The Book of One Hundred Truths (12 page)

“Five dollars each,” she said. “Ten for the two of you.” She didn’t talk like a fortune-teller. She talked like a person from New Jersey. My mother always said that almost everyone from the state of New Jersey had a personal hatred for the vowel.

Jocelyn used her own money—her allowance—and insisted on buying a fortune for each of us. She counted out six wrinkled bills and four dollars in change, carefully stacking the coins on the table. Madam Carla didn’t count them; she swept the money into a metal coin box as if performing a magic trick. “You two are related.” She was looking at me. “But you aren’t sisters.”

“We’re cousins,” I told her. My legs were sticking to the vinyl chair.

“And you’re here on vacation.”

Jocelyn gave a little jolt of surprise, but I wasn’t impressed. Ninety-nine percent of Port Harbor was in town on vacation.

“I think there’s something you’d like to know,” Madam Carla said. “Who’s first?”

Jocelyn kept her gloved hands in her lap. I nudged her, but she didn’t move, so I said, “I am,” and I put my hand palm up on the table, where it lay on the black wrinkled fabric like a fish on a plate.

I thought again about Liam’s description of a tidal wave, all that water churning and dragging itself out to sea.

“What’s your name?” Madam Carla flattened my fingers gently. She traced a circle near my thumb.

“Thea,” I said.

“Theodora,” she said, as if correcting me. “A long life.” Her breath smelled like cinnamon. “Good health—that’s very clear—and probably a number of children, eventually. Two or three boys, I would say, if I were guessing.” Her fingers moved lightly across my palm. “I see a successful marriage, as far as those things go. And a career in—what?” She looked up. Her eyes were gray, the color of stones at the bottom of a stream. “It could be advertising or journalism. Something that requires originality and imagination.” She was studying my hand, smoothing my fingers. “But over here, this is unusual.”

A man with an obscene word on his T-shirt stopped beside the table.

“It looks almost like grief,” Madam Carla said. “I’m seeing—”

“How long does this take?” the T-shirt man asked.

Madam Carla slowly lifted her head and glared at him. “There’s no rushing the future,” she said when he stalked away.

I had already pulled my hand off the table. “Jocelyn can have her turn now,” I said.

Madam Carla raised one eyebrow; she didn’t look like Mrs. Sullivan anymore. Jocelyn took off her gloves.

It had been a while since I’d seen her hands. Her skin was thick and looked painful. Her right hand was worse; it was callused and stained, the rash like a rough pink continent. Jocelyn stared at her lap. She was so short that her feet didn’t touch the ground.

“Here are difficulties,” Madam Carla said. I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about Jocelyn’s future or about her rash. She touched Jocelyn’s fingers. She told her something about traveling to foreign lands and falling in love during some kind of harvest. It sounded like a fortune that anybody might have found in a fortune cookie.

I was wondering if Jocelyn’s hand might be too hard to read. “You wanted to ask her something,” I said, nudging my cousin. “You should go ahead and ask.”

Jocelyn mumbled.

“I don’t think she can hear you,” I said.

Jocelyn spoke up. “I said, I want you to wait for me over there.” She pointed to the custard booth.

“Me? You don’t want me to sit here?”

“I’ll come and get you,” Jocelyn said.

I opened my mouth to object. Then I unstuck my legs from the vinyl chair and walked into the shade near the custard booth, where the man in the obscene T-shirt was complaining about the size of his waffle cone.

Truth #46: If you’re going to drive a car across it, ice should be at least eight inches thick. If you’re going to walk on it, you need four inches.

Jocelyn took a long time. I strained my ears. She and Madam Carla were talking and talking.

Finally Jocelyn stood up and put on her gloves. Madam Carla seemed to close up shop. She picked up her coin box, tucked it into a backpack, and wandered off in the direction of the Ferris wheel.

“How did it go?” I asked Jocelyn. “I guess you got your money’s worth.”

She nodded.

“Did you ask her where twenty-one Bay is?” I asked. “Or how we can find it?”

“I didn’t need to ask her that,” Jocelyn said. “I already know where it is.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“W
hat do you mean, you know where it is?” I asked. “How long have you known?”

Jocelyn walked away, in the direction of the realty office. The paper clock was still in the window.

I grabbed her arm. “You really know where it is? So we don’t have to wait for this place to open?”

“They have a map anyway,” she said.

And in fact, they did; a fairly large map was taped up in the window, only partly obscured by a layer of grime. I walked over and studied it. Across the top it said,
PORT HARBOR: NEW JERSEY’S FAVORITE FAMILY PLAYGROUND
!

