The Lucky Kind Read online

  Also by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  The Beautiful Between

  “This debut novel is the perfect antidote to the ‘Gossip Girl’-ization of young adult literature.… Endearing, realistic, and heart-wrenching.”

  —New York Post

  “Sheinmel makes an impressive debut with an absorbing tale of unlikely friendship, loss, and family secrets.… The intriguing and well-defined characterizations will keep readers riveted.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Full of small moments and quiet realism … creative and satisfying.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Subdued and reflective … compelling.”

  —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

  “Touching and genuine … a refreshing read.”

  —Justine Magazine

  “A gem of a book.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “A memorable debut … emotionally moving.”

  —The Knoxville News Sentinel

  “Especially refreshing … realistic.”

  —VOYA

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sheinmel, Alyssa B.

  The lucky kind / Alyssa B. Sheinmel. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Having always felt secure within his small family, Manhattan high school junior Nick is unsettled to discover the existence of an older brother that his father put up for adoption many years ago.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89866-2

  [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Families—Fiction. 3. Adoption—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Coming of age—Fiction. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S54123Lu 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010027967

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  This book is for

  Joel E. Sheinmel

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Phone Calls and Other Life-Altering Events

  Girls in School Uniforms

  Tribeca

  Stolen Bicycles

  History

  The Weekend

  Counting the Steps

  After School

  Chips & Salsa

  Smooth

  The Implications of Smooth

  My Girlfriend

  Introductions

  Thanksgiving

  Dessert

  The Bad Dream

  Perfection on Black Friday

  Invitations

  The True Meaning of Christmas

  The Morning After

  Much, Much Later

  How to Completely Blow Everything with the Girl of Your Dreams: A Step-by-Step Guide, by Nicholas Brandt

  Studying

  Presents

  ’Twas the Night Before the Night Before Christmas

  Flying

  Ohio

  The Days Inn

  Christmas Day

  Cigarettes with Sam

  The Sights and Sounds of Troy, Ohio

  The Lone Star State

  Phone Calls and Other Life-Altering Events

  Acknowledgements

  Phone Calls and Other Life-Altering Events

  It’s 7:42 on a Tuesday when the phone rings. I only notice the time because I’m watching Wheel of Fortune, which is so boring that I think I might be better entertained if I turned off the TV and stared at the blank screen. I wonder when Vanna White began looking like somebody’s mom. I distinctly remember thinking she was hot when I was younger. My parents are out and I’m sunk into the living room sofa, but the phone is within my arm’s reach. I grab the remote and hit the mute button.

  “Hello?”

  “Eh-hem.”

  “Hello?”

  “Is Sheffman Brandt in?”

  It takes me a second to realize he’s talking about my dad. Sheffman is his real first name, but no one calls him that. He usually goes by Robert or Rob or Bobby, for his middle name. Sheffman is his mother’s maiden name. It must be a telemarketer or someone who got his name off a list.

  “No, I’m sorry, he’s not home. Can I take a message?”

  There’s silence on the other end. I think I hear the man say “Umm,” like he’s really thinking about whether or not to leave a message.

  “Hello?” I say, mildly irritated.

  “No. I’m sorry. No. Sorry. No, thank you.” His voice sounds more certain that “No” is the right answer each time he says it. Then he hangs up, so I do, too. I’m asleep before my parents get home.

  In the morning, the sound of my mother and Pilot coming back from their walk wakes me up. Pilot is our dog, but my parents act like he’s my little brother.

  My father is sitting in the living room at his computer. His desk is in the back of the room, behind the sofa, so that he can watch TV while he works.

  “Morning, Nicky,” he says, looking up from his cereal. Even though he’s fifty years old, my dad has a big sweet tooth; he puts three or four spoonfuls of sugar into his Grape-Nuts every morning. Mom says he’s going to get adult-onset diabetes. Dad works from home half the time, and he’s sitting in his pajama bottoms with his cereal, so it doesn’t look like he’s going in today. Before I was born, he started a company called Fetch Capital, and my mother quit her job to help him run it.

  “Hey, Dad.” My hair is still wet from the shower, and my shirt is clinging to my chest because I was still wet when I put it on. But it’s only September, school’s only just started, and it’s still hot out. It’ll feel good once I get outside.

  My mother and Pilot are on the couch, watching the five-day forecast, which is pretty much my mother’s favorite show.

  “Stevie coming over this morning?” she asks as I walk toward the kitchen.

  I shake my head. “I’ll meet him downstairs.” Stevie and I have been walking to school together since we were ten.

  “His parents were at the fund-raiser last night. They won the big prize in the silent auction.”

  “What they win?” I ask as I pour myself cereal.

