How To Avoid Bad Luck

I | The Beginning

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." – Cormac McCarthy

Note: Special thanks to CoderBee22 for the cover featured above!

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Every town has a quirk of its own.

When you travel from one place to another, you delve into another dimension. At first sight, the roads may be riddled with the same gray pebbles and sunlight bathes the suburbs in the same golden light as always, but when you venture deeper into the heart of your new home, the quirk begins to reveal itself from shadows of apparent normality.

Necmire has yet to find its quirk.

As a small, quaint town on the border of Massachusetts, Necmire was the very definition of normality. Thin roads sprawled out from the center in a random fashion, as though the architect had sketched the area with a blindfold on. The locals were nice enough, but tourists were few and far between. Since our closest neighbor happened to be Salem, people usually flocked over there to buy a few potions and whatnot. As far as I had lived in Necmire, which was for a couple of months, nothing special had popped out at me yet.

That was perhaps why I was seated on a balcony on the roof of Necmire High, staring out at flecks of paint which dotted the winding roads. That was what the students appeared to be. Just flecks of paint on a canvas. None of them stood out to me.

Maybe it was because I was new here, but when I lived in other cities, I would recognize the street vendor with mustard smeared across his forehead, or the businesswoman dressed in a pencil skirt, rushing to her next meeting with a phone wedged between her cheek and shoulder, or the golden retriever that fetched a branch for me every day. In Necmire, the faces were pixelated, harder to put a name to.

To give the town some credit, there were a couple of people I knew here. It was a stroke of luck to meet the Mayor while I was buying new textbooks. He was nice enough to introduce me to his daughter, who I befriended over having a similar sense of humor. My Latin teacher, Mr. Griffiths, also tended to pick on me to answer questions. Maybe he thought drawing attention to me would help my chances of making friends. I appreciated the sentiment, but it was more of a curse than a blessing.

"Zoey?"

The voice snapped me out of my daydream. My chin jerked up from where it had been resting on my hand, and I twisted around to see Mr. Griffiths standing there with a frown creasing his forehead. I instinctively shrunk back to the edge of the balcony. Oh my god, had I summoned him with my thoughts? Maybe that was the Necmire quirk, teachers who can read minds.

"What are you doing up here?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. His eyes slid downwards, and I followed his gaze to the camera in my slackened right hand. "Oh, a photography project. I should probably find somewhere else to grade papers, then."

In the haze of the summer heat, I'd forgotten why I was up here in the first place. My photography project wasn't due for another three months, but I had nothing else to do. Besides, what Necmire lacked in quirks, it made up for in scenery. The town really was a canvas, with dark green trees seeping through the forest to the left, and tottery old buildings which resembled cottages more than modern houses. This balcony gave me the perfect overview of the town, though I was currently more enamored with a potted daffodil placed stylistically in the corner.

"Wait, sir!" I called as Mr. Griffiths turned away to head back downstairs. "You can stay if you want. I can take this daffodil and find an empty classroom or something."

A smile broke through his frown as he turned back to me. "No, you should make use of the sunlight while you have it. These papers," he raised the stack for effect, "can wait."