Scattered here and there across it were cartoonlike drawings of the town’s main attractions: the fire station, the jetty, the lighthouse, the boardwalk. The street names were written in large block letters, and without even looking for it, I found Bay Street (remarkably, it seemed to be located near the bay), a road about fifteen blocks from where we were standing.

“You think that’s it?” I asked. “Twenty-one Bay? I guess it would be.”

Jocelyn was fiddling with the strap on her purse.

“We can ride there and find out,” I said. Something didn’t seem right.

Jocelyn kicked at a nugget of caramel corn that had tumbled out of somebody’s bucket. “What if they see us?” she asked.

“Celia and Ellen? They’re not going to see us. They were only going to see us if we went back to the hotel.”

Truth #47: If it had been someone else at the creek with Gwen—someone who didn’t count things or care that they came out even—nothing bad would have happened.

Jocelyn walked away from the realty office, past the bakery and the paperback bookstore.

I followed her through a stream of people. “We’re both going home soon, anyway,” I said. “Jocelyn, wait for me. Where are you going?” I lost sight of her for a minute and felt almost desperate. “Jocelyn?” Dodging a man on a pair of crutches, I caught up to her in the doorway of the 99 Cent Store.
EVERYTHING INSIDE ONLY
99
CENTS
! The store window was streaked with dirt and sunlight, and it was crowded with inflatable sea serpents, Styrofoam surf-boards, shovels and buckets, books of postcards, and food.

Truth #48: I used to wish that someone would ask me,
What really happened to your best friend, Gwen?

“You’re out of breath,” Jocelyn said, looking surprised. She had turned around.

“I’m all right,” I told her. “I’m probably just thirsty.” I wiped the sweat from my forehead. “Maybe we can get something to drink in here.”

We walked into the 99 Cent Store, where the cashier, a bored-looking woman clutching a pencil between her teeth, was watching a miniature TV by the register. Beyond her, on the ceiling, were rows of long fluorescent bulbs that sent out a shuddering artificial light; everything smelled of plastic. We walked past dozens of bins full of flip-flops and yo-yos, Super Balls and baby bottles and Krazy Straws and squirt guns and coffee mugs and shampoo. Some of the toys were already broken. Two giant fans sent clumps of dust across the floor.

“I think we should go home after this,” Jocelyn said. “We should go back to Nenna’s.”

I spotted a row of coolers humming in the back. “The soda’s only ninety-nine cents. Do you want one?”

“No. Soda’s bad for your teeth.”

Feeling calmer than I had outside, I plucked a root beer from the cooler. When I turned around, Jocelyn was poking through a bin full of bathing caps, some of them the old-fashioned ladies’ kind with chin straps, and rubber flowers all over. She picked up a daisy-covered cap.

“What did Madam Carla say to you?” I asked. “Did you ever get a real fortune?”

At the end of the aisle we were standing in, two girls were bouncing Super Balls next to a sign that said
NO BOUNCING BALLS
.

Jocelyn put down the bathing cap and examined a pyramid of toilet paper.

“Listen, Jocelyn,” I said. I opened my root beer and took a sip, even though I hadn’t paid for it yet. “I know you want to go back to Nenna’s, but I think we should finish what we started.”

Jocelyn picked up a bundle of handkerchiefs (3
FOR NINETY-NINE
!) and a pair of swim goggles.

“Celia and Ellen aren’t going to bother us. If we get in trouble, you can just tell them it was all my fault.”

Jocelyn stopped near a bin full of masks. Some were the Batman kind, just a plastic oval with two eyeholes cut in the center; others were stained or battered versions of Snow White or Tinker Bell or Sleeping Beauty. Jocelyn leaned over and picked up a gorilla mask, then handed me a mask that looked like the Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz.

“Does that make sense? We’ll ride past twenty-one Bay and find out what it is.” I looked down at the cheap mask in my hand. “It’s kind of early for Halloween,” I said.

Jocelyn held the gorilla mask up to her face and blinked at me through the little round eyeholes. “They aren’t for Halloween,” she said.

She left me standing in the aisle with my mouth half open and headed for the register, where the cashier was still watching TV. Jocelyn paid for the root beer and the masks, and we walked back into the glare of the afternoon.

A couple of gears were shifting in the back of my mind. “Tell me you aren’t thinking what I think you’re thinking,” I said.

Three girls in shorts and brightly colored tube tops staggered past us, laughing. Their bleached hair gleamed like copper.

Truth #49: I still remember exactly what Gwen was wearing that day: tan corduroy pants and her favorite red sweater. I can still see her looking over her shoulder and laughing, dragging her backpack behind her along the ice.