  “Some trip. They always bid on the trips, those two.”

  Stevie’s parents love to travel. When we were little, Stevie slept over every time his parents left town.

  “Bring a sweater to school with you, Nick,” Mom says, kissing my head before she leaves the room. “I know you think it’s still summer, but it’s getting cold already and your hair is still wet.” I roll my eyes at Dad but he says, “Sweater, Nicky,” like he agrees with Mom that I’m not old enough to know whether I’m hot or cold.

  Girls in School Uniforms

  “Why the fuck is everyone in such a hurry to get into that building?” Stevie asks. We’re standing on the corner across the street from school, leaning against the windows of the pizza place. Stevie hates school this year. His parent
s are making him see a tutor after school because colleges pay such close attention to junior year on your transcripts. It wouldn’t be so bad if Stevie didn’t already get straight As. They seem to think, since he never studies, that something must be wrong. But Stevie’s just that smart. You’d hate him if he weren’t so cool about it. Sometimes when we have two choices for an essay, he’ll write both of them, choose the one he likes better, and give me the other one to hand in.

  I’m pretty sure that Francis is the only coed high school in New York with school uniforms. Boys have to wear shirts and ties, and right now Stevie and I are sweating under our long sleeves. Whoever came up with this outfit was not thinking about the weather in Manhattan, which stays hot through September and gets hot again in May, so that the boys have to sweat out two months every year.

  But not the girls. The girls wear gray kilts and button-downs, although they call them blouses, and they always roll their kilts at the waist to make them shorter. Sometimes they wear boxers underneath their kilts, and the skirts are rolled so short that you can see the boxers peeking out at the hems.

  Eden Reiss is walking toward Stevie and me, and her kilt is just above her knees; she never rolls her skirt to make it shorter. Her button-down is loose enough that the buttons don’t pull at her chest, but you can see the polka dots on her bra underneath her white shirt.

  “Check out Eden’s bra,” Stevie whispers.

  “Yeah, I see it.” I don’t exactly need it pointed out to me, and Stevie knows it. But I’m trying not to look because she’ll see me staring. Eden Reiss has been at Francis since kindergarten, too, just like Stevie and me. Just her name is enough to make her cool, like her parents wanted something biblical, but rather than settle on Eve they went straight to the heart of the matter by naming her Eden.

  “Praise Jesus for girls in school uniforms,” Stevie says.

  “You’re Jewish.”

  “So are you. But I gotta thank someone.”

  “Well, thank Theodore Francis for being so uptight that when he started this school, he made the kids wear them.”

  “ ‘Praise Theodore’ don’t have the same ring to it.”

  “Let’s go in already.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  Tribeca

  Most of the kids at Francis live uptown, mostly on the Upper West Side, but the Upper East, too. Eden Reiss lives in Tribeca, which is all the way downtown. She’s the only person in our class who lives there. And Tribeca is my excuse to talk to Eden Reiss today. Her walk to the subway is kind of in the direction of my building, so all I have to do is fall into step with her and ask her for Tribeca restaurant recommendations for my parents’ anniversary, which is next month. It’s flimsy, but it’s the best I can do. I barely spoke to her once last year and it’s a new year and so it’s going to be different. We’re juniors now, which means there’s only four more semesters left to get this girl. Someone’s going to get her attention, and damned if I’m not going to at least try for it to be me.

  I’m standing outside the building after school is over, feeling like a total jackass because I’m waiting for Eden. Stevie flashed me a thumbs-up before he left for tutoring, even though I hadn’t even told him what I was planning. Crap, this is pathetic. She might have plans after school. What if she’s with her girlfriends, or with Rob Mosely, who lives in the West Village and sometimes takes the subway with her? This is never going to work.

  But then there she is, on her own, chewing gum, pulling her hair back with one hand and getting her MetroCard out with the other. Girls can do so much at once.

  I wait until she gets started on her walk, and then fall in behind her, trying to be casual.

  “Hey, Eden.”

  She turns back, blinking. “Hey, Nick.”

  “You walking to the subway?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too—I mean, I’m walking home, but it’s this way.” Christ, I sound rehearsed.

  “Oh.” Eden keeps right on walking.

  “How long does it take you to get home? Once you’re on the train?”

  She shrugs. “About twenty minutes, I guess.”

  “You must get a head start on reading.” I don’t think I could sound more like a dork at this point.

  She wrinkles her nose. “Nah. I like to people watch. Have you ever noticed how we always try to fill our time with reading, or listening to music, or whatever? What’s wrong with just staring into space, or at the other people? You see interesting things.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Eden nods, but she doesn’t say anything else, and for, like, five steps we walk in silence. She hasn’t once smiled at me.

