In her last year of school, she’d given up trying to fit in. Always a niggling worry would intercept any hope she harbored of friendships with other girls: the fear she might accidentally cause some innocent person’s death crossed her mind. But really, that wasn’t the whole truth, because on the odd occasion, she engaged in a little purposeful luck swapping.

Small-time stuff where nobody even got sick. They tripped over bags and random objects, fell asleep at inappropriate times (that was sometimes very funny), failed exams or lost things. Nothing really. Others who’d shown kindness, teachers and people deserving a break, well, they enjoyed unexpected good fortune in many ways.

She’d grown creative, even as she grew more careful to not overuse the diary. She pondered at times if there was a limit to the swaps. After all, the book had a finite number of pages, and she couldn’t know what lay in the future.

Her adoptive-parents never wanted for anything, health or otherwise, and Lacy’s mom and dad did receive a healthy, new baby. Sometimes she reminded herself of the good achieved when guilt crept into her heart in unexpected moments.

No, she probably didn’t play the friendship game because the other girls just weren’t of interest to her. They talked about the inanities of teenage life and Nem just didn’t care. She’d seen too much, delivered already too many life lessons. She didn’t even look like them, as if she was an alien creature placed on earth to observe the local fauna.

When Nem looked in the mirror, the supposedly beautiful teenager Peg assured her she was, did not look back at her. She saw a leaning-to-overweight girl, with dark, style-defying hair no matter how much product she fluffed through the strands. Her ears stuck out too far; and brown eyes are beautiful when they’re big and round and not squinty like hers.

So what happened on the last Friday of October, ironically only days before Halloween, shouldn’t have been a surprise. She always looked back on that day and thought of it as the day she learned her most valuable lesson about the diary. That she had about as much influence over the book’s distribution of luck as she did in stopping the tides. She finally understood, this wasn’t a matter of practice makes perfect, but if she wanted any control it was her feelings she needed to tame.

To her credit, she had developed a way of keeping her anger in check by imagining emotions as jelly held in containers. If the jars started to leak, she’d flick the switch and lock-in the emotional energy. What she couldn’t have known was that holding in feelings was only delaying the inevitable.

Nem entered the English class and took her usual seat, back, far right, to stay out of anyone’s sight. As she pulled out her book, she noticed Annabella. The girl reminded her of one of those preening models in game shows, who walked across the screen, their hand outstretched toward prizes. They seemed to be saying, “Aren’t I gorgeous?”