Sylvie
Alarm bells. Air horns. This is not good stupid anymore. I want to run for the door.
But Knox stands up, calm and steady. “My friend here wanted a reading,” he says. Unsaid: Lady, while I respect your hustle, I’ve seen way better.
I still want to bolt. I guess the Dawn of it all still has me on edge. The patchouli smell in here isn’t helping. The psychic, Miss Tara, eyes me, but she says to Knox: “For both of you, fifty bucks for a half-hour reading. Or forty dollars each, and I’ll see the girl first.”
Hell no. “We’ll go together,” I tell her, taking Knox’s arm.
Miss Tara holds back the curtain in invitation. From nowhere a low soundtrack starts playing. Trance music, like something out of a nineties movie about vampires. She isn’t wearing any rings. Aren’t psychics supposed to wear rings? When we don’t immediately follow her, she slips back without us.
“How did she do that?” I whisper to Knox. “Start that music?”
“Tapped a button on the remote in her pocket.”
“How do you know?”
“Trust me, I know,” he says. “Are we having fun yet?”
“I never said fun. I said weird.”
“Are we having weird yet?”
“Yes. We are definitely having weird.”
Miss Tara yells, “Your half hour started two minutes ago!”
She has the table with the fringed tablecloth, lamps with fringed lampshades, stacks of softcover books (Dream Logic, Angel Numbers) and a dragon vape pen resting on an Atlantic City souvenir coaster, like Smaug guarding his treasure.
“Did you live there?” I ask her as we sit down, trying to assert some control over this situation. “Atlantic City?”
“No,” she says, shuffling a deck of tarot cards.
Well, that clears it up. I take the chance to study her: red cheeks, big blousy hair, the kind of icy eyes that make you think she sees dead people.
Her veined hands laying out the cards in a cross.
I see lots of swords, and a guy on a horse above the word DEATH, and in the middle a guy who looks like Jesus who’s named THE MAGICIAN.
She studies them, palms above the cards, and the music somehow gets louder, and suddenly I think, oh my God what if she can actually see everything about me?
What if she’s about to say it in front of Knox?
Why the hell did I think this was a good idea?
“Hmm,” she says, moving her spread hands in a circle. “Hmmmmmm.”
“See anything?” Knox asks, the way you’d ask someone if they’ve decided on the smoothie they’re having.
Her eyes flicker up to his. “Your life has been very unstable so far. As if you had a chaotic twin sister who refused to work on herself. I see . . . dark nights. Running away, never running toward. I see the moon. Your false guardian?”
The hair is standing up on the back of my neck. I glance at Knox, and he’s staring at her evenly. “Okay,” he says.
“I see betrayal, much as if you had a twin sister who decided she wanted to go her own way and wrecked a really wonderful thing.”
“I don’t have a twin—”
She ignores him and continues. “You seek stability. You want a life off the road. You want a home,” she says, “a real home, and you’ll give it all away to find it.”
“I—” he starts to say, a note of fear seeping into his voice.
But Miss Tara raises her hand to cut him off. “You are distant from your mother—your father is absent from your life—”
Knox is inching closer to her, his hands trembling in his lap. Arms wide, Miss Tara squeezes her eyes shut. She’s summoning. She’s calling something up from the ground. “I hear it! Do you hear it? The reaching from the beyond—”
And there it is, under the drone of the music: a sharp chirp. I pull the collar of my sweatshirt over my mouth like a turtle retracting. Knox’s eyes narrow. Widen. Narrow.
Then I listen harder. And say, “Miss Tara, I think you need to change the battery in your smoke alarm.”