Chapter 5 Logan #2
“If I don’t look like myself, that would help,” Hazel says before quickly adding, “I’m not hiding from the law or anything.
” She twists a long strand of her hair. “And it’s not that I’m worried about the world knowing.
I just don’t want my world to know.” She releases a deep breath. “So, okay. Disguises it is.”
I tap the ticket against my palm. It makes me think of the kiss, which reminds me…
“So, the thing I wanted to talk to you about,” I start.
“I don’t know if I’m being irrational, but something strange has been going on.
I think our luck flipped or something.” I suck in a sharp breath as I hear how this sounds.
Is that even a thing? Luck flipping? “It must’ve been when the fortunes got mixed up. ”
“You think… our fortunes… flipped,” she repeats slowly.
“Something like that, yes,” I say. “I don’t know how else to explain it. I’ve been having bad luck.”
She pauses mid–temple rub. “Is that new for you?”
“Yes, actually,” I say.
“Seriously?” Hazel side-eyes me. “Bad things don’t happen to you?”
“No one gets through life unscathed, but luck is always on my side. Even the worst things could’ve been worse.”
“So you took all my good fortunes when you didn’t even need them,” she says, mostly to herself.
“In the past few days, it’s like everything’s going wrong at my job.
” I tell her about the set number mix-up and the fire.
“Then we were given the wrong installation points, and automation rigging is already complicated. And a set wall fell, even after being secured, right onto the lake backdrop, which now needs repair and repainting. Not one show I’ve worked on has ever gone this wrong, but now that I’m head carpenter, it’s all going to shit. ”
“Wow. I’m sorry,” Hazel says. “All that happened in the last, what, two days?”
“Uh-huh.” I adjust my baseball hat, the strands still damp underneath it.
“That’s awful.”
“Yes, and—” I cut myself off, hearing how negative I sound.
I take a breath. “I’m complaining, and I shouldn’t.
Everything that’s happened comes with the job.
I’m probably just tired. It’ll come together, and thankfully, no one got hurt.
It’s just weird. Everything went so smoothly during spotting and rigging.
It was all laid out, we altered the stage correctly, everything on deck lined up with the grid,” I reflect. “And then load-in happened.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” Hazel says. “But two days isn’t a lot of data to work with.”
“You want more proof?” I glance around the pizzeria. “Okay. Follow me.”
Hazel slides out of her seat and traces my steps to the crane machine in the corner.
“This machine hates me now,” I tell her.
“These machines hate everyone. They’re rigged,” she says. “It’s practically a slot machine. No one ever wins.”
“Yeah, well. I win every time.”
“Seriously, he does. It doesn’t make sense,” Suze says as she delivers drinks to a nearby table.
In the machine is a jumble of hundreds of small, New York City–themed stuffed toys: apples, hot dogs, taxi cabs, pigeons, and landmarks.
I remove a couple of quarters from the honesty jar that Curtain Call Pizzeria offers for customers. We’re supposed to add what we take back into the tip. I steady myself as I grip the handle.
“If you’re so lucky, does that mean you have millions of dollars? Shouldn’t you have already won the lottery?” Hazel asks. I must make a face because she follows up with, “Have you? Won the lottery before?”
“No, it was my first time playing,” I say, nodding to the pile of stuffed toys. “Which one do you want?”
“The soft pretzel, I guess,” Hazel says on an exhale. “What’s your strategy? You jiggle the handle? Bounce the toy off the other plushies?”
I maneuver the claw over the knitted brown pretzel sprinkled with beaded salt.
“No strategy. Luck,” I say, tapping the button to initiate the grab.
The claw lowers, its prong slipping through the pretzel loop.
As it’s lifted into the air, the Empire State Building and everything bagel it was tucked between go tumbling.
On its way back toward the drop-off, the claw abruptly stops.
The pretzel unhooks from the claw, falling back onto the pile as the claw resumes motion, the arm folding back in on itself in completion.
“There. See?” I say, waving toward the glass. “Also, sorry. I wanted to win that for you.”
“That claw is flimsy at best,” Hazel says, crossing her arms. “It jerks back on purpose.”
I tap on a sheet of paper taped to the side of the machine. “See those eighteen tally marks? Mine.”
“That’s a lot of plushies.”
“You heard Suze. I’ve never lost once,” I say. “Now you try.”
“I never win those things,” she says with a shake of her head.
“That’s the point. If you win, something’s up.”
“Me playing will convince you either way?”
I nod. “But you need to actually try to win.”
She considers it for a few seconds before adding quarters into the machine.
It beeps back to life. Hazel pushes the handle forward until the claw is centered over the soft pretzel.
She presses down on the button. The claw descends, gripping the pretzel through the loop.
It stays put, even when the jerking motion happens.
Hazel’s clearly shocked by her win as she claims her reward. “But—but I’m the person who somehow gets quarters stuck inside pinball machines. And not the money slot part. The actual game.”
“Must be beginner’s luck,” I say, writing her name on the paper and adding a tally mark next to it. “Or… flipped fortunes.”
Hazel still looks skeptical. She tries again, this time winning a stuffed rat. After racking up five tally marks in a row, she seems slightly more convinced… or confused.
