Séance? Whoa.
Max looked like she wanted to crawl into the carburetor and combust. I don’t know why. I thought it was cool.
“Maxine did invite you, didn’t she?”
Silence.
“Maxine.” Her mother glared at her.
“Like I said, Ma, we’ve got stuff to do.”
“Well, at least let me read your friends’ cards. Come along, girls.” She waggled a luminescent fingernail at us. “Let Madame
Sibylique be your spiritual adviser. Allow her to answer your most burning questions.”
Boy, did I have a few of those!
Lydia whispered, “I didn’t bring any cards. Nobody told me you had to bring cards to a sleep-over.”
I gave her a withering look. “We’re not playing Old Maid.”
“Madame Sibylique, your spiritual adviser,” Max said sarcastically, “is going to read your tarot cards.” You know she wanted
to add, “tumor head.”
Cool, I thought. Way cool. I love psychic stuff.
Reluctantly Max followed us out. From the end of the procession, loud enough for the heavens to hear, she hollered, “We are
not
staying for the séance, Ma.”
Her mother twisted her head and smiled all-knowingly. “Yes, dear.”
M
ax elbowed her way through the kitchen to block the doorway to the back. A gauzy gray curtain covered the entrance. “We can
do it here,” Max said. For some reason she didn’t want us going into the living room. It sure made me want to go into the
living room.
Madame Sibylique sighed. “If you insist, dear.” She pulled a pack of cards out of her skirt pocket. They were wrapped in red
silk, and as she uncovered them she asked, “Who wants to be first?”
We all raised our hands. Lydia said, “Okay, Prairie. You’re first.”
That earned Lydia a sharp elbow from me. She elbowed back.
Madame Sibylique motioned Prairie to the kitchen table. She sat down across from her and handed her the pack. “Please shuffle
your cards,” she said. “While you’re shuffling, concentrate on your hopes, your fears, your dreams and desires. Think about
the question you would most like to have answered.”
Prairie nodded. You could tell she was concentrating hard.
We didn’t have to ask our questions out loud, which was a relief to me since mine was, Will I marry Kevin Rooney and live
happily ever after?
Madame Sibylique laid out ten cards for Prairie. After she studied them a minute, she smiled. “It appears that your question
concerns love.”
Prairie blushed. Madame Sibylique said, “This card, the Four of Wands, shows the coming of romance and harmony. The Ace of
Cups says that you will be abundant in all things: Love, joy, and fertility.”
Fertility? Immediately I changed my question to: Will I fill my void? Or maybe, What is my void and could I fill it with an
Eskimo Pie? Is that two questions?
Lydia said Max could go second. Just to be ornery to me. Max didn’t want to go, so Lydia and I scrambled for the chair. She
won. I considered flopping on top of her and giving her a hernia, then changed my mind. Who could stand to hear her scream?
First thing Lydia did was drop the cards all over the floor. Typical. After Madame Sibylique laid out the cards, she studied
them for a long time. All the while she kept murmuring to herself, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
Uh-huh, what? Did Lydia deserve a hernia?
“Lydia,” she said at last, “it seems you are struggling against opposing forces. An inner force and an outer one.” She pointed
to the card directly opposite Lydia. “This card means you are facing a choice of vital importance. See how it’s reversed?”
I leaned over to get a good look at the upside-down card. It was called the Fool. Behind me, Max snorted.
“You must be careful not to make the wrong choice,” Madame Sibylique added. “There are dire consequences. Also, you appear
to be experiencing some parental difficulties.”
“No kidding,” Lydia said.
That surprised me.
“But,” Madame Sibylique said with a smile, “this card is strength. The triumph of love over hate. Yes, your strength and courage
will see you through.”
“Sweet,” Lydia said.
Strength and courage? Lydia? She must’ve mis-shuffled.
Finally, it was my turn. While shuffling, I concentrated on my hopes, fears, dreams, and desires. I didn’t get too far beyond
fears.
When Madame Sibylique laid out my cards, I heard Max exhale an “ooh” beside me. What? I looked at the cards. There were a
bunch of sword cards. And one, the one closest to me, showed a skeleton with a bunch of swords sticking out of the bones in
his back. It was labeled
Death
. Madame Sibylique gathered the cards back into a pack and said, “Why don’t you shuffle again, dear?”
I did. And it turned up again. The Death card. Madame Sibylique “hmmmed.” She “hmmmed” again. The hmmming went on longer than
Lydia’s uh-huhing. “Your question seems to be about something you are missing. Something you desire.”
