Knox
“So what’s your biggest mess-up?” I ask.
Sylvie looks at me like I just asked her if she wanted a light sprinkling of baby spiders on her sandwich. “Dude.”
“What?”
“You don’t get to ask me that.”
“I don’t get to ask or I don’t get to know?”
“Well, both but definitely the not-getting-to-know part. That, for sure.”
“Okay, sorry. I didn’t know how far past small talk we’d moved.”
“I mean, turn it back on you: What’s your biggest mess-up?”
“Whoa, that’s a new one to me,” I say—genuinely not intending to avoid the question but also grateful for a plausible way to do just that—pointing. “And I’ve seen a lot of billboards in my life.”
“The Highway Psychic?! Next exit?” She immediately gets into the far right lane.
“No way. Really?”
“I am not merely passing by The Highway Psychic.”
“Don’t you think it’s a scam?”
Sylvie shrugs. “Maybe.”
“Because I’ve had some behind-the-scenes contact with ‘fortune tellers’ in my life and there was absolutely nothing gifted about them other than their ability to look someone in the eyes, tell them what they wanted to hear whether it was true or not, take their money for the privilege of being lied to, and sleep like babies at night. ”
“Look at that billboard. Those can’t be cheap. The only people you see with those are ambulance chaser lawyers who get big settlements or realtors who look like they used to be Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.”
“And?”
“You gotta be a pretty successful psychic to run with that crowd, which means your predictions are coming true. Maybe you even won the lottery or something.”
“So because she can afford—”
“You’re assuming it’s a she.”
“Well . . . yeah. Again, based on my experience. Don’t you think it’s probably a woman?”
“One hundred percent chance.”
“So, because someone has a fancy billboard, the product that billboard is advertising must be a good one. Seems like circular logic.”
“What’s circular is your head,” Sylvie says, slowing and hitting her blinker to exit the highway.
“What? My head? You’re saying my head is a circle. I mean sure, my skull is a roughly spherical shape but—”
Sylvie, without looking, traces a circle in the air with her finger in front of my face. “Circular.”
I sigh.