Read The Lottery for Free Online Page A

Brydan.
    “Oh, sorry.” She braked and waited for him to catch up. “You got any condoms?”
    A slight flush hit Brydan’s face as he coasted past. “What is this, an invitation?”
    She did this to him sometimes, talked to Brydan as if he was Dusty, Lizard or another of her brother’s uncouth friends. It never failed to take Brydan into the red zone, as if he thought she’d somehow managed to deke his civil pretenses and zoom straight into his thought life. Why did guys think they were so different from girls when it came to thinking about sex? “I just thought, in case the office secretary asks us what we were doing, we could show them to her. Put her mind at ease.”
    Brydan laughed drily. “Sal, did anyone ever tell you that your grasp on reality let go a long time ago?”
    “Hey, I’m holding on with my phantom limbs.”
    He liked the joke. Everyone liked a joke. Tell enough jokes and no one looked past the surface, down to where the strange wailing cries were hidden. Putting on an easy grin, Sal pedaled through the clean wet morning toward the sunlit walls of Saskatoon Collegiate.



Chapter Four
    The third scroll was dropped onto her binder as she rushed between classes at mid-morning break. The halls were crowded, she hadn’t seen anyone of note beside her — the scroll hadn’t been there, then suddenly it was. Instinctively, she pulled the binder to her chest, crushing the scroll to invisibility. A mad screaming started in her head: No, it can’t be, it can’t, why is this happening to me? To her left, she spotted an open maintenance closet, full of cleaning solutions and wet mops. Stepping in, she closed the door and fumbled for the light switch. The air gave off the usual slight crinkling sensation as the electricity cut in, and the small room grew sharp-edged with light. Frantically she tore at the ribbon and the wax seal, not caring if the paper ripped. Things often came in threes, it was the number of finality. This had to be the last scroll, the last blank scroll, and the end of a tasteless joke that just didn’t know when to quit.
    The crushed paper opened uneasily. Sal’s eyes skimmed the contents, then darted to the bare bulb above her, its vivid electric wire. In the stillness her breath repeated itself, harsh in her throat. Thick chemical odors closed in like a cage. As her eyes reluctantly returned to the black message scrawled across the page, the lightbulb’s electric afterimage danced across her retinas, confusing her vision, but the third scroll’s contents had already been seared deep into her memory.
    Congratulations! You are this year’s lottery winner. Report high noon, you know where. Tardiness will not be tolerated.
    She was on her bike, pedaling furiously. She burrowed deep into her bed, sucking her thumb. She huddled in a bean- bag chair under the giant Winnie-the-Pooh at the downtown library branch, nose buried in Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars and shaking uncontrollably. Endless escape scenarios flashed through Sal’s head as she slouched near the back of her French class, each granting a brief virtual-reality burst of freedom before returning her to the late-morning classroom, the desk with the cracked seat that pinched her butt, and the clock at the front of the room sweeping its hands around the final fateful arc toward twelve o’clock.
    She sucked at her tongue, swallowing and swallowing the sour taste of fear. There was no way to avoid this meeting. All over S.C., Shadow Council members were slouched in similar desks, faking interest in quadratic equations and the dissection of dead rats while they plotted her doom. Her name hadn’t yet been released to the general student population — no one had started treating her as if she’dcontracted rabies — but the important students knew. She could feel their minds, like lasers in an electronic network, closing in on her from all over the school. In thirty minutes ... in fifteen ... in ten, the twelve o’clock bell