We were heading for the trike. “You’re the one who said you didn’t want anyone to recognize us,” Jocelyn said.

I paused, then nearly tripped over a knothole. “You might not appreciate this, Jocelyn,” I said, “but it’s already fairly unusual for me to be pedaling an old man’s tricycle all over Port Harbor with a seven-year-old in the front basket. So I’m not going to wear a gorilla mask.”

“You can be the Tin Man,” Jocelyn said. “I don’t mind being the gorilla.”

Out on the beach, a lifeguard was standing at the edge of the water, pointing at someone on a raft and blowing her whistle.

“Are you coming or not?” Jocelyn asked.

Truth #50: That’s what Gwen said to me at the creek: “Thea, are you coming or not?”

It appeared that I was. I was going to follow the path that lay in front of us, even though I felt nervous about where it led, and about the direction in which Jocelyn and I seemed to be going.

Truth #51: The three worst mistakes I have made in my life so far all happened in the past five months:

•
going to Three Mile Creek with Gwen,

•
making Gwen a promise I never should have made,

•
agreeing to wear a gorilla mask (the Tin Man was too small) while pedaling a seven-year-old with a nearly shaved head on a giant tricycle through downtown Port Harbor, New Jersey.

“Slow down,” said the Tin Man.

The gorilla (me) was sweating like a pig. Do gorillas sweat? Pieces of fake gorilla fur were stuck to my forehead.

“This street is bumpy. You’re going too fast.” The Tin Man was a real complainer.

The gorilla slowed down and turned left at the corner. “I can barely see in this crazy thing. My entire face is falling off.” In fact, my eyeholes seemed to be slipping.

I pulled over and we paused in the shade of a maple tree, two homely creatures under a leafy green umbrella. The Tin Man’s head was an odd shape, I decided. It looked like a water tower with eyes.

I caught my breath and adjusted my mask. Bay Street was a narrow road with a column of houses on one side and a marsh on the other. Most of the yards were made of pebbles instead of grass. “It must be a couple of blocks ahead of us,” I said.

Two boys on in-line skates rumbled by. One of them pointed at me. “Weird-looking monkey.”

“I don’t want anyone to see us,” Jocelyn said. Her gloved hands gripped the sides of the basket.

I told her that no one was going to see us; she should just relax.

“We aren’t supposed to be here,” she said. “I want to go back to Nenna’s.”

“In a minute.” I started to pedal.

Jocelyn grabbed the hand brake and squeezed it, and we jerked to a stop.

I pulled off my mask. I pulled hers off, too. “What is the matter with you?” I asked. The elastic had made a funny little line across the back of her haircut.

“You know what the secret is,” Jocelyn said.

“What? I don’t know what it is.”

“You do,” she insisted. Her voice was high and unsteady. “You talked to Liam. That’s why he gave us that piece of paper.”

“Jocelyn, I just asked him—you were sitting there next to me.” I wasn’t going to spend my time arguing with her. I started pedaling again, the gorilla mask dangling around my neck.

“You were supposed to tell me,” Jocelyn said. She grabbed for the brake, but I swatted her hand away.

We rode past a man walking a dog on a leash; they had stopped to examine a cluster of cattails. They looked happy together, as if both of them thought strolling along a mosquito-infested marsh was a wonderful thing.

“I think you’re a liar,” Jocelyn said.

I told her to be quiet. We were almost there. “And stop squirming around,” I said. “You’re going to get hurt.”

She unhooked her bungee cord while we coasted through an intersection. “I know where your notebook is,” she said. “You keep it in the bathroom. In the back of the cabinet. I knew you weren’t smoking cigarettes.” She started to cry. “I know about your friend.”

A ribbon of anger unrolled itself inside my chest.

Jocelyn was on one knee, almost standing up. “Everyone lies to me. You broke your promise.” The trike was still moving.

All I could think was
You read my notebook.

Jocelyn stepped on my wrist and tumbled against me, trying to get up.

I was about to warn her that she was going to fall when she caught the strap of her shoe in the basket. I lunged for her, managing to grab one of her ankles in its ruffled sock. But it was too late. The trike tipped. It seemed to turn on its side in slow motion, inch by inch, with Jocelyn trying to catch her balance but approaching the street.
How can a three-wheeler fall over?
I wondered. I reached for the brake but missed. Jocelyn’s ruffled sock ended up, empty, in my hand. I wasn’t sure how it happened or which came first: the trike hitting the pavement, the handlebars scraping against the street, the sudden pain shooting through my arm—or Jocelyn falling, headfirst, against the curb.