I nod, trying to look like I do this all the time, like I didn’t just turn eighteen a few weeks ago, like this isn’t my first time buying a lottery ticket.
“You have to make them really, really good ones.”
“Okay then,” I say with a smile, surprised to find myself playing along. I planned to let the computer decide, to put my faith in randomness. But now a number floats to the surface with such ease that I offer it up to him before thinking better of it. “How about thirty-one?”
Teddy’s birthday.
“Thirty-one,” the man repeats as he scratches out the corresponding bubble. “Very promising.”
“And eight,” I tell him.
My birthday.
Behind me, there’s a line of people waiting to buy their own tickets, and I can practically feel their collective impatience. I glance up at the sign above the counter, where three numbers are glowing a bright red.
“Three-eighty-two,” I say, pointing at the display. “Is that millions?”
The man nods and my mouth falls open.
“That’s how much you can win?”
“You can’t win anything,” he points out, “unless you pick some more numbers.”
“Right,” I say with a nod. “Twenty-four, then.”
Teddy’s basketball number.
“And eleven.”
His apartment number.
“And nine.”
The number of years we’ve been friends.
“Great,” says the man. “And the Powerball?”
“What?”
“You need to pick a Powerball number.”
I frown at him. “You said five before.”
“Yeah, five plus the Powerball.”
The sign above the counter clicks forward: 383. It’s an amount nearly too big to mean anything—an impossible, improbable figure.
I take a deep breath, trying to shuffle through the numbers in my head. But only one keeps appearing again and again, like some kind of awful magic trick.
“Thirteen,” I say, half-expecting something to happen. In my mind the word is full of voltage, white-hot and charged. But out loud it sounds like any other, and the man only glances up at me with a doubtful look.
“Really?” he asks. “But that’s unlucky.”
“It’s just a number,” I say, even though I know that’s not true, even though I don’t believe it one bit. What I know is this: Numbers are shifty things. They rarely tell the whole story.
Still, when he hands over the slip of paper—that small square of illogical math and pure possibility—I tuck it carefully into the pocket of my coat.
Just in case.
