The Lucky Winner (The Lucky Series Book 1) Read online

  The Lucky Winner

  Tomi Farrell

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  The Lucky Prisoner Preview

  Also by Tomi Farrell

  About the Author

  Disclaimer

  CHAPTER 1

  It was the same sky as on that day.

  It spread as infinitely as our desires, deep into the unknown.

  The dismal, grey concrete building stood before me in somber silence, as if the world had lost all of its color. The sharp blades of its razor wire fence looked ready to cut through one’s heart without mercy.

  Today, I turned seventeen.

  Wow, I’ve already lived for seventeen years?

  Okay, I’ll take that back. A decent amount of people might protest against such a statement, so I’d just keep it to myself.

  My little house was located in a little town called Littleside, North Dakota. I wasn’t sure if people could easily grasp what small towns were like, but if I said that merely nine hundred and sixty people lived there, it should give you a pretty good idea of how small it was.

  Still, it did pride itself on owning the world’s largest metal sculpture, which was showcased on what they called the Enchanted Highway. My mom always bragged about it whenever we received visitors from other towns. As a child, I always thought my town was so famous that everybody in the world knew about it—even those living in Mongolia! As soon as I entered adolescence, however, I came to the disappointing realization that this wasn’t true, and, from then on, I was deeply embarrassed whenever my mom proudly talked about our own world’s largest metal sculpture. I didn’t know why she always felt the need to mention it. It was as if there were nothing else to talk about.

  Well, that was probably true.

  I lived alone now, in a one-thousand square-feet, two-bedroom house with a den. The lot was uselessly oversized. I used to live with my parents and my older brother in this house. The two bedrooms were occupied by my parents and my brother, while the small den was my former room.

  That room was absolutely the biggest tragedy of my life—it didn’t even have a door! I hated it when my brother got one of the bedrooms. I’d protested the injustice whenever I could, eternally attempting to have our rooms switched. I was a sixteen-year-old girl. I had a life. I had friends. And, potentially, boys. I needed a bedroom with a door. What need did my brother have for a bedroom? Especially as all he did was play video games in the living room where the TV was.

  However, despite my countless protests, I was doomed to the doorless den, and all I could do was hang a curtain for privacy, which, of course, meant nothing.

  Actually, as it turned out, I wasn’t doomed to a doorless life forever: I later had doors installed to my den, and, after that, I moved into the master bedroom that my parents once occupied; the whole house was my space now, because they weren’t here anymore. The house I used to complain about being so tiny, now seemed so big. And quiet.

  I thought about getting a pet every once in a while. But I wouldn’t, unless I knew, with a hundred percent confidence, that I could take good care of it. I was studying to go to Stanford, and all of my focus was on earning a decent score on the SATs. Getting a pet would have taken up a great deal of my time.

  I had more than enough money to support myself for the rest of my entire life. I wouldn’t even need a job after graduation. But that life wasn’t what I wanted. I was determined to get a PhD from Stanford, and, eventually, become a psychiatrist. That was my goal in life.

  I was born to very conservative parents—diligent Catholics who attended church every Sunday. The priest, Father Paul, was around Dad’s age, and we knew his whole life story (well, in a town with a total population of nine-hundred and sixty, there wasn’t much left to know about each other). Some might think that was nice: Knowing everybody in the whole town was like having one big family—so relaxing; helping each other, laughing together, and no need to worry about anything… Well, I could tell you this: try living in one, then you’ll know what it’s really like! Example: imagine you did something bad, or wrong. Once you committed it, that was it: the whole town would know about it by the next morning. It was far from being a relaxing environment. It was nerve-racking. Especially for someone my age.

  My mom was a very kind, modest, and soft-spoken lady. She worked as a waitress, at a small restaurant called Nancy’s Diner, adjacent to a gas station. She never took her job lightly, and treated it with the same conscientious approach as if she were Director of Marketing at some big ad agency, always arriving at the diner fifteen minutes before her shift started. She only worked lunches—the nights were reserved for us, that she could always be at home to make us dinner, and we could always eat together.

  Apart from Dad. My dad was a trucker. He was away two or three times a month, usually for a week or so, and he wasn’t home very often. When he was, he always helped Mom with the household chores and kept himself busy fixing things. He was as good a husband and father as you could expect, and fairly typical in most ways.

  He was quiet, too, and, in this respect, kind of similar to Mom. If anyone adhered to the theory that opposites attract, that wasn’t the case at all for my parents. They, in fact, seemed to thrive on the notion that similars attract. They never fought, and never cursed each other; they were the prime example of a healthy, functional couple.

