Chapter 1: Bewitched, Bothered, and Badly Lucky
“You can only be as fearful as you choose to believe, weakness is deciding to limit what you soon will be.
“You have every reason and right to be hurt and afraid, for everything life’s thrown at you has been so hard to brave. Very few stood beside your side to fight there on your team, and even fewer still stuck around when the others leave.
“But then you must find the strength to stand on your own two feet, to trust that you can fly if you have the courage to leap. The power inside of yourself is the bewitches key, because with that magic you cannot be so unlucky.”
-- Mary Melinda Morose
When Kersted Morose picked the four-leaf clover off the soccer pitch, she thought her luck had finally started to change. That was, of course, until the ball was kicked for the goal, bounced off the post, hit her square in the face, and she watched in slow-motion horror as the whole team trampled over her to get it.
The Black Cats still lost, as did her clover, which turned out to have never had four leaves after all.
Kersted’s parents surely could not have anticipated the backlash of their naming her, and oh how easily it came, in the form of repetition. The chanting of “Curse-ed Kersted” had already started, bitter-spitted whispers filed past as her teammates fled the field.
And that was just from the luckless. How much worse would it be when she started summer camp with the lucky?
The mocking stung worse than her face, which had certainly turned red if not purple from the imprinted grid of the ball.
At least she wasn’t bleeding this time.
Kersted hung her head as she dragged her feet and her folded, clover-less hands towards the already emptying stands. There her mother waited, wearing her winner’s smile, which was so honestly displaced that it only added to Kersted’s shame.
“You almost could have won that time!” Winnie Morose clapped her palms together in cheer.
“I almost could have become fertilizer, I think,” Kersted moaned.
“Then the grass would have been oh so lucky!” her mom chirped back.
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