My void. My eyes widened at her. She was good.
“I see many obstacles to fulfilling your heart’s desire,” Madame Sibylique began.
Max muttered under her breath, “Yeah. Misery, suffering, loss, and defeat.”
Really? I glanced up at Max. She averted her eyes.
Just as Madame Sibylique was getting to the Death card, the front doorbell rang. Max jumped a mile. She crunched two cockroaches
on her way to the back door. “We gotta go now, Ma.”
“All right. Just a minute. Jenny,” she said, “you will succeed in the end. I do see victory.”
She and Max exchanged a look. I didn’t like the look of it. Madame Sibylique gathered the cards up quickly. Too quickly, I
thought. Max reached across the table and grabbed the back of my sweatshirt. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Her grip tightened
like a noose around my neck as she yanked me up.
Outside, the smell of rotten garbage bit my nose. Something furry skittered across our path, and Lydia yelped. She and Prairie
charged for the van. While they climbed in, I broke away from Max and pulled her aside. “What did my cards really say?” I
asked her.
She glanced back at the house, then gazed off across the junkyard. “It’s a bunch of baloney,” she replied.
“Baloney. Salami. Just give it to me straight, Max.”
Max exhaled a long sigh. “You’re never supposed to tell the bad cards….” She paused. “But yours were pretty bad.”
“Did they really say misery, suffering, loss, and defeat?”
Max didn’t answer. Or maybe her silence was the answer.
“What about the Death card?” I had to know.
Max shook her head. “Just forget it. It doesn’t mean hooey.”
But I couldn’t forget it. Misery, suffering, loss, and defeat? Plus the Death card, all in one sitting?
“That was so f-fun,” Prairie said when we clomped up into the Peacemobile.
Lydia added, “Yeah, your mom is fantastic.”
Max slammed the van door. “You want her? Take her.”
We all looked at Max.
“She’s a fake, okay? She thinks she’s this whoop-de-doo channel to the spirit world, that she can predict the future and communicate
with the dead. She takes people’s money, then makes up all these stories. She’s a liar and a cheat, okay? So don’t tell me
how great my mother is.”
The three of us exchanged glances before our eyes hit the floor. Poor Max. My mother embarrassed me; she made me mad, too.
For instance, this one time I overheard her tell my grandma she wished I was more like Vanessa. That Vanessa was such a perfect
child, so trouble-free. My mother is deep into denial, but I didn’t think that made her immoral. It was Lydia who said, “Your
mom and my mom are a lot alike. My mom thinks she knows everything about everybody. They say one word and she analyzes them
to death. I don’t even want to bring my friends home.” She stopped and shook her head. “Let’s not talk about mothers.”
“G-good idea.”
Even if Max’s mom was a phony, I was still trying to shake off the creeps from my tarot cards when Max held out an opened
jar to me. “Here,” she said. “This is for your face.” She scooped out a glob of purple goo and smeared it on her cheeks.
It had a tantalizing aroma. “What is this gunk?” I taste-tested it off my thumb. “Yum.”
“Blackberry jam,” Max said. “I was going to use axle grease, but it doesn’t wash off too good. This was the darkest stuff
I could find.”
Lydia made a face at me.
“She’s the expert,” I explained.
Once we were all smeared up, I looked around the group and made an observation. “We look like Tootsie Roll Pops.”
Prairie said, “My f-favorite, too. G-grape.” We all cracked up.
Max slid open the door panel. She hesitated and spun around, focusing on me. “Maybe we should forget this.”
I knew it! She believed. She believed the tarot.
“Forget it?” Lydia wailed. “I’ve been waiting all my life for this. Don’t chicken out on me.”
Wrong thing to say to Max McFarland. Her eyes narrowed. Her fists clenched.
I jumped in. “Yeah, let’s forget it. Let’s go to the séance instead.”
Max glared at me. She jumped down and snarled, “Come on, then. Let’s get it over with.”
I assumed my bad karma would show up later in life. That it’d appear little by little. And that it wouldn’t extend to my friends.
Wrong, wrong, and really wrong.
W
ith thirty-three rolls of toilet paper jammed into three backpacks, we slithered stealthily into the night. As stealthy as
a motor-mouth, a dragging Dracula, a kamikaze commando, and a hooded hippopotamus can be.