“Come with me,” I say, heading back to the table just as Suze brings our food. She drops off fries as an apology for the milkshake machine being out of commission. “First, it was the milkshake, which is the best in the city, by the way.”
Hazel sets her mound of plushies on the chair next to her. “I guess I can’t corroborate your statement without that machine.”
“Watch. Normally, this pizza is perfectly crisp on the outside with a soft and doughy crust.” I lift the slices. The bottoms are burned while the middle is still raw.
Hazel gestures with the soft pretzel toward her plate. “Check my slices! It’s probably not just yours.”
Both sides of her pizza are golden and crisp, the middle perfectly baked. She pulls her slices apart, the cheese stretching from one half to the other, the way it does in commercials.
“And these fries?” I add. “Crisp. I don’t know when they switched to waffle fries, but the crinkle fries were”—I shudder—“not good.”
Hazel crunches into one. “These are tasty.” She thinks for a moment. “I’m not saying you’re right, but a pipe had burst in my apartment building.”
“I remember.”
“It was fixed the next day. Repairs with that kind of speed are unheard of.”
“But?”
“But for all the good things that happened, there have been worse things,” Hazel says as she seems to debate something. “My brother broke his legs.”
I set the fry down. “Did you say legs, plural? Is he okay?”
“He’s recovering. But it’s why I need the money. There will be a lot more bills coming on top of… everything else.”
“I’m sorry. That’s stressful.” The words “break” and “legs” bring forward something else to mind. “Oh my god. I told an actor before one of his performance rehearsals to break a leg earlier this week,” I recall. “Do you think that somehow transferred to your brother?”
She scrunches her forehead. “What’s with that saying? I never understood it.”
“It’s theater superstition,” I say. “There are actually quite a few theories on how it originated—Never mind. It’s a thing people say when you want to wish them good luck.”
She sips her juice. “It’s just odd to me. Why don’t we say things like, hope you get laid off today, so people can, you know, keep their jobs?”
“You want that to catch on? We can try to make it a thing,” I offer.
Hazel smirks.
“The point is, I said it,” I continue. “And everything I touch lately turns to… not gold.”
She stares at me. “Huh. And how would your theater-specific wording affect my nonactor brother in a different state?”
I rub my hand over my face. “I don’t know. I think maybe we’re now connected in this inexplicably bizarre way because of the fortunes.”
“As much as we want to, we can’t always explain why bad things happen,” she says.
She’s right. I’m uncomfortable, and I’m trying to find answers for why everything’s gone the opposite of how they usually go in my life.
Hazel hands me her second slice. “You didn’t break my brother’s legs, Logan. Lately, there have been more fortuitous events than I’m used to, but the rest of them? That’s life,” she says with a shrug. “That’s how it goes.”
“Not for me. Our past fortunes are irrelevant now. But your present and future ones were that you’ll experience a loss, and that you’ll have a painful event that will shake you,” I recall.
“Not only did everything I just told you happen, but we lost one of our main actors to a movie shooting in Hollywood. The new guy is taller than I am. We need to modify the height of a few doorways. We’ve been working around the clock. ”
“Losing an actor was your loss?” Hazel asks.
“Yeah, besides the destruction and chaos.” I shake my head.
“You know what, ignore me. I should be grateful that I have a smart, talented team who’s willing to work through these problems. It’s amazing I get to do what I do at all.
This is my first time being a head carpenter.
Of course there are going to be problems. What’d I expect? ”
“It can still be frustrating,” Hazel says, cataloging my reaction.
“I need to look at the bright side. I’m going to learn something from this. I’m probably delirious from the lack of sleep.”
She makes a sympathetic face. “There’s a really good chance that’s true. Has anything gone right?”
I try to think of something, anything. “We put the fire out?”
“Everything you’ve said does sound chaotic.”
“And my fortunes were that I’d come into abundance and that next month is when I should execute on any ideas or goals. Given that we’re not in October, that one’s still to be determined.”
“How do I fit into this exactly?” Hazel asks.
“Technically, you were holding the lottery ticket when we won,” I say. “That was my abundance fortune.”
“That’s a huge stretch. With my luck, we wouldn’t win a contest where everyone’s a winner.” She eyes her plushies, looking skeptical as she says this.
Sounds like Hazel and I have both had challenges. I’m probably so off base with my fortune theory.
I try to focus on something else and land on the pizza. “Thanks for sharing with me. I may have to rethink my usual.” As Hazel drags a fry through ketchup and lifts it to her mouth, her bracelet catches my eye. “Were you inspired by Doc and Marty?” I ask.
She reaches for her wrist. “This was my mom’s. All the charms fell off except this bird one,” she says, like, See? Not good. “I thought I had lost it forever. But then someone… found it.”
“That’s very—”
“Don’t say it.”
“Fortunate.” I can’t help but point this fact out.
“I’ll admit that happening is uncommon for me,” she says.
All this good luck and bad luck. We need answers. And if the bird on Hazel’s bracelet isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.
We need another fortune reading.
“What I do want you to tell me is”—Hazel waves the lottery ticket—“how big of a tip do we need to leave?”