Bad Luck

The mail brings all kinds of things to Odyssey, and one afternoon it brings Robyn Jacobs a chain letter. Send a dollar to an address in New York, the letter says, copy it, and pass it along - or be struck with instant bad luck. To prove the point, the letter lists people who threw it away: a Mrs. Thelma Morgan Brackett of Laureltown, Maryland, hurt in a freak gardening accident, and a Mr. Richard Belcap of Rockfield, California, whose arm broke in an unexplainable dog sled collision.

Robyn carries the envelope to Whit's End, hoping for grown-up advice, and finds Jessie Morales instead. Jessie takes one look and goes pale. Robyn is not impressed. Somewhere out there, she figures, a crook is collecting dollars from a lot of frightened people, and that is simply not right. She tears the letter up and drops it in the trash while Jessie warns that she has just doomed herself.

Almost immediately, things start going wrong. Bernard Walton is up a ladder washing second-story windows and tells Robyn to walk around it instead of under it. She walks under it on purpose, just to show she is not superstitious, and a bucket comes down on her head. It has nothing to do with bad luck, Bernard tells her from above. It is just dangerous.

Robyn goes home with a headache. Jessie turns up with a library book about superstitions, full of ladders and knocked-on wood and the number thirteen, and keeps reading it aloud until Robyn slams the medicine cabinet shut and cracks the mirror. Seven years of bad luck, says Jessie. Seven years of restriction when her parents see it, says Robyn.

The next day Robyn cannot find the homework she knows she finished. Salt spills at lunch. Jessie hangs a rabbit's foot around her friend's neck and promises it will turn everything around. Then Robyn realizes she is five minutes from being late to a debate at the city library that she has to write up for history. She pedals through the streets at top speed, scattering startled people out of her path, fumbling for the rabbit's foot so she can rub it for luck - and the world goes sideways.

She wakes up in bed with her father sitting beside her. She has been out for hours. A car swerved, she hit a tree, and she has come away with cuts and bruises. Not lucky, her dad corrects himself. Blessed. He has found the cause of the crash, too: the rabbit's foot slipped off her neck and jammed her bicycle chain.

That night the fear finally gets inside her. In a spectacular nightmare, everyone she loves speaks in nothing but superstitions - crossed fingers, a horseshoe over the door, a black cat delivered as a present, a warning not to step on cracks - until a tornado roars through the house and Robyn cries out that she will find the letter and mail it. She means it. At six the next morning Bernard finds a girl in a parka and slippers digging through the Whit's End dumpster, and he and Officer Winger have to lift her out and take her home.

Cleaned up and calmer, Robyn talks it through with her dad. The bucket fell because she stood in a dangerous spot. The mirror broke because she slammed it. The homework went missing because she often loses her homework. The bike crashed because she was fiddling with a charm. He does not deny that there are real spiritual forces in the world, good and evil, but superstition is not one of them. God loves her far too much to leave her life at the mercy of random chance. Robyn admits she never truly believed any of it. She just let herself get confused.

Then Jessie bursts in, delighted. She has gotten a chain letter of her very own, and she has already gotten rid of it - by mailing in her dollar and sending it merrily on its way. Robyn's father asks her to sit down for a talk, and to remember exactly where she mailed it, so the whole business can be stopped. Across town, though, the mail has already arrived somewhere else, and Bernard is calling for Maude to come see the wonderful news: he is fairly sure the two of them have just won some sort of contest.