Unlucky–that is a way Jessica Crowley, the 15-year-old walking and talking magnet for disaster and chaos, could describe herself. Well, if you ask her, she would say unlucky is an understatement–she would say she probably has a curse on her or that she’s jinxed for life. There is a possibility. She has a set routine for disastrous things to happen every day. Every morning, her alarm clock breaks, so that usually sets her back thirty minutes and leaves her scrambling to get ready for her day. If she has time to make breakfast, it’s always either a little overcooked or a little undercooked. Most of the time she doesn’t get to eat at all. To get to school, she has to take the bus since she lives far away from the school in her town, Chadron, Nebraska, and she always misses it by a few seconds, which leaves her waiting for the next bus to arrive to take her to her school, which undoubtedly leaves her late for her first-hour class, and if it doesn’t come around again at all, which is usually the case, she has to walk 20 minutes, which ruins her hair and makeup since the weather there consists of 99 percent stormy, gloomy days and 1 percent cloudy, cool days. At school, she has no friends, so she is constantly picked on by other students. She holds a GPA of 2.71, even though she is one of the only students to listen to the teachers and tries her best to do her homework efficiently and correctly. When she gets home from school, she heads straight for her fridge because her lunch money is stolen from her every day by students, which leaves her starving, but there are never any snacks in there because her sister, Aryana, takes them all. She is usually left with just some vegetables to eat–hey, they are healthy, but not very tasty. They do leave her petite 5 '4 figure trim, though.  After her not-so-satisfying snack, her parents make her work hard on house chores that take up a few hours of her free time after school, so she ends up staying up late working on her homework, so she gets little sleep at night and has no time for herself.

One day, as per usual, Jessica woke up late to her newest faulty alarm clock, and hurried to get out the door to the bus stop to possibly make it to school on time for the first time in her life, no exaggeration, but, of course, that didn’t happen. She walked the 20 minutes in the cold, miserable rain to her school, and once she got there, since she was already late for her class, she went to the bathroom to dry off with the hand dryer. It was kind of a routine for her since she seldom ever got to ride the bus. As she pressed the button to start up the dryer, an avalanche of baby powder came out onto her hair, face, and clothes. Perfect. Just perfect. She realized that at this rate, she’d miss her first-period class altogether if she didn’t think of a solution to get the powder off of her quickly. Jessica made the quick decision to take her chances and use the boy’s restroom's hand dryer since everyone was supposed to be in class. She looked to the left, then to the right, and bolted into the boy’s restroom. She looked around the bathroom to see if anybody was in there, and when she thought she saw nobody in there, she started to use the dryer. After a few minutes of intense brushing and scrubbing, Jessica got mostly all of the powder out of her hair and off her tattered face and clothes. When she turned the dryer off, she heard a toilet flush from the stall in the very back of the restroom, and then out came the one guy that she had been interested in the whole year: Enzo Reeves, her sister’s best friend’s popular older brother. Today, he wore black athletic-fit jeans and a white tee shirt that fit perfectly on his lean, tall, and toned body. Jessica had a habit of checking out his outfit every day. She noticed everything went well with his flawless, olive-toned skin, dark brown eyes, and thick, medium brown curls he let grow out to the top of his ears. She wanted to make a beeline for the door, but the sight of him standing there with his eyes locked on her made her freeze. They stood there, looking at each other in stunned surprise, and then she blurted out that she was sorry and that she thought she was alone in the bathroom. She also explained why she was there in the first place. He stood there and looked at her for what felt like a million long, excruciating seconds, and then all of a sudden he started to laugh, which made her start to laugh as well. She didn’t know if he was laughing at her in an innocent and playful way or in a derogatory way, but she continued to laugh with him anyway. After they stopped laughing, he told her it was all good, and then offered to walk with her to their first-hour class since they had it together. 

As they walked into the classroom together, everybody stared. Normally, Jessica would feel self-conscious as she was being stared at by everyone, but with Enzo walking in at her side, she didn’t feel that way at all. As the day went on, she noticed that whenever they passed by one another, he would look at her and give her a tiny smile. Though it made her feel giddy inside, she thought that was strange since he’d never noticed her before, or anyone for that matter, and let alone somebody as good-looking as him. When lunchtime came around, Jessica had her money stolen by the insubordinate kids like it was every other day, so she started to walk away from the lunch line, but Enzo, who watched it all happen from farther back in the lunch line, offered to buy her lunch. She surprisedly thanked him and offered to pay him back if her money didn’t get stolen the next day. He interrupted her and told her he wouldn’t let anyone steal her money again as long as he was there, and that she didn’t have to pay him back. After they bought their lunches with Enzo’s money, he offered to sit with her while they ate. She excitedly accepted since nobody had ever sat with her before, and because this had been a hopeless dream of hers since the beginning of the school year, except, in that moment, it was actually coming true. They sat in a corner away from everybody else and talked and laughed and joked the entire time. After school, he walked up to her at her locker as she was about to leave and handed her his number so they could talk that evening. She smiled from ear to ear and plugged the numbers into her phone. As Jessica walked to the bus after saying goodbye to Enzo she thought to herself, Could this be the start of me becoming lucky?