The sky was sneak-attack black. No lights were on at the Krupps’s house as we approached from the north. It gave me the willies
to be near this house again. And on Friday night, too. The street was only dimly lit by a fluorescent lamp at the corner,
until we hit the Krupps’s driveway and a bejillion watts of electricity illuminated the entire block. “Geez,” Max wheezed.
“Get down.”
We scrunched to our haunches and crawled back behind a lilac bush out front. The driveway spotlight blinked out after a couple
of minutes.
“It’s one of those motion detector lights,” I whispered. “My dad just put one in over our garage.”
“Great,” Lydia mumbled.
“Let me have your hat,” Max said to her. Lydia handed over her ski cap. Max jammed it onto her head and ordered us to stay
put. Like a jaguar, she sprang out of the bush and charged toward the garage door. The spotlight flashed on, showing every
puzzle piece in her camouflage field jacket. She vaulted the picket fence to the right of the garage and ripped the ski cap
off her head. In a single bound she covered the light with the hat. Immediately it grew dark again. Not axle-grease black
like I would’ve preferred, but dark enough. At least you couldn’t see the whites of our eyes.
Max raced back, breathing hard. “Let’s go.” She unlatched one of the backpacks. Lydia grabbed a fat roll of Scott tissue and
sang, “Geronimo!”
Lydia charged out into the yard and tripped. She called back in a whisper yell, “Watch the hose.”
You could definitely see the whites of Max’s and my rolling eyes. Lydia hauled back and launched the toilet paper over the
roof, where it disappeared into the night.
We snuck up behind her. “Why’d you do that?” I said.
“I thought that’s how you did it.”
Max piped up, “You have to hold one end when you throw it. Like this.” She unfurled a roll of flowered TP, held one end, and
tossed the other up into the maple tree out front. The bottom square of tissue tore off in her hand, while the roll wedged
about halfway up the tree in a branch. “Crud,” Max said.
That’s two wasted rolls, I thought. Aloud, I whispered, “I’ll decorate the front bushes and the porch area.”
Prairie said, “I’ll h-help.”
As we divvied up rolls between us, I heard Max grumble, “How do you get it to hang down in the trees?” and Lydia say, “Here,
you hold one end and I’ll run with it.”
A siren blared. Like missiles, we launched for the lilac. It was some other crime on the next block over, probably a drive-by
shooting, but my heart was hammering a hip-hop. As I yanked a couple more rolls of Charmin out of the pack and thundered toward
the porch, a car turned down Quigley. Its headlights captured me in the act.
I hit the deck, knocking Prairie into the rosebushes, then landing right on top of her. She “oomphed” as the car sped by.
“Sorry.” I helped Prairie up. She was okay, but the roses weren’t. Flat as French toast.
We went through all thirty-three rolls of TP in about ten minutes, which felt more like ten years with the dogs barking and
doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whoever called it the dead of night was deaf as a Ding-Dong.
Racing back up the block, we paused behind an RV to admire our work. From the wash of streetlights on the corner, we surveyed
the damage. “Not bad,” I said. “For amateurs.”
It wasn’t bad. Toilet paper draped like thick cobwebs all over the yard, shrubbery, trees, and mailbox. Yes, the black widows
had snagged their prey.
That night I had a nightmare. A sword cut through the black curtain of night, and it was dripping blood. Ashley Krupps’s blood.
Right in front of me, she collapsed. Like the picture on the Death card, there were swords sticking out all over her back.
Blood pooled around her body. Then it wasn’t Ashley anymore. It was me, my body. I woke up suddenly, nauseated and sweating.
My sleeping bag was soaked. For a long time I just lay there, thinking. Thinking about my cards. About misery and suffering,
loss and defeat. I felt as if I’d already experienced all four. Because of Ashley—what she’d done to me. The Death card was
a mystery, though. Except for my beloved Petey, no one had died in my life. Afterward, after the Ashley incident, I wished
I was dead. Did that count? Somehow I didn’t think so. Could the Death card relate to what we did tonight? I didn’t see how.
TP’ing Ashley’s house was just a prank, right? No one got hurt. Whoever died from a TP job? Stupid. But for some reason I
couldn’t stop shaking.
In class on Monday, everything seemed normal. During silent reading, Ashley passed a secret note to Fayola, who unwrapped
her third stick of gum and shoved it into her mouth before reading the note. In front of her, Rachel Cagney braided Melanie’s
hair, while Melanie giggled at some joke Kevin Rooney made across the aisle.