  “So, you live in Tribeca, right?”

  “Yeah.” She knows I know that.

  “How come your parents chose Francis? It’s so far away.”

  “My mother went to Francis.”

  “Really?”

  “Why would I lie about that?” she says, not meanly, and not rhetorically, either. I think she may want me to answer. But I move on.

  “Anyway, it’s my parents’ anniversary in a few weeks, and they like to go someplace new every year. There are so many good restaurants down there—any suggestions?” I’m doing everything wrong, but I don’t know how to do it any better.

  Eden shrugs. “Do they eat down there a lot? ’Cause I can’t think of anyplace new—but there are some great places that have been there forever. Do they want something romantic?”

  “I guess. My dad always makes the plan, but I said I’d help him think of something.”

  “Try Scalini Fedeli.”

  “Scalini Fedeli, got it.” I know the name, because we’ve eaten there. But I’m not going to tell Eden that.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Sure,” she says, and turns onto the block where the subway entrance is. It’s out of my way, but I turn with her. She’ll disappear soon, and I haven’t made any kind of progress at all.

  But then something happens, right at the subway entrance: Eden stops walking, and turns to face me. “I have to run.” She sounds apologetic.

  “Yeah, me too,” I say, even though I don’t have anywhere I need to be.

  “One of these days I’ll have to drag you downtown,” she says, and she, just barely, smiles. I can see her teeth peeking out from under her plump upper lip. She looks so fresh that I think her mouth would taste like apples.

  “How come?” I ask, feeling stupid.

  “Show you around the neighborhood, I guess.”

  “Right.” I don’t think I’ve smiled this entire exchange, so I start to, to let her know that I’m friendly and that I’m enjoying talking to her, and then I stop, because I should be so cool that I don’t need to smile. But then that’s worse, because now this half smile of mine is hanging in the air between us.

  Mercifully, Eden says, “Right.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” she says, and hops down the stairs to the subway. When she bounces, I can just barely see the bottom of her underwear: plain gray cotton. Not polka-dotted to match her bra.

  “Dude, she practically invited you to her bed,” Stevie says later. Stevie is very optimistic about Eden Reiss. I’m sitting on my bed, a highlighter in hand. Stevie’s phone call interrupted my attempt at our history homework.

  “I wouldn’t say that. She said ‘the neighborhood.’ ”

  “Well, that’s world-class innuendo.”

  “Jesus, Stevie, not everything is innuendo.”

  “It is if you look for it.” I can hear Stevie grinning.

  “Hang on a sec, someone’s on the other line.”

  “Okay, but come on back, ’cause we gotta get you into the Garden of Eden.”

  “How long you been waiting to say that?”

  “Not as long as you’ve been waiting to do it, man.”

  I click over. “Hello?”

  “Hello? Excuse me, is Mr. Brandt at home?”

  I recognize the hesitant voice immediately.
“Is this the same guy who called last night?”

  “What?”

  “Are you trying to sell us something? ’Cause we’re on the do-not-call list.”

  “No, I’d just like to talk to Mr. Brandt.”

  I roll my eyes. “Hang on a sec.” I click back to Stevie. “I’ll call you from my cell phone. It’s for my dad.” Stevie and I may be the last two guys in New York who still call each other on their landlines; we’ve been friends since long before either of us had a cell phone. Other than my own, his home phone number was the first one I ever memorized—and I’m pretty sure that his house was the first place I ever called all by myself.

  I click back to the other line. “One second,” I say, and then walk into the living room and hand the phone to my dad, who’s watching baseball from his desk. “Bring it back to my room when you’re done.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Thanks, kid.”

  “I’m not your secretary,” I say, but I’m smiling.

  “Hello, this is Rob Brandt,” he says, and for some reason, I don’t walk away immediately, back to my room, to my cell phone, to call Stevie and discuss Eden, or at least to work on our homework together. I’m kind of curious who this guy is.

  But my father surprises me. “Oh, hello,” he says. “Yes, I usually go by my middle name,” he explains, and then he’s silent. “Can you hang on one second?” Poor guy’s been on hold three times already tonight. Guess he’s not a telemarketer.

  “Nicky, do me a favor.” My father hands me the phone, carefully, like it’s made of glass. “I’m going to go into the bedroom. Will you hang up when I pick up, please?”

  “Sure.” He’s acting like he’s asking me to do the impossible, and this is not a big deal. The phone from my room gets fuzzy in my parents’ bedroom. We do this all the time.

  “Okay. Thank you,” he says, breathless. I can’t tell if he’s nervous or excited. “Just hang up, that’s all.”