  Growing up alongside my brother, Kyle, however, was tough. I often thought his sole purpose in life was to embarrass me. He was the king of nerds. If he had been completely invisible at school, it would have been better. But no: his nerdiness was so extreme, it made him stand out to the extent that it was sheer torture! His video game addiction, which began as soon as he could speak, had been rewarded by a pair of Coke bottle glasses, which he had needed by the age of ten—they looked like the ones Milton wore in Office Space.

  Yikes!

  Kyle was obsessed with Candy, an animated character from one of his games. What happened one day shall forever remain the most traumatic event of my life. I’d witnessed him in the middle of you know what, with Candy’s picture in his other hand!

  I took a deep breath and approached the prison. Yes, that was where my family now awaited me.

  So, what happened to them?

  What happened to my kind mother? What happened to my gentle dad? What happened to my geeky brother? How did they suddenly turn into malicious monsters? How did that happen... really…?

  Well, it all began on that one day.

  Our luckiest day ever…

  CHAPTER 2

  I was bored.

  So bored, I seriously wondered if I could die from it. Think about it: every day I got out of school at two in the afternoon, and, from there, I had nothing to do at all. I would have to drive twenty miles to go to a shopping mall, movie theater, or wherever else any traces of civilization existed. And get this: I didn’t have a car to get to any of those places, anyway!

  My parents shared one car. Since my dad was a trucker, and didn’t need a car to drive to work every day, like most of the other dads, my parents figured it was far more economical to share. Mom would drop Dad off at the truck terminal, which was only five blocks away, and then he’d be gone for days. Nothing gave them more satisfaction than knowing they only needed to pay insurance for one car, and not two.

  In any case, they never allowed me to drive their only, precious family sedan. For them, it was no different than letting me drive it as a five-year-old—they didn’t trust my driving skills at all.

  I obtained my driver’s license as soon as I turned sixteen, as excited as I’d just won a beauty pageant. I kept thinking the world would change—would somehow turn upside-down. Looking back, did I think that, for some magical reason, a car would fall from the sky, right in front of my eyes, as soon as I got my license? Or, did I think t
hat my parents would miraculously change their minds and let me drive their car, even after they’d said no a million times? I wasn’t sure.

  When the world didn’t change one single bit after receiving my driver’s license, I was so disappointed that I thought I could devour three large pizzas, washed down with a full bowl of sangria.

  Oh. Talking about sangria. Being a teenager in a small town, the most popular way to fight boredom was by drinking and partying. No wonder people in small towns married and had kids by age twenty-something, right? Drink and mate—that was all there was to do!

  I often hung out with my besties—Sophia and Zoe. The three of us were always together, both at school and after school. Let me brag a bit: we were all very pretty, too. Anybody observing us walking together, in our cute T-shirts and short skirts, and our long hair swaying in the wind, would have to admit that we stood out. Boys would stare at us, looking like they would offer to do anything—even clean the dirtiest public bathroom with pleasure—for a chance to date us. But honestly? We believed no one was good enough for any of us. We would even get offended if dorky boys attempted to talk to us. What can I say? We were snobs!

  Sophia was the most popular among the boys, and definitely the prettiest. She had long, beautiful, blonde hair, eyes the color of clear blue water from the Caribbean, long, shapely legs, and she was always dressed irresistibly cute. Unlike me, she owned a huge wardrobe selection to choose from every day, and had the mannerisms of a rich girl. Still, she could be very sweet—when she wanted to.

  After school, we usually hung out at Sophia’s house and, occasionally, at Zoe’s. But never at mine. Why? Because I didn’t have a room with a door!

  Sophia’s room was decorated like some pink princess’s castle. Although she wasn’t exceptionally rich, according to national standards, her parents owned a grocery store and earned a decently good living. It had recently been renovated, and was inherited from several generations of her family, having been originally founded by her great grandparents, about ninety years ago.

  The good thing about owning a store in a small town was that everybody had to go there, with no other choice. The store paid for her house, which her parents had built from scratch. It was a very nice house with five bedrooms; as Sophia was an only child, she used two bedrooms as her own—one to sleep in, and another as entertainment space for her friends.

  Compared to her, I was living in abject poverty.

  But, even Sophia couldn’t afford the five-thousand-dollar surgery required for her cat, Furball. I supposed her parents could have given her the money, but Furball was one of four cats Sophia owned, and they probably figured it wasn’t economically sensible to pay five-thousand dollars each time one of them needed surgery. Besides, Furball was sixteen years old, which was like eighty, in human years. Sophia was pretty upset about it all—Furball was her special, furry friend, and they’d been together since Sophia was born.

