Orwell's Luck Read Online Free

back to bed.
    Theory number two was that someone tried to kill Orwell to prevent him from delivering a message.
    Then there was theory number three, made up of parts of theories one and two. Theory number three dismissed the injury as an accident, but kept in the part about the message.
    The only problem with this line of reasoning was that it led to a very big question—namely, What was the message? Whatever it was, I had a feeling it was going to be a lot tougher to crack than the seven little numbers printed in my daily horoscope guide.
    My thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the bathroom door. It was my sister, wearing a smile that looked like the one the stars had been issuing to Scorpio lately. Standing behind her, lined up like they were waiting to buy tickets for a movie, were the two little girls who live next door.
    "They want to see Orwell," my sister said.
    "Beat it!" I told them. "
Va-t'en!
"

A certain smile
    The next day, a frown face on my horoscope made everything go haywire. The prediction for Scorpio began positively enough. "A good day," it said. But by the time I finished decoding the rest of the message, it had turned into
A GOOD DAY TO CUT YOUR LOSSES.
    Yikes!
I thought. And for good reason.
    I got a C on a history paper, my father lost his job, the construction project on the back of my house was stopped dead in its tracks, and my mother walked around all evening with a goofy look on her face hardly saying a word.
    The one good thing about this day was that Orwell didn't die.
    After the school bus brought me home, I shot baskets until suppertime. I like the way a basketball feels. Unlike a baseball, a basketball is too big to hold on to for very long. You have to do something with it. You have to keep it moving. If a basketball could talk, it would always be saying, "Let's go!"
    After supper, I did my homework with Orwell in his private rabbit hutch. He seemed to be doing OK. He really liked the lettuce leaves my mother had saved for him. In spite of what she sometimes says, deep down inside, my mother has a kind heart.
    I tackled my science homework first. Science is an interesting subject. I especially like learning about animals. Take rabbits, for example. A lot of people will try to tell you that rabbits are rodents, like guinea pigs or woodchucks or mice, but they're not. Rabbits are members of the order Lagomorpha. Unlike rodents, they have not one, but two sets of upper front teeth, a little pair behind the big pair. And let me tell you, every one of those front teeth is razor sharp!
    There are many kinds of rabbits living all over the world. The best known is the cottontail. Orwell is a cottontail rabbit. According to my science book, although many rabbits settle in large groups in underground burrows called warrens, cottontail rabbits are different.
    Cottontails are "Let's go!" kind of rabbits. They like to stay on the move, spending their days above ground. Their homes are just temporary hiding places in tall grass or bushes. They prefer to be alone and only get together with other rabbits when it's time to eat or to start a family.
    I looked up from my notebook. Orwell was watching me. He didn't act scared at all.
    "Hey, Orwell," I said. "Was there something you wanted to tell me?"
    His ears perked up and he raised his chest up, too, like he was going to stand. But, of course, he couldn't.
    "Don't worry, Orwell," I told him. "It'll be all right. My grandmother says that when stuff happens, even when it's bad, it happens for a good reason. It's just that we don't always know what the reason is."
    Orwell twitched his nose at me a mile a minute and opened his little pink mouth like he really was going to say something. Then, all of a sudden, he smiled at me. It was really fast, and it only lasted a second, but it was definitely a smile.

A secret signal
    Three weeks passed, but nothing changed. Not Orwell. Not my house. Not my father's jobless situation. It was as if time, like an