Jack Adrift by Jack Gantos Page B

Buddha under his chin and in an instant launched him out to sea like a stone from a Roman catapult.

    â€œWhat the heck was that?” Dad shouted.
    â€œReel him back,” I pleaded, jumping up and down. “Reel him in. That was the Buddha!”
    Dad was like Popeye after he ate his spinach. He put everything he had into spinning the reel’s handle round and round, but it didn’t matter. In a minute the silver spoon with the triple hook danced cleanly through the surf and dragged across the sand. I stared at it, horrified, like people in a movie who open their wall safe only to find it empty of all their gold and diamonds. For an instant Dad’s expression was the same as mine.
    Then he put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”
    â€œBut you said the Buddha gave you luck.”
    â€œI only half-believed it,” he said. “The other half of me knew I was just on a lucky roll. It happens.”
    â€œHow can you be sure?” I asked.
    â€œPeople wiser than the Buddha know you make your own luck,” he said. “If you keep your head down and work hard, luck comes your way sooner or later.”
    We fished for a while longer. Dad caught a flounder. When he reeled it in I picked it up and worked the hook out of its mouth while it looked up at me with its two odd eyes on one side of its face.
    â€œSee,” Dad said, “that’s a lucky fish. It lay on its side so long its eye drifted around to the other side of his head.”

    â€œDad,” I said, “that probably took a hundred million years to evolve.”
    â€œPatience,” Dad advised. “No patience, no luck.”
    He was losing me again. Nobody lived to be a hundred million years old.
    In the morning I went over to the beach. I walked up and down the shoreline searching for the Buddha as desperately as if I had been washed up on a desert island and I was searching for signs of life. I did find all kinds of cool things—blue sea glass, hollowed-out crabs, an unbroken sand dollar, a size-seven swim fin, and a three-foot-long reef shark. I assumed it was dead, but when I reached down to lift its snout so I could examine its rows of teeth, it still had one bite left. It was just my luck that it got me. Or maybe it was just my luck that I got only seventeen stitches. It wasn’t bad. And on the way back home from the Navy clinic Dad put his arm around me and said, “You know, if we hadn’t lost our lucky Buddha this never would have happened.”
    It was nice of him to say that.

Romance Novels

    B eing Miss Noelle’s friend was good for a while, but it was not as satisfying as having a crush on her. As a friend, I could imagine being her equal, as if we were just teaching buddies who shared common interests like windsurfing, or scuba diving through old pirate wrecks. As a friend, I could be her play pal and pitch in to help her do chores in half the time so we could dash out to a wild beach party. We could talk on the phone as phone friends and make silly comments about everyone but ourselves. This was fun to think about, but being in love, having a crush, an infatuation , was much more fun to wallow in. I spent hours sitting quietly in class while in my imagination I was holding her hand as I drove my customized dune buggy through the surf toward a setting sun. I dreamed of exchanging gifts each year on the anniversary of the first day we saw each other—I’d give her a pair of lovebirds in a golden cage in the
shape of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, and she would give me a miniature portrait of herself painted inside the illuminated dial of a diver’s watch.
    I would look up into her eyes and boldly say, “I love you now, and forever .”
    She would stare down into my eyes and say, “I love you more.”
    â€œNo,” I would reply, and kiss the top of her extended hand. “I love you