fia found her first rare piece. Fia had driven late into the night the day before, hoping to reach Lincoln by the time she stopped. Close to midnight, she realized she was still two hours away and she was exhausted. With no hotels in sight, she finally pulled into a rest stop to park and nap for a while; Mel had been asleep for two hours. Though by now Fia was used to sleeping inside Harold, she had never shared the space with another person. She slept fitfully at best, startled herself awake every forty-five minutes. By half past five, she surrendered to wakefulness and pulled back onto the eastbound highway straight into the sunrise. Mel woke with the start of the engine, but soon regressed to the unoccupied sleep of a passenger. Fia tapped her awake after an hour and they stopped at the next McDonald’s they saw, collecting three Reading Railroads and a St. James Place off of their McMuffins.

They stopped again three hours later after turning south at Lincoln, each ordering Big Macs. Fia turned in her free fries, and they came out crispy and hot. It may have been a game of chance, but her luck didn’t seem to be interfering yet. It seemed like Mel was right—it was impossible to win. Fia prayed to all of the gods and saints and ancestors she could think of to keep her safe from the game and to forgive her for playing it. That morning, she’d asked the I Ching whether or not to play; she tossed hexagram 28, Preponderance of the Great. The ridgepole sags to the breaking point. It furthers one to have somewhere to go. Success. Fia took that to mean that she and Mel would be safe.

Until Fia pulled her pieces from her box and found the light blue bar at the top of one of her four pieces. The color was familiar; she already had the light blue Connecticut Avenue. This piece read: Vermont Avenue, #434; Need 433, 434, 435; $5,000; Subject to Rules. Her other pieces were normal—Indiana Avenue, Pennsylvania Railroad, St. James Place—and because she hadn’t seen Mel’s pieces the night before, she didn’t realize what she had just pulled.

Mel tore her pieces off of the box and read them out, “I got B. & O. Railroad, Park Place, Park Place and Marvin Gardens. How about you?”

Fia read her list, ending on Vermont Avenue.

Mel dropped her tickets onto the table. “Fia,” she said, “I know you’re a newbie to the game, and that you’ve been playing for fun, but don’t lose that piece.”

“Why not?” Fia asked. She could already tell from Mel’s expression that it was rare. Fia’s stomach lurched. She quickly read the prize again. $5,000 dollars. Something was going to happen, and it would cost her. It would cost her something equivalent to $5,000 dollars. She was only one piece away from winning it, whatever that other piece may be. “Well,” Fia said before Mel could explain, “I only have two pieces of the prize anyway. Even if this one’s rare, I’m probably not going to find the third one easily.”

“I already have it,” Mel said. “I have it twice.” She dug into the front pocket of her backpack and pulled out last night’s tickets. When she found Oriental Avenue, she passed it to Fia.

Instead of the joy that most people would feel, Fia felt horrified. She dug into her coin purse where she’d stored the other tickets until she found her Connecticut Avenue. All three pieces had the same sky blue bar across the top; all three listed their prize as being $5,000. “No,” she said. “No. This isn’t happening.” She pushed herself away from the table, which caused the chair to scratch and squeak loudly enough to draw attention to herself from the other people seated inside. “You take it,” she said to Mel. “I don’t want it; you take it.”

“Are you kidding? Do you realize how incredibly lucky you are right now? Here.” Mel pushed her Oriental Avenue piece closer to Fia. “Take the piece and split the prize with me. Fifty-fifty. Hell, I’ll only take a third of it, if you want, since I only have one piece.”

“No,” Fia picked up all three pieces and put them in front of Mel. “You take it. Take it all. I don’t want anything to do with it. It’s yours.”

Mel looked from the pieces to Fia’s mortified face back to the pieces. “Are you sure?”

Fia nodded. The last thing she needed was to win a prize in a contest. Maybe it wouldn’t be a monetary backlash, but a backlash would come eventually. Other peoples’ lives didn’t work like hers, and she had to be careful when the stakes were $5,000 dollars. Winning Harold had cost her the apartment; she couldn’t gamble with such high stakes anymore. Besides, she hadn’t won anything yet. Mel was the one who had the winning ticket, not her. Mel’s luck was average at best, not strong enough to incur the kind of karmic wrath that Fia suffered under. If Mel took her tickets now, then the unluck could be avoided. She hoped.

Mel picked up the Vermont Avenue piece and held it lightly around its edges. “My dad and I used to play this game every fall,” she said. “We’d spend weeks eating tons of McDonald’s, collecting pieces, laying them out on a real monopoly board. I always had a lot of fun, but we never won anything bigger than a quarter pounder with cheese. Then last year he got sick and he became obsessed with the game, drove all over Wyoming and Colorado looking for pieces. He wanted one of the big ticket prizes so much.”

Fia shook her panic back enough to focus on Mel’s story. “Why?”

“He had cancer, and we didn’t have good enough insurance to take care of him. He thought if he could just win one of the big cash prizes, not even the million, but something like this—just one of them would pay for enough of his treatments that he’d get better. He never did win though.” Mel held the Vermont Avenue piece up above her face. The black surface on the back absorbed the light, but the white front with the text still seemed to shine. Mel’s smile was genuine, but bittersweet.

“What happened?” Fia asked.

“He died last month.” Mel gathered the other two pieces of the $5,000 prize and stacked them together, with Vermont Avenue in the middle. She handed them back to Fia.

Fia took Mel’s wallet and stuck the tickets behind the Wyoming photo ID. “How about we keep these here and you think about whether or not you want the money for a while, okay?” She pushed the wallet back to Mel, already certain that she wasn’t going to take the prize if her life depended on it, but she could tell that Mel had misgivings about taking the pieces for herself. “Okay?”

By the time they reached Akron, they had amassed seven Marvin Gardens, five Oriental Avenues, nine Park Places, three Connecticut Avenues, five Reading Railroads, four St. James Places, two Pennsylvania Railroads, one B. & O. Railroad, three Free Medium Fries, two Pacific Avenues, two Indiana Avenues, four Illinois Avenues, one St. Charles Place and one Atlantic Avenue.

In addition to the one Vermont Avenue rare piece, Fia uncovered one Short Line Railroad just before they entered Ohio. The four railroad pieces, of which she held two and Mel held two, together gave them Shell Fuel for a Year. She gave that prize to Mel without offering an explanation. When pressed, the best Fia could come up with without explaining her fraught relationship with luck was that Harold the Prius didn’t take well to fuel from Shell and got fewer miles to the gallon from their gas. She was afraid that collecting free gas would quickly lead to the loss of her ugly brown car, the only thing that had sustained her since her graduation.

Fia watched from the driver’s seat of her car with the engine idling while Mel knocked on the door of a townhouse in Akron, Ohio. The door opened halfway, and a tiny black woman with deep wrinkles and gray hair poked her head through the opening.

When Mel didn’t disappear into the house immediately, Fia rolled down her passenger window and strained her ear to listen. She couldn’t hear anything. Another face, tall and starkly white above the small woman, appeared at the door as the woman retreated. The new man shook Mel’s hand. Mel gestured back toward Fia in Harold, waving her to come join them.

Fia turned the key and stilled the engine. “Everything okay?” she called as she slammed her door shut and jogged up to the door.

“Not quite,” Mel said. She tossed her arms around Fia and squeezed her so tightly that Fia’s arms started to feel numb. “There,” she said. “Now it’s all right.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t just let you leave without saying goodbye,” the younger girl said. She dropped her backpack onto the stoop. “Truth is, I wanted to ask you to stay the night, but this guy here,” she pointed at the man, “says that my grandma can’t handle it.”

“I’m her nurse,” he explained. “She had a hard enough time just now remembering that she even had a granddaughter. I don’t think bringing in a stranger would be beneficial to her.”

“That’s okay,” Fia said, “I’m actually only a few hours from home right now; I should get there in time for dinner.”

“Are you sure?” Mel asked. “I know that I’m beat, and I haven’t even been the one driving.”

Fia nodded and smiled. “I’ll be fine,” she said. She was certain that she would be. From Akron to DuBois was only about two and a half hours, then she’d turn south toward Jackson Falls and be there in no time. After enough days on the road and enough fast food to last for a lifetime, Fia was finally ready to be home. She thought back to hexagram 25. Innocence. Supreme Success. This had been the right choice after all, whether or not she would admit it to her mother out loud. Fia was making the right decision. Fia swept Mel into a second hug before walking slowly back to her brown Prius. She waved through the window and watched Mel in the rearview mirror until Fia turned a corner and Mel was gone.

Fia slept soundly for the first time in weeks when she finally arrived at her house in Jackson Falls. It was strange; now that she was here, she couldn’t understand why she’d avoided the place for so long. Harold’s back seat was a wreck of McDonald’s garbage, which her mother had tsked at, but Fia was too bone-tired from driving to care. “I’ll clean it out tomorrow,” she promised. She also didn’t mind when her mom pointed out that she could use a shower. 

Inside, she found herself scrubbing down with her mom’s body wash and shampoo. Her old bedroom still had her bed and her dresser, but now it also housed a craft table and a basket full of yarn. Fia dug through the dresser until she found a pair of old gym shorts and a t-shirt, then fell into a hard sleep without eating. She woke at four a.m. from a dream about Mel with a craving for more fries.

In the morning, Fia’s mom made them both pancakes. Fia played with the puddle of syrup, drawing designs in the liquid with her fork that slowly flowed back into a single gloop.

“You slept like a rock,” her mom said.

“Yeah,” Fia replied as she formed four concentric circles of syrup blank spaces on her plate. Pancakes themselves weren’t the most healthy breakfast in the world, but after so many days of fast food, homemade pancakes felt alien to her stomach. She missed Mel, who’d ordered the hot cakes almost every time they’d stopped before 10:30 at a different McDonald’s. Including the day before. Her road trip with Mel was already feeling foreign, fuzzy, like it came out of the dream that had woken her while it was still dark out.

Once her pancakes were sitting stodgy in her stomach, Fia grabbed an empty garbage bag from the kitchen to go clean out her car. Empty Big Mac boxes, medium drink cups full of tepid water, and greasy fry containers littered the back seat. Her mouth salivated even as her body revolted at the smell of stale burgers and cold fries. Mel was lucky, she thought, that she didn’t have to deal with this. She remembered Mel’s dad, the hints about Mel’s ex, and all she could think was that Mel had never been lucky in her entire life.

Fia reached deep under the passenger seat, swiped her hand around on the grainy carpet until she found one last piece of large debris. She could feel that it was just another hash brown wrapper, and she crumpled it in her hand as she pulled it out. Fia couldn’t tell you why she looked at it before she put it in the bag with the rest of the trash, but she did. And in that quick glance down, Fia noticed the black backing of a ticket still affixed to the wrapper.

She smoothed it out, laid it down on what she now thought of as Mel’s seat. She could open it, reveal another Park Place or Pennsylvania Railroad, but she hesitated. Instead, she reached for the coins in her cup holder and grabbed three quarters. The question was simple, but infinite. Should she pull the ticket?

Hexagram 52, The Mountain. Fia skimmed through the text. Above this Mountain’s summit another more majestic rises: the superior person is mindful to keep his thoughts in the here and now. Something bigger was happening, and her fingernail traced the edge of the ticket on the wrapper while she read the rest of the hexagram. The final line, this is no mistake, made her stop. This was a mistake. She had their last ticket in her hand, and she was about to rip it off without Mel? She wanted Mel to be here; she wanted Mel to be part of this. It wasn’t about her, after all. She’d been pouring her own luck into helping Mel with this crazy, chaotic tribute to her father. This ticket wasn’t hers to pull, but it was her luck that was making it heavy in her hand.

Six more tosses. Hexagram 61, Inner Truth. You may cross the far shore. Great fortune if you stay on course. What was Fia’s inner truth? For so long, it had been that luck and unluck work in cruel tandem, but after just a few days in the car with Mel, it felt like something had shifted. Mel’s life had been a series of unluckiness without much of the luck that Fia always experienced before a tragedy, and somehow, that unluckiness had finally balanced out the karmic retribution for Fia’s good luck. Mel had brought her more balance in their road trip than Fia had ever felt in her life. Mel was due for a life’s supply of more than just Shell gasoline in the luck department, and Fia wanted to be there to keep things trending up. She didn’t know what piece was on the hash brown wrapper, but she knew the big one, Boardwalk 452. And she couldn’t help but feel that if she pulled the ticket now, by herself, a million-dollar tragedy would befall her. But if she could open it with Mel, then the possibilities were endless.

“Mom,” she called back to the house.

Fia’s mother leaned out of the front door. “Yeah?”

“I left something in Akron,” Fia yelled. “I have to go get it. I’ll be back again tonight.”

“Whatever it is, it’s probably gone by now, sweetie.”

“It’s not,” Fia said. “I still have her address in the GPS.” 

After Fia tossed the trash into the can and ran to give her mother a quick hug goodbye, she jumped back into Harold’s driver’s seat. In a few hours, she would be in Akron, and she hoped Mel would answer the door when she knocked.