Jimmy was always going on about how unlucky he was. I had to agree. He hardly ever had a break.
"Watch this!" he would say, getting ready to throw a stone. "I bet this goes the wrong way!"
He'd take careful aim, and let fly. Sure enough, the stone would miss the target and bounce off a wall, right into the side of a car, or go over a fence and into a window.
Sometimes we'd do experiments, just to see how unlucky he could be. We'd play the "Street Game." It wasn't very complicated. We'd just walk about the streets counting how many unlucky things happened to Jimmy.
I counted ten things one day, in only an hour!
Bad luck followed Jimmy around like a bloodhound whether he was on the street or anywhere else.
On a typical sort of day, he'd lose his pocket money because of a hole in his back pocket, or he'd find a Scratch and Win card but the serial number would be one day out of date so he couldn't win anything. Or he'd buy the only pen in the shop with a faulty tip, the only popsicle with a cracked stick, the only set of magic markers with no ink in them, and the only pair of new shoes with the soles not stuck on properly.
He was so unlucky it was funny.
"It's not fair!" Jimmy said to me nearly every day. "I'm only twelve and I've had more bad luck in those twelve years than an octogenarian has had in 80!"
"What's an oct neerinian?" I asked.
"It's a really old person," said Jimmy. "You know, they start to look like octopuses when they get to eighty. That's what my Dad says anyway."
I had a feeling his Dad was pulling his leg, or his arm.
"Don't get so down about it," I said. "Your luck's got to change some time! The odds are all for it. It's like standing in the rain. Every time a rain drop misses your face, the chances increase for one hitting you!"
"Oh yeah?" asked Jimmy. "Then how come when it hails and there's only one hail stone, it always hits me on the head? And how come when there's only one seagull in the sky it always manages to do a poop on me?"
"Just lucky I guess," I said. "I mean it's like you were really meant to be lucky, but it turned the wrong way round! Imagine how hard it must be for a seagull to hit you from way up in the sky! That's a pretty good shot I reckon!"