Page 115 of With a Little Luck

He’s obviously winging it at this point, hardly singing along to the music at all as the background vocals fade away. It doesn’t matter that he sounds ridiculous. The restaurant is a cacophony of cheers, hoots, wolf whistles, as Ezra Kent promposes to Ari.287

Ari … who looks shocked.

Ari … who looks bewildered.

Ari … who is starting to smile.

“Jude?”

I barely hear my name over the blood rushing through my ears and the chaos of a whole bunch of strangers rooting for the guy who is asking out the girl that I realized too late that I am in love with.

I look at my sister, who is frowning at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Awesome,” I say, my voice tense. “Why?”

Rather than answering, she looks down at the napkin on the table. Or what used to be a napkin before I mindlessly tore it to shreds.

I swallow hard and sweep the pieces into a pile, dumping them onto my plate.

Ari and Ezra return to our table. Ezra’s got his arm draped loosely over Ari’s shoulders. He’s beaming like he just won the lottery, because … yeah.He just won the freaking lottery.

Ari is smiling, too, but it’s more nervous, more dazed. Her eyes meet mine and widen in a look of total dismay. Acan you believe that just happened?look.

I force myself to smile back around clenched teeth.288

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Chapter Thirty-Seven

Fine, Curse of Lundyn Toune. You win. I’m not going to fight itanymore. What does any of it matter? If Ari can be into Ezra Kent, of all people, then clearly, I never stood a chance. He and I couldn’t be more different. He thrives when he’s the center of attention. Lives for the spotlight. Loves getting a reaction from people—laughter, usually, but I think he’ll pretty much take any reaction over being ignored. He is confident and outgoing and doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him.

Whereas I was perfectly content to fly under the radar before all this happened. To just survive high school unscathed and go on my merry way.

So there. I don’t need uncanny good luck. I don’t need real-life magic. I certainly don’t need love.

In fact, from what I can tell, all I really need … is to study.

“Jude, Jude, Jude,” says Mrs. Andrews, clicking her tongue. I’m standing beside her desk, ignoring the fact that Maya, Matt, César, and Pru are all loitering in the hallway, waiting for me, even though class ended two minutes ago.

Mortification prickles my skin. A teacher has never asked to speak with me after class before, and I can’t recall a teacher ever looking quite so disappointed in me, either.

“I don’t know what’s happened to you this semester,” she says, handing me my test. A D is written at the top. “Is something going on that you want to talk about?”295

It’s a trap.

“No?”

She sighs, like she hadn’t expected anything different, and I wonder how often she has some version of this conversation with her students, and how often they just want to dodge her questions and get out.

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