  We often sat around and watched TV, sipping sangria or fruit punch (spiked, of course). One of our favorite shows was Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I wanted to be like Kim Kardashian so bad. And so did Sophia and Zoe. Kim had everything; she could do anything she wanted. She could go on shopping sprees every single day, and never go bankrupt. Me? I’d have to rob a bank before I could even dream of going on a shopping spree. I often wondered why it was that Kim had been born into that family, and I had been born into this one. I surmised that life just wasn’t fair at all.

  The three of us talked about everything. We made a pact, as kids, never to keep any secrets from each other, and we’d all fulfilled that promise.

  Zoe’s latest topic was her upcoming boob job, which she was planning to schedule an appointment for very soon. Well, when the funds were in place, of course. She was very open with her parents, and wondered if she should just ask them flat-out for the money. I wanted one, too, but it was simply impossible for me. One: I didn’t have the money, and nor did my parents, and two: my parents would have killed me, had I even remotely implied ever wanting such a thing as that. I wished my parents were more like Zoe’s—open and understanding—instead of ultra-conservative and uptight.

  There were so many things in my life I wished were different, that it wasn’t even funny.

  So, yes: I was a typical teenager. Maybe I was going through a rebellious time back then. Although, it wouldn’t have really been right to call it rebellious, because my parents and I never really fought. I complained a whole a lot, but Mom was always so calm, no matter what I said, that she simply killed off all of my arguments. And Dad simply wasn’t around long enough for us to fight.

  Both my parents were hard workers, but they didn’t make much money at all, and our household could barely make ends meet. I hated it. I hated it so much, I would compare myself to Kim, and curse my ill fate. I was living in a doorless den, in a two-bedroom shack in North Dakota, while Kim lived in a twenty-million-dollar house in beautiful Southern California. How unfair was that?

  Why couldn’t I have been born under a lucky star?

  CHAPTER 3

  “Why are we so poor?” I used to ask Mom, almost every chance I got.

  “Poor? We’re not poor,” she always replied. “We have money to buy food, we have a place to sleep, we have each other, we have a church to go to, and we’re surrounded by wonderful people. How are we poor, exactly?”

  “You know what I mean,” I said, rolling my eyes with an audible sigh. “We can’t eat out. I have no new clothes.”

  “We went to the Olive Garden for your birthday. And you have plenty of clothes. A ton of them.”

  “A ton? You can’t be serious! Sophia and Zoe have twice as many. Or triple. Or ten times more! In case you don’t realize it, I go to school every day. I need variety. I need way more than what I have!” I barked, with hand gestures so exaggerated I resembled a speaker at some cheesy motivational seminar, perhaps entitled, How to Make Money.

  Mom looked at me with her unchanging, calm expression. “Honey. That’s not what we learn from the Bible.”

  I still went to church with my family on Sunday. Not every Sunday, but some. It wasn’t by choice—I went for my parents’ sake. We’d been going to the same church ever since I was a baby, and I knew how important it was to them that I continue. I might have been a brat, but I wasn’t a jerk. I couldn’t do anything that would hurt their feelings. Even though I usually slept through Father Paul’s sermons.

  From time to time, I found myself seriously wondering how Mom did it—how did she manage to be her? How could she find fulfillment and contentment, doing the same exact thing, every single day? With no excitement and nothing new in her life. Getting up, going to work at the diner, coming home, cooking dinner, doing the dishes, filling out the house account expense sheet, and living within this tight budget...

  Dad was expected to keep a record of all of his personal expenses, and he did it well, while Mom clipped every single coupon that came in the mail, using them skillfully and effectively—though, thankfully, not obnoxiously; not like some middle-aged women who took forever to sort out a thick bundle of coupons (most of which were expired) at the grocery store’s cash register.

  Didn’t she ever wish she had more money? That she could just enjoy life, and have fun? Did she never wish she could dress up, and dine out at a nice restaurant? Wasn’t it in our human nature to always be wishing for more? It sure didn’t look like it for her. I doubted that she ever wished for such things, and the same went for Dad. I often wondered if my parents and I really shared the same genes.

  “How about moving to Los Angeles?” I said once, impulsively (though, of course, not impulsive to me). She looked at me as if I had completely lost my mind.

  She slowly composed herself, and in her gentlest voice, replied, “Ella, our home is here. And Daddy’s job. And my job.”

  “Your job? You can work in a diner anywhere!” I shrieked.

  But I knew it wasn’t like that for her. She’d been working in the same place for over ten years, along with the other employees, and that made them practically family. She seemed to take pride in her choice to remain unchanged.