Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery by Keren David Page A

skill to ride it. Anyway, without a licence, I can’t let you try it out.’
    â€˜I can afford it. My friend here’s just won the lottery.’
    He looked at me. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘read about you in the
Mail
. Going to save the world, aren’t you?’ When I nodded – what else could I do? – he said, ‘Well, if you value your friend’s life, you’ll listen to me. I’m cutting my own throat here, but I wouldn’t want to sign his death warrant.’
    â€˜Just let us have a look,’ said Jack, ‘now we’re here.’ And he looked at loads of models, and asked masses of questions, and before very long I’d got bored and found somewhere to sit and catch up with Facebook, while Shaz followed Jack around the showroom.
    And the next thing I knew, Jack was back and asking me to write a large cheque.
    â€˜They’ll deliver it,’ he said, his face glowing. It reminded me of his sixth birthday party when his dad revealed that he’d secretly put up a Scalextric set in their attic. Jack was so excited then that he wet himself. I glanced anxiously at his jeans to check it hadn’t happened again.
    â€˜It’s just the best thing ever,’ said Jack, and he insisted on dragging me over to the far corner of the showroom to see the bike – large, silver, kind of attractive, really. I wondered if I should buy one for me.
    â€˜It’s not as powerful as the sports bikes, so I think it’ll be OK,’ said Shaz, and the salesman said, ‘Promise me, now, that you’ll have proper lessons. I don’t want your death on my conscience.’
    So I wrote the cheque and Jack gave me a hug and a sloppy kiss on my cheek and then Shaz gestured to our taxi driver to drive round and pick us up. We’ddecided to keep him waiting for us. We didn’t want to be stuck in Enfield for a minute longer than we had to.
    Jack celebrated all the way back to civilisation.
    â€˜This is the best day of my life!’ he said. ‘Lia, you are a complete and utter star. I can’t believe I’ve got my own bike. Frank’ll be so tanked when he sees it.’
    Frank is Jack’s oldest brother. Jack had spent his whole life trying to be better than Frank, a completely impossible ambition as Frank was twenty-two, gorgeous and played for Tottenham reserves.
    â€˜Calm down,’ said Shaz, a little bit grumpily. I thought she must be feeling dreadful, seeing me spend so much on Jack when her dad had banned her from accepting anything from me. ‘It’s only a bike. And you’ll need lessons and a licence before you can ride it.’
    â€˜Yeah, calm down Jack,’ I said, not all that much less grumpily.
    â€˜It’s so unfair that I have to wait until I’m seventeen to get a licence,’ he said. ‘If we were in America we could all drive
cars.
Sixteen. That’s all you have to be to drive there.’
    â€˜And they all have their own cars,’ I joined in. ‘My dad said that even if I did have lessons and passed mytest when I was seventeen, there was no way he could get me a car and pay extortionate insurance as well.’
    Shaz and Jack were both laughing. ‘Well, that’s not his problem now, is it?’ said Shaz.
    â€˜I suppose not,’ I said. Obviously it was great, the possibility of getting a car as soon as I could legally drive. But somehow, all that I could imagine was me having to drive all my friends around. I glanced at Osman, my regular taxi driver – paunchy, grey-haired, chomping on his gum. Was I going to turn into him?
    My life was going to be different from everyone else’s. I’d never be able to moan about mean parents, or not having enough money to do stuff. It was like suddenly waking up and discovering that you were actually Bulgarian – actually, maybe Osman was Bulgarian, I wasn’t quite sure. It wasn’t a